Heidi Liu

San Bernardino County is sort of the Twilight Zone of Southern California. It feels much more like the desert that it is, rather than the heavily developed Orange County and the sprawling urban Los Angeles cityscape.

And so it goes to show, not unlike these swallows, those of us who are home in California are bound to it; unable to stay away no matter how we stray.

Almost a work of fiction. Three thousand dollars a month. Three thousand divided by four weeks is seven hundred-fifty dollars a week. Seven hundred-fifty dollars a week divided by five weekdays is a hundred and fifty dollars a day.

Then, for the first time in years, you called me one night while I was graphing calculus equations and asked me to go on a drive with you.

We sat on the swings, then, and you told me that you liked me because I had nice hair and because I was funny. You asked me to tell you why I liked you back.

A beautiful thought: the wanting to keep intact something cold and pure and white, something that reflects the morning light, something that puts a gentle hush on your world.

You are a sea and I am a sea. Beside me, I see the body of your water and throw my own against yours. But like that magic place off the Alaskan coast, from our meeting erupts a ridge of separation.

Most of the time it’s fine and I don’t think about it but, when I need someone to blame, I let myself remember you.

Last night, a YouTube video of a young man named Samuel H. went Facebook and Twitter viral. In it, Samuel makes a string of negative, racial remarks against Asians.

I am hysterically frightened of investing myself in things that will be torn away from me. I am defensive.

Your relationship to the author is solidified and you want so badly to know him and to call the number he provides.

I was engaged for a grand total of a month and a half, when I was pretty and skinny and seventeen, as arranged by my parents who wanted nothing but the best for me.

You will learn a specific, biting type of alienation that is drunken aloneness when you are surrounded by a room full of strangers you pretend to know, and that will make you an in-your-bones kind of tired. This is the kind of tired that you will wish you could un-know.

I imagine people looking at us and wondering if we eat breakfast together.

Why are you alone? Is it because you have to be, or is it because you chose to be?

And I want to fall in love; I might even want to fall in love with you. I have this tremendous capacity to love and I am drowning in it.

You know that bittersweet subtlety that only exists on an autumn mid-morning? That impossible-to-pinpoint scent that rides on the new crispness in the breeze? Does it tug nostalgically on your heartstrings like it does on mine?

I don’t not-love you in a way that deserves a song. I just don’t. It is the most anti-climatic thing in the world, falling out of love.