I wrote this a long time ago, when life wasn’t as good, when I was at rock bottom, actually. At the time, the weight of this phrase falls into the later half. At the time, it felt like there was no way out, and life could only move up if I started anew.

It is with great pride that I can say I’m no longer actively yearning for a sweet ending anymore.

If I had not chose to live back then, I would not blame myself. But because I chose to live, I can say that it does get better. It does get better, doesn’t mean all that pain was “worth it”, doesn’t mean I became stronger in ways that is good for me. But it does get better, enough for me to keep trying.

I am not a family-body. I have never experienced homesickness. I am grateful for my family to not making me feel guilty about moving far away, prancing around like a bird. I love my family, but not in the ways that I want to visit them every so often, but in the way that I’s like to take care of them from afar. My love for them is complicated, but I promise I’m trying.

All my friends moved home this time of the year. All my strangers on the street moved home this time of the year. Saigon is so empty, in the literal sense that a street is not cluttered, but in the figurative sense that none of the people I am close with are here. I drove down the street yesterday, and while wandering aimlessly, I realized this is how I felt when I was very little. When I was 7, I ride my bike from school to a dark home, locked because both my parents are still at work. When I was 14, I decided to join đội tuyển học sinh giỏi without telling anyone. It’s the little things. It’s the little things that makes me the secretive person I am today. It’s the little things that makes me feel a twisted sense of comfort at the familiarity of loneliness. Yesterday, I really felt alone.

But it was yesterday when I realized that the weight of this phrase no longer bears at the latter half. I no longer long for death the way I used to. I know that death looms around me, the people I love, and everyone whether I think about it or not. And until the inevitable comes, I will have to live life as-is. The air is toxic, the greed never ending, but life is worth living, and in the process of becoming the person I want to become, I will have to breathe in a lung of toxic air to keep it going.

The air is toxic, but it sustains me to the best of its ability. My lungs are damaged from this air, but it sustains me to the best of its ability. And I too, no matter how tattered, will sustain the ecosystem around me to the best of my ability.

What am I even saying.