Being microcosms of the whole, even the individual pieces of me repel light. Hence I play crosswords until I see floaters while a grid of shadows imprints the inside of my lids. My finishing times ricochet like birds move in shifting constellations, swarming blue from the sky. Some days I am brilliant, mostly idiotic. My shadow scares me in the way it morphs, splaying long over dark lawns at dusk, joining me with things I don’t want to touch. I don’t want the constellations to morph but they already are, like how I pull and twist vectors apart in Photoshop. I don’t want to look that strange but I still turn up the brightness on Instagram. I want to be the identical fractals of the wave, not the one riding it. But in real life its certainty is indiscernible. Iterations surge and crash day and night, day and night, and each one splaying over the shore is random at best, at worst, enough to drive me to despair.
Emily O Liu is a second-generation Chinese American writer from San Diego, California. A former Fulbrighter teaching English in Taiwan, she is currently studying learning design and technology at Stanford GSE. Her work appears or is forthcoming in No Tokens, The Gravity of the Thing, HAD, Gone Lawn, and other places.
Lost Balloon 