We talked, careful not to say anything.

That my late-night trips to the record store with my dad had been about discovery, not mastery. Later still, I came to recognize that assimilation as a whole was a race toward a horizon that wasn’t fixed. The ideal was ever shifting, and your accent would never be quite perfect. It was a set of compromises sold to you as a contract. Assimilation

We seemed to spend hours apart, occasionally intersecting in some unlikely aisle. Everything seemed a possibility, a clue, an invitation to experience new, unprecedented emotional realities. We were enthralled by the same music, but it showed us different things.

History is a tale we tell, not a perfect account of reality, I continued. You just have to figure out whether you trust the storyteller.

It was the kind of scene I had wanted to see for months, a clue that beauty was still possible. Maybe it was nothing more than shifting cloud patterns. But I saw it.

Like many immigrants who prized education, my parents retained faith in the mastery of technical fields, like the sciences, where answers weren’t left to interpretation. You couldn’t discriminate against the right answer. But I preferred to spend my time interpreting things.

I really hope you can read this. I don’t care if you can see through me, I wrote, confessing to a list of imperfections and insecurities. Just as long as you can see me.

When you’re young, you do so many things hoping to be noticed. The way you dress or stand, the music played loud enough to catch the attention of another person who might know a song, too. And then there are things you do as you step out into the world, the real world full of strange adults, testing out what it means to be generous or thoughtful.

I was quickly coming to the realization that my creative anxieties about whether there was anything original or new left to say about the world were quite generic.