Jen

I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible... See more

Conversely, when Johanna after 18 months finally asks me out (and I feel that other kind of joy—the one that tells me that she is a path towards life)

that a person like her could even exist was enough to make me feel that the world was a good place.

On trains I watch faces written in the script of their errands and think: each of us is being auditioned by reality for the role of ourselves. Most days we get the part. On the days we don’t, the world is generous and miscasts us as somebody kinder or braver or more foolish than we planned

There is a river through the city no one photographs, a river no one cares about. It is a strip of water too honest for postcards. I take it as my teacher. The river is a champion of mixed metaphors: the glitter of oil, a shopping cart tenderly rusting into coral, a heron like a thought that decided to happen later. I walk beside it until the day’s... See more

e don’t try to be important. We try not to become scenery to each other. Once a month we do a civic tenderness: we return a rogue shopping cart to a corral, sweep a stoop that isn’t ours, carry a stranger’s catastrophe for twelve minutes and set it down without advice. I am a liar. I don’t have any friends. But I like to believe I have and,... See more

Death starts visiting like a polite accountant. We talk monthly. I write a two-sentence obituary for myself with no achievements in it; I throw out a box of things that were supposed to prove I had lived: lanyards, plastic, a faded wristband that believed in me for forty-eight hours. I clean a drawer with the calm of someone who knows the coroner... See more

if anyone asks what your five-year plan is, say something honest: to still be curious. because curiosity will take you farther than ambition ever could. curiosity asks questions even when it has no answers. curiosity keeps you humble when the world insists you have a direction. curiosity — not control — is what actually keeps you moving.

that care is genuine, but underneath it sits a truth no amount of thinking can undo. the point of life isn’t to make the perfect decision. it’s simply to make one. period. to trust your gut and act from the rawest place inside you. to move before you’ve thought it over for ten hours, made three lists, and consulted every available source.

every time... See more