This Time, I'm Different

On returning to Taipei, one year later

I landed back in Taiwan this week, almost exactly a year since I was last here. I was raw then, from the fresh wound of separation with my former partner. That summer, grief moved in like the rain that tips from the ever-gray sky in June in Taipei, waking me at 3 a.m. sharp. I learned later from my therapist that grief has a time zone. Between 3 and 5 a.m., when the veil is thin, sorrow slips through the cracks of slumber and can shake you awake.

Some nights, I’d wake coughing. Not from illness, but from something thick and black lodged in my lungs. I imagined the pain swirling in tendrils like smoke I couldn’t exhale.

After three nights like that, I turned to qi-gong. In the 7th-floor rental, I stood in front of the bed and lifted my arms slowly above my head, expanding the bottom of my lungs. On the exhale, I hissed like a snake, spitting out what felt like venom. I did it nine times because I’ve always been drawn to the number. That night, for the first time in weeks, I slept through the night.

On the plane from Bangkok to Taipei, I rewatched Call Me By Your Name, all snot and tears. First queer love splashed itself across my iPhone’s screen, and I devoured it. Some might call this self-torture, but I was driven by the undeniable weirdness of grief. Don’t shut yourself off to the pain, Elio’s father says, or you’ll shut yourself off to the joy too.

And joy did return.

We took a day trip to Shifen that summer, which is known for its paper lanterns, waterfalls, and temples. I was traveling with the family of one of my besties, and she led us into a lantern shop tucked along the railroad tracks. Inside, two tissue paper lanterns, nearly half my height, hung clipped to metal racks. Black ink pooled in shallow pots. The calligraphy brushes leaned, waiting.

“What do you wish for?” the shop owner asked, pressing a brush into my hand.

I stood across from my friend, on one side of the lantern, the kids decorating their own: six-pack abs, more friends, a glow-up, good ramen, no unibrow, no bullying, they scrawled in shaky, hopeful letters.

When it was my turn, I paused. The eggshell-blue panel in front of me. I closed my eyes.

And then, I painted with my brush: Letting go. Laughter and joy. Deep calm. Adventure. Friendship and community. Conscious love.

We stepped onto the tracks to launch our wishes skyward. The kids went first, eight hands lifting the lantern into the misting gray. Then ours. I watched it until it was a speck, farther than any other.

This year, I’m back in Taipei. But I’m different. My grief has thinned out. My boys are older now. They are taller, more independent, using their voices, and walking streets with the kind of confidence that comes with time and a few solo boba tea orders in Mandarin and pedaling U-bikes to the Shida night market.

Just before arriving in Taipei, I participated in an advanced writer’s workshop in Denver with one of my favorite memoirists and met with an agent. The dream that once felt faraway now feels like a nearer path. Yet, I’m not holding so tightly. I’m listening more and opening to each moment as a new learning opportunity. If nothing else, my life thus far has taught me to honor my rhythm and pace and trust the universe to show up with exactly what I need.

There is no sense in rushing things.

We went back to Fulong Beach today. The sun arrived shockingly bright, piercing and rare for a June sky in Taiwan. I picked up trash on the beach with the same friend, our feet sinking into warm sand, our hands moving with quiet rhythm, talking about the past year, dipping into moments that were both serious and reflective and hilarious and light-hearted.

Tonight, after a train ride and upon arriving back at my apartment, the earth shook. An earthquake, brief, but unmistakable. I was on the outdoor porch, switching laundry into the dryer and came inside to sit on the bed, a little wobbly, the building swaying beneath me. My body remembered something I hadn’t realized it was still holding. How quickly the illusion of stability can fracture. How we brace. How we breathe.

And it’s not just here.

Back home, chants rise for immigrant justice, for liberation. People are saying: We belong to each other. Borders don’t change that. We are showing up.

Sometimes the ground trembles, not from tectonic plates but from collective refusal to accept the unacceptable.

I feel it in my own body now, moving toward a new kind of steadiness. Not because the earth has stilled, but because something in me has. A calm that came not from being spared the pain and heartbreak, but from walking through it. Staying with it. Letting it transform me.

My kids are older now. They walk farther ahead on their own. I trail behind K. in his banana bucket hat and L. in his earbuds dancing a little through the MRT station and watch them becoming. I let them go a little more each day. I let myself go too.

I no longer need to write my wishes in ink to know what I want. They’re etched in the way I show up. In the small moments of joy I let myself feel even as the world burns and trembles. In the choice to keep loving, to keep hoping, to keep moving toward what’s just and true. To keep showing up with an open heart.

I am ready.

Letting go isn’t the same as forgetting. It isn’t the same as giving up.

It’s just another way of rising.