2023

You roll over.

Everyone came over to your place for New Year's.

You look at her and ask her to be your girlfriend. And that was that—she was yours. This beautiful, creative spirit. Two weeks from now, you will drive to Florida. You will go parasailing, eat oysters, order a paella meant for seven people, and drive and swerve around crocodiles and alligators. You will be annoyed at how much you have to drive, but you love her.

Two weeks from then, you two will go to Kelly's place. And... She will make the most amazing meals. But she won't talk that much. This foreshadows how you break up. But for now, you're blinded by the kindness, the consideration, and the love you have for her, this woman.

You two will sit on the tatami mats. You won't have to work anymore. You will wake up to great meals, a beautiful home, and a beautiful girlfriend. She could be your wife. You'll go see art galleries and take mirror selfies. You will practice the trumpet while she comes home. With your credit card, she will buy you anything that you want.

Valentine's Day will be the second time you nearly break up. You got her flowers, but she took them out of a vase. You're confused. But in your confusion, she doesn't like your tone. This is the first time you realize that everyone is always telling you who they are.

You leave to go free diving under the ice, ascend to the top of a lake.

Between the cold and the compression and the suits and the restlessness and the lack of sleep, you basically pass out.

More trumpet, more food, more beautiful pictures. You look at art, you look at art, you look at art.

You learn about yakitori. You learn to butcher a chicken. You learn about the oyster, the thigh, the breast, the skin, the butt, the neck, the tender, the kneecap. You learn to see and feel everything.

You also start working on an app—a note-taking app, a journaling app, a YouTube transcription app. AI is happening; you don't want to fall behind. And as you reconnect on Twitter and build an audience, you make new friends and old friends.

And for the first time, you decide to go to Japan.

It's amazing. Aside from the allergies, you get her a new bandana. Some fried chicken, some nice sushi. You go to Japan and visit the nice restaurants, and you see that they use the same cups, bowls, and utensils as the stuff inside your house. You feel validated. You visit petting zoos, Chrome Hearts stores, museums, you eat fancy plums. But you show some restraint because next month you're going again with the woman you love.

New friends and old friends, you meet old friends and eat fancy strawberries, raw eggs, tuna, and more tuna.

Park after park, beautiful tree after beautiful tree. You climb a couple of hills to get that red Kaftan shirt that everyone knows you for. And you walk up a couple of hills and find that feather necklace that everyone now knows you for. Slowly becoming yourself.

You fly back to San Francisco and New York City. Slightly sick, but she takes care of you. More shows and more picnics. You're working on code. You're consulting. Everything is great. You visit home. You visit your parents. You visit your high school. And you realize you're going to leave soon. Your visa is expiring. Linda has finished her classes, and it's time to travel.

You pack everything up and fly back to Japan. You're a little bit worried about the money, but it's all going to be worth it. She takes you from our island to Art Island. She speaks Japanese, and you don't, and you just can rely on her no matter what. In Teashima, she shares with you her love of Tadao Ando and Japanese brutalism.

You ride bikes, go on walks, and hold hands. In the rain, you see art and more art and more art. She shows you a world that you would not have been able to enter.

You will wish you did more for her. She is the only person you have ever loved that made you need to become a better man.

You go from Tokyo to Kyoto to Nara. You fall in love with Japanese pickles. You run away from those fucking deer. You remember her slipping away, and she takes you from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant to restaurant. She exposes her love by feeding you well, and soon you realize that she is loving you the way her father loved her.

In Kyoto, you stay in the Ryokan, Sumiya Inn. A meal is more beautiful than any eating meal you've ever had in your life. You visit the hedgehogs, the alpacas, and the capybaras. You check into hotels by the Isu Peninsula. You catch your own food—your own lobster, your own abalone. More fish, more 16-course meals of tiny beans, leaves, and fish. Onsen by the ocean. Onsen by the island. More onsen. More petting zoos. More expensive fruit.

Then you go back to Kyoto, prepared to go back to China. You check into a hotel that is $900 a night. She tells you it is worth it. And you decide she is worth it.

By the time you get to Xinjiang, you are met by a mountain of lamb. You have lamb skewers every single day, 2050 so. For the second time you meet her father, you see himself in you, and he sees you in himself. The same person, she better for worse. He takes you to the sand dunes of Xinjiang. Takes you traveling. Linda said she would try to take you to the capital of porcelain, but she never goes. The person you wanted to ask but didn't feel like it was right. You were so dependent on her and your time in China that you do not want to be more of oppression. Later you realize that when you break up, she would apologize.

The rest of Guangzhou is so fucking hot that you basically cannot stay. As you meet her family and you meet her father and you meet her stepmother, you learn one of the most important lessons you'll learn in 2023. She is like her mother, and you are like her father. And her father left her mother. And you realize the person you need to find and the person you need to date is not like her—the same tendencies as her stepmother. A little bit softer, a little bit kinder, but more importantly, doesn't hate kids.

As you go to Beijing and Shanghai, it is just family dinner after family dinner until you go all the way to Guangzhou. By that point, it is so hot that you are constantly in a state of losing your mind. You take time to just read, study, and work until midnight until you're free.

When you leave, you go directly to LA, where you are detained for three, four hours. It's some bullshit, but you eventually make it— a little scared and more determined than ever to get your O-1 visa. You spend a couple of weeks in a hostel until your friends are ready to meet you in Toronto. With Chris, Pedram, and Kelly, you spend your days diving in the Santos and lounging around in the pool. The mosquitoes try to kill you, but the Alpastore is worth it, and every night you eat 20 tacos.

But you two don't text much. After Mexico, you go back to Canada before heading down to New York City to be reunited with your girlfriend. A couple of days into... Having moved in together, you break up. It's a little bit of miscommunication and a little bit of something else. I think you would have gone back together had she not broken up in such a dramatic way that involved your friends. And things could have worked out. But there was a part of you that remembered that she didn't want kids and she wanted to be in new... And she didn't, and maybe she took that to heart. Ironically, she's still in New York now.

She probably just needs to date someone with a little bit of money and a little bit more time.

But by then, you've gone to San Francisco. You've gotten a job offer for a visa. You go to the AI Engineering Summit and give the most popular talk at the event. And slowly, and slowly, you become a little more internet famous. You go back to New York. You see your friends for one last time before you start preparing for your visa. You go to Aska, which offers some of the best meals you've ever had so far. And you meet Sharon. For one day, it was good, but that was all.

For the next two months, you are stuck in Canada, and every week you think that your visa will come soon enough, but it never does. You stay home, see your friends, and wait. And you wait.

And you wait…