han maw aung – writing

I

What is the self? Or more simply, who am I? When I ask myself this question, certain parts of the answer come quickly.

There is the body you inhabit, the body you live in, the body you will die in. There is your action, your behavior, your history – everything you do and everything you’ve ever done. There are the people in your life, your friendships, relationships, all your loves and affections. Take all of it into consideration and you get a good enough sense of who you are. You get most of it.

But then there are the less tangible things that are nonetheless still essential to the question of who we are, these things that exist only in one’s own mind, these things that make up the interior self, the private self that accompanies us in the silence and isolation of night when nothing else does.

This self can make itself known occasionally, translating thoughts, values, beliefs, convictions, faiths, fears and aspirations into existence if you will it. But like putting words to the pages of a bedside dream journal in the moments after waking, it is a hopelessly imperfect endeavor, wholeness and truth always slipping away like smoke and quicksilver through the fingers. But still we persist, wrestling with the formless and amorphous to give it shape.

It’s why, I think, we are so drawn to labels. We see these constructs, these categorizations, concepts sculpted and crafted by wandering minds past, by philosophers and authors, scholars and scientists and think – here is something that can hold me. We pour ourselves into these vessels and marvel at the ease with which we find new shapes, how effortlessly these instruments of identity can find and define our edges.

But this ease is a temptation, a complacency to confuse the kitsch with the real. I’m not sure if it’s my unique pathology or a symptom of the times, this Westernized mid-twenties soul-searching, this yearning attachment to anything that seems to reflect us, this desperation to define ourselves through these boxes built by others. It is this intoxicating relief that comes from being seen, feeling understood after the endless days spent fumbling without the words, dredging through our subconscious, staring at our lives trying to make sense of it all. And so we gather these little pieces, our love languages, our MBTI, our star signs, attachment styles, diagnoses, traits and traumas, adding to our collection, trying to piece the whole of ourselves together as if a curation of glass could ever represent the character of water.

Of course identity has its merits as language, as communication. Simply saying – I am X – conveys the necessary information concisely compared to comprehensively expressing your entire inner self and history to any new person you meet before any interaction you have. It makes it easier to find like-minded people and community, signalling compatibility, understanding. Identity becomes a convenient shorthand for the complex immensity of who you are.

But language, like science like culture like society, is a sign of the times. It can be medical, clinical, delusional, overconfident, dated and flawed. Language meant for a specific purpose with a specific context from the past, however comforting, can limit you. It can insist on the mutilation and contortion of you in their image as the price of admission. We must remember that times can change, times do change, and we are – no, must be – the ones who steward that change.

We cannot cling to these wire mothers blind to their imperfections. We must see them as they are, as tools, as the embodiment of our collective knowledge that continues to move forward. We must assert our own egos, define our own existence, and insist on being whole. I know that there is a loneliness, sometimes a sad inability to accept the things we know as true about ourselves as good until we see it mirrored in the acknowledgement of others. But we cannot let others prescribe to us the story of who we are. We make the world. Not those before us.

II

Even before my great-grandfathers’ time, birds have always known when it’s time to go. I wonder if my parents knew – saw the scratches of the quiet yellow songbird nestled in the small of my chest – that their son was someone who leaves.

I was not a realistic child. I’ve loved stories for as long as I can remember, fantasies full of magical powers, hidden treasures, mystical creatures and grand quests. I spent my days with books in my lap, eyes straining at colorful animated respites on the screen, waiting to one day finally awaken my secret talents as a mage or discover a portal to another dimension. In my heart was the siren song of every world but my own.

As a child you must often field questions of what you want to be when you grow up. Even in their adoration of youth and innocence, adults seemed terribly tethered to ideas of work and value. I think my earliest answer was artist, but with the years and my good grades came adult expectations of success and prestige, of reasonable dreams and financial stability, and my answers soon changed to scientist, or engineer, or whatever made the people around me nod their head in approval at my increasingly sensible pragmatism. With each and every of the many responsibilities of the world I learned of and internalized, this life I wanted drifted ever further until all that was left was a little voice, telling me anywhere but here. We can’t stay here.

I was fourteen when my brother first left for college in New York. I remember crying on the way home from the airport, because even then I knew. Things are never the same once someone leaves.

Immigrants often speak of chasing opportunity and a better life. They echo the many stories of the American dream, tales of prosperity and progress heard in every corner of the world, including my own. Though I didn’t and couldn’t fully buy into the idealism of the time, America seemed like the closest thing to magic left in this world, the nearest match to the songs I no longer heard at home. I did not know if America would save me, but I saw no other choice but to go. With no other destination in mind, I would settle for the land of possibilities.

Life after I left was hard at times but it was also good to me, good for me. College was a chance at new beginnings and I ran with it. In those four years, I reinvented myself and let myself be changed in ways I don’t often anymore. Now I wonder if I was simply coming into who I always was.

I have a theory that people who leave are defined by their restlessness. In looking for a place to be and people to be with, we seem to gather in certain places and I realize now that in every place I’ve ever felt at home – first at a faraway college and now in the big city – I’ve been surrounded by those fellow people far from home, who also felt out of place.

A culture in a foreign place is never a perfect copy of where it came from. It is shaped and influenced not only by the new place it finds itself in but also by the people who bring it, those dreamers and risk takers, the optimistic and the anxious, by those people who leave who arrive carrying with them their perspective of home. It is from this version of tradition and heritage that an immigrant community and immigrant culture is born and takes on a life of its own, sometimes developing, sometimes staying still, but ultimately separately from the motherland, where it is shaped and influenced by the people who stayed.

At my most self-righteous, I judge and pity those people who stay. Too scared to take risks, too afraid of the unknown, or too complacent, they watch their own life pass them by. Or perhaps they have simply learned how, I hope, to be satisfied. Help me, Lord, to be satisfied.

Sometimes I wonder if I am someone who gives up too easily, if that is why I leave, chasing some spectre of an ideal happiness instead of making do and in those insecure moments, I think, maybe, I should’ve tried harder to stay. Maybe if I learned to be a little less selfish, a little more content, if I compromised just a bit more, endured a little while longer, it would’ve worked out. I could’ve made it work. I should’ve made it work. Sometimes I wish I was someone who stayed.

I was twenty-six when a close friend left America and its growing hostility for Berlin. Though I wrote her a letter with all my love and best wishes, I left out some things I didn’t think I should say, the feelings of being the one who stays. I thought of my parents that day, and what they must have also left unsaid.

Mom, I’m sorry. I know my life has been filled with uncertainty and instability and that things really haven’t worked out the way we hoped or imagined. I’m sorry I still don’t regret it. These hardships are bearable to me because I chose this life, a life you may not understand, and I can live with my decisions. I’m just sorry that you have to live with them too. I’m sorry for running headfirst into things you can’t protect me from. I’m sorry for wanting more than what we had, sorry for needing what you could not give. I’m sorry for being gone for so long, for being so far. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being sorry. It just seems to be in my nature.

Sometimes I wish I was free of attachment, truly free to leave and float and let the winds of my whims and the tides of my desire carry me away wherever. Only the world is not so gentle, the seas not so kind, skies far from fair and so I dig in. I hold onto these hurting roots tight and tender, let reality drag me through whatever waters it must.

Dad, I know your son is selfish, a crybaby and a fool but I’m trying. I’m trying my best to be happy. I have somehow stumbled into this life with people who are kind to me and people who care, and I’m building this life the only way I know how, brick by brick. I hope it’s working, hope that one day I will have taken this in-progress life of mine and made something of it. At least then we could look at all this sadness and separation and say it was worth it. At least then my parents could be at ease, say our son is someone who leaves, but at least he’s happy.

Maybe one day this complicated guilt will wash away, leaving nothing but the white sandy shores of a simple grief, pure and true. Maybe one day, there will be nothing left to do but sit and watch the waves come in. But for now, it seems we must live and lie in the wake of our own desires.

It’s been six winters and soon, seven springs. I feel a shift, wings unfurling, the weight of a great wandering seabird lift off my neck. These days, my chest is bursting, ringing with what my little songbird knows. It’s time to go home.

O albatross, carry this restless weary dreamer home.

---

_{1. The title is inspired by a scene from the movie Past Lives by Celine Song, “But
the
truth
I learned
here
is,
you
had
to
leave because
you’re
you.
And
the
reason I
liked
you
is
because
you’re
you. And
who
you
are
is
someone
who leaves. . . . To Arthur, you’re someone who stays.”}

_{2. “We make the world. Not those before us.” is an altered line from the episode Chapter 34: Three Sisters of the audiodrama podcast Midnight Burger by Joe Fisher.}

_{3. “… learned how, / I hope. to be satisfied. // Help me, Lord, to be satisfied.” is a line from the poem Ordinary Sugar by Amanda Gunn.}

_{4. Other influences include A Young Woman’s Guide to Self-Deportation by Goeun Park published in Seventh Wave’s Issue 17: The Cost of Waiting and The Enigma of Amigara Fault by Junji Ito.}

Dear Amy,

What do you give someone who’s about to start a new chapter of their life?

We’re no stranger to packing our lives into suitcases, ready to leave if needed at a moment’s notice. But somehow in the past five years I’ve forgotten how to live that way. I’ve accumulated so much stuff, maybe it’s from American consumerism, maybe it’s from the audacity of trying to settle down and start a life here. We didn’t bring much with us when we first came to the states, only some vague idea of the future and who we thought we were. From there we slowly collected things over the years – memories, experiences, all the knick-knacks and appliances that come with growing up. Eight years later I don’t know how I would fit all of this into the suitcases I used to, fit all of my thoughts into a love letter disguised as a gift note.

What do you give someone who’s already pared their life down these past weeks and months to only essentials in preparation for leaving? What could you possibly give them that they should take over the things they’ve thrown away? What should you give them that won’t be a burden to squeeze into suitcases packed to the brim?

It’s 5am on August 25th, 2025 before I head to the airport, and I’ve been crying for three hours, pacing this apartment you never got to visit. It’s 10am on Tuesday, August 26th and again on Wednesday, August 27th in this godforsaken heat and it’s still here. I’ve seen the grief coming now for months but it still hits hard like front teeth on pavement, unexpected. All at once, over and over, this feeling of loss.

You know, the life I imagined here always had you and everyone else in it because you have always been in my life. I imagined all of us meeting up year after year and growing old together. I imagined visiting your kids and watching them grow up, all the little things that get harder and less frequent with distance. Maybe I’m being dramatic. It’s not like I’m never seeing you again. God and government willing I’ll see you soon, maybe even next year to celebrate twenty(!) years of friendship. It’s really not the end of everything. But it is the end of something. For all the variables I’ve been trying to figure out about building and living my life, you were an invariable, set in stone, a given. For all my doubts about any and everything, your presence was effortlessly unquestionable. Every possible version of the life I wanted for myself had you, had us, all of us, in it. But like it always does, whether we want it to or not, change comes. 

For all my sadness, there is also relief that you are getting out. I hope Germany will be kind to you, the kindest person I know. I have an endless respect and admiration for your character, your earnestness, your resilience and how you make the world a better, kinder, softer, gentler place. People seem to say that I am kind too, though I’ve always found it hard to believe. I really just try to be more like you, and the kindness they see is the part of you that I always try to carry with me, the same way I carry parts of everyone I love. I’m proud of the person I am and I’ve only become because I’ve known you, and know that everyone that has ever loved me has also loved a part of you. I thank God and the universe for your existence in the world and even more for your presence in my life. I hold that gratitude at the same time as my anger and frustration at what life has thrown your way. It takes bravery to be doing what you’re doing now, and I am filled with excitement for what comes next for you, all the peace you undoubtedly deserve. I just wish we lived in a world where the kind didn’t also have to be brave. 

I love you and am going to miss you so much. I will miss you in the summer and miss you at Thanksgivings and I will miss all the parts of me and my home here that will leave with you. Life without you here just won’t be the same. But if anything we’ve learned how to keep going, that home is not a place or a thing but people and what we make it. So I promise to keep going, to make a life here we both would be proud of, a life that will always have a place for you. And I know you will do the same.

So what do you give someone who means the world to you? What do you give someone who deserves the world and more? What do you give someone who’s given you so much joy in your life? What do you give an old friend?

You give them a little bit of yourself and the world, in a small book of poetry and a handwritten note.

You give them a little piece of the home you’ve made together, your history, your rituals in a small bag of pink chocolate.

You do all anyone can really do. You say what you can and you give them all of your love.

All my love,

Harry

---

_{This letter was started in Seattle on August 25th, 2025, finished and written in Los Angeles on August 28th, 2025, delivered August 30th, 2025 tucked into a copy of Girl’s Guide to Leaving by Laura Villareal alongside a bag of Maeve Pink Bubbly chocolate truffles, and read on August 31st, 2025 on a flight from LAX to Berlin.}

Take me out to the field on a still, moonless night. I want to be there, up there with all the beautiful far things, up where the weight of the world shrinks into a twinkle and a flicker. You could spend your whole life running, go as far as your legs and dreams can carry you, and it still wouldn’t be enough. But if you made it up there? Somehow? No one could ever catch you again.

All my life I’ve loved beautiful things, because beautiful things are easy to love. I surround myself and hope by osmosis it all somehow soaks and seeps into the soul. Is it not natural? For a boy who loves beauty to want to be beautiful too.

But beauty is pain and desire is a kind of ruin because to want something is to admit you do not have it. Best a boy learns this early. Life will be full of delusions and illusions but this will not be one of them. A boy is not born beautiful. He must make himself so.

This is the Faustian art of alchemy, to take a life and painstakingly transmute it into beauty, to give everything in search of it. Then maybe once you succeed, with what little remains, learn to extract from beauty, the rest of what a boy needs.

So pull at the fraying stitches and seams of you. Coax strands of sorrow from the tangle of your grief and comb through the knots of dread. Unravel. Weave singing strings with threads of warped morning lies and spin your ghosts into gossamer and gingham. Craft from your despair, something smooth, something comfortable. Something one slips into with ease. Hem with lace, dye black.

Scent your sadness with sandalwood and cedar and all things evergreen that also never die. Ply your demons and dead dreams with jasmine and citrus, lilac and tonic. Run your tears through sieves and charcoal, pull till they flow clear, pure, iridescent.

Douse your anger in ice water till the skin separates, cracks and peels white. Cut the pith from the flesh, bury the soft, unspoken parts with the seeds. Temper yourself so that when you break, your wrists snap clean like crisp spring peas and shards of lustrous dark chocolate.

Fashion, around the soft warm animal of your heart, a fortress. Adorn its walls with murals and mosaics, emeralds and amber. Forge for your secrets stained glass cells draped with empyrean tyrian. Drown your desires in decadence while wearing your god-fearing, faithless Sunday best.

Spend your days picking salt from the earth. Strip and sand down your bitterness, your fear, your resentment so your flaws lie flush. Let their touch trace the contours of your body and when their hands linger around your throat, may their fingers find nothing but birdsong and honey. This is what beauty takes, a necessary violence for this tampered fate, this trick of the light life.

Look, my dear boy. Don’t you see that this is how your life will be? Don’t you know that the sun only shines while he’s burning himself alive? That a son becomes a star only when it’s up out there, far away. That beauty is in the distance from the burning.

So wreathe yourself in starlight, in flowers and furious silk, in all things beautiful and sweet, until you trick the world into loving you back.

More than once I’ve been told by girls with tattoos that I have commitment issues. They’re not entirely wrong, though maybe a better word is indecisive. Or avoidant. Or anxious. Or obsessive. Or perfectionist. I’m not sure. I’ve always been an overthinker when it comes to words and everything else, always in search of some feeling, the feeling.

Not quite satisfaction. Or certainty. Or safety. Or peace. More like a fickle god going,

Yes. That.

to some fleeting, arbitrary thought of mine and then absolutely fucking off for every and any other important question I might have, no further elaboration, like being on a call with customer support staffed by the all-knowing universe with the communication skills of an inconsistent lover. That feeling. The feeling.

Anyways, I’ve been thinking about what to do with my uncommitted blank canvas body after I die – or I guess what I would want others to do, since I won’t be here. I’ve been able to rule out being buried, since I can barely decide if I want to live in Seattle or New York or if any place will ever truly feel like home. A final resting place sounds not restful at all. I worry my skeleton will get claustrophobic, or hate his eternal outfit.

Perhaps one of those movie Viking funerals could do, where you get pushed off to sea on a wooden raft, set alight by a singular, arcing, flaming arrow. But would I need to get a ocean or seaside permit? A professional fire archer for hire seems kind of impersonal, so I guess I would need to befriend one before I die, preferably one without performance anxiety.

Maybe cremation will be a little more my speed, certainly more flexible in terms of options. Apparently it’s cheaper than burials, which will ease my frugal Asian soul and maybe my ancestors too. The words involved seem more elegant as well. Pyre, cinerarium, ash, retort, urn. Much better than embalm, casket, pit, plot, grave. My favorite so far is cremulator, the machine that, after incineration of the body, grinds the remaining bones into fine dust – ashes – all in around twenty seconds. The word just sits right in my brain – cremulator – making it all the more a betrayal to see what it looks like, the feeling leaving me as suddenly as it came. No way they clean that thing after every person, and I’m not sure I would want parts of a roommate.

Now the Japanese have a bone picking ceremony, called kotsuage. Starting from the feet and moving up towards the head, family members, using long chopsticks, attentively pick up and place fragments into an urn so that you don’t end up upside down. It’s quite thoughtful of them, what they do for the dead. I wonder if in addition to being handpicked, I could request my bones be ground by hand by my loved ones. It seems intimate, care like mortar and pestle and spices and the feeling.

In this daydream I’m passing through young hands, imagining into existence children I don’t have. Everyone wants a better life and a better world for their kids, but I’m not sure I can deliver. Even if I could, there is a tragedy in succeeding, in becoming a stranger to this, to their better life you did not get to live. For all the things I seem to want, I’m not sure I want this. For me or for them.

I still wonder what it means to be a good son to my parents, whether it is in making them happy or being happy. I only know it involves not dying first. As for being a good friend or brother, I know even less. I’ll keep my hands young just in case.

For all my love of water you’d think I want to be scattered at sea, but I’m scared of the deep and the dark, of fish and all things that maneuver in three dimensions. All the space options – leaving then returning to Earth, or maintaining an obituary orbit, or getting shot into deep space – are all deeply romantic in their own way, yet also a little lonely and a lot capitalistic. Definitely don’t send me to the moon though. I think that’s the worst space one. I would rather stay earthbound.

Turning into jewelry sounds cramped but haunting people could be fun. I wonder if tattoo ink or an ashy artpiece would be even more cursed? I entertained being used to grow fruit trees or flowers but I learned even in death I will be too basic and salty and bad for plants. Maybe just park me with a seaside view, and take my bones with you occasionally when you travel. Being able to visit friends and family sounds nice.

As for how I go, I’ve always suspected that I will die in surgery. Call it a superstition, hopefully not a premonition, but really it’s just the feeling. Like I said, fleeting and arbitrary. My friend once told me that if you want a fortune to come true, you had to eat the paper. I watched him chew and chase waxy paper with iced tap water and it brought me a strange comfort. That gave me the feeling too.

And so when I’m cut open on the operating table like the world’s most depressing piñata, I imagine they will find all the love letters I’ve ever written and swallowed over the years, desires and regrets, a lifetime’s worth, scribbled and choked down in illegible fragments, apologies for all the mistakes I’ve ever made scrawled on bones, organs, and cavity walls, my body holding all the things I ever wished would come true, all spilling out on the operating floor. And somewhere in all that mess, one note addressed to them, the poor surgeons –

Please don’t be sad. It’s not your fault I died. I’ve always been tired and looking for a reason, a moment to let go. I’m sorry. It’s just the feeling.

P.S. If it’s not too much trouble could you pack it all back in? I think it’ll help me burn nicely.

It’s my favorite place in Seattle, I think – a stretch of two miles along the water. I’ve come to escape my worries, but it seems like they’ve followed me here. Under my feet, I feel concrete, grass, asphalt, a worn trail, and the shifting of smooth sea pebbles. I walk aimlessly in search of some peace, and my worries walk beside me.

Today, the sky is cloudy, the pinks and oranges high up where I can’t reach. Dotting the coast, small coves, furnished with driftwood and round speckled rocks tumbling in the clear water of waves too gentle to wash my worries away. Instead they sit here with me, tender in their silence, as I wait for the sun to go down.

Some days I hold my worries, but today, my worries hold me. Today, like many days, I find no freedom here – only a tenuous calm. I listen to the sound of bikes cycling past and leaves rustling from a faint breeze against an everpresent rhythm, the moon slowly, imperceptibly, pulling it away.

After enough time has passed and the warmth of the day has left my fingers, I leave my worries here. I hope they find the peace I could not, or if they are anything like me, at least find it beautiful here. And I’ll come back to visit, if not tomorrow then some day. I will come back when the sun is not shy and bring for them new friends – worry friends to meet their worry wives and worry children, in this place where they can make a worry life and a worry home and follow their worry hopes and worry dreams.

I hope they keep each other company. I am far from home and I miss my family and I miss my mother and I worry about her worries like she must worry about mine. So I come here to the water to sit with old friends, witness their worry love, tell their worry stories, laugh at their worry jokes, and learn from them how to live my worry life.

---

_{This piece was inspired by the poem My Worries Have Worries by Laura Villareal.}

There’s been in me a recent desire for my body to turn to glass, my flesh hollow and transparent. I wonder if then, you would finally be able to see my soul.

Would it be laid bare, easily examined, studied, able to be known? Would it double and diffract through spidered cracks, born not just of the hardships of existing in the world, but also the tragic violence that I inflict upon myself. Or perhaps it would only hint at its existence through a frosted misty boundary, hiding its curves and true edges. Would the glass still reflect my same habits, a soul scared yet desperate to be seen?

What tints of color would my heart take on, my liver, my lungs, my throat, my bones? What patterns would design their surfaces? Would I still have my mother’s brown eyes?

I want to love as glass, to see how the light dances through you – how the world, shaped by your presence, becomes more beautiful. To be loved is to be seen, and I want to see it all. And if after seeing it all there is still love to spare, I imagine there is nothing more romantic than crashing into each other, body and soul. Perhaps as glass I would not worry that I am too much.

But my body is not made of glass. It does not shatter gracefully, nor set my soul free. Instead for my love I am left with a blunt thud, confused and reeling. It aches and smarts, but to bruise is to heal.

It is almost dusk, the sun is kissing the water’s edge, and I am curled up in his arms. On a busy airport morning, sitting on my suitcase as cars pass by, I wait not for a make or model but instead, for a familiar face and smile. There is a silence in the night sky, and no one in the park can see us holding hands but the trees and the stars.

Glass could never be soft like this, soft like a boy at sunset. Soft like the comfort of a childhood friend and the warmth in their eyes. Soft like her hands and the gentle distance of my desire.

I am learning to love with this body – slowly, gently, tenderly. I am learning to trust in the existence and beauty of what we cannot see. Maybe it is a blessing, to be able to love without falling apart.