ESSAYS
Colors
Isu Hong
Purple. Often associated with rarity, magic, and ambition, it’s the epitome of beauty. It’s a perfume, purest on a bouquet of lilacs, lavenders, hydrangea blooms, and violets. It’s twilight, where everything settles and the world goes quiet. It’s a delve into your deepest desires. It’s the screams and bruises. It’s dark circles emerging under your eyes.
His favorite color was purple. He told me that once, in his velvet voice. He was a rarity; everything I had dreamed of, sitting across from me. The first weeks, he spent casting a magic spell, building a cocoon out of violet flowers, until I was completely consumed.
“I love you. I don’t ever want to stop saying those words to you.”
“I love you more than anything else in this world. I don’t think I can live without you by my side. Life has no meaning without you.”
“You’re beautiful, and the first time I met you, it was like love at first sight.”
He spoke of forever, intertwining his life with mine. He wanted to marry me. He wanted me to have his babies. His ambition to succeed only added to the allure. I believed him. He asked me to stay up until dawn for him, and I did, without question. But as twilight struck, and the world went quiet, his desires started to emerge. He and his best friends spoke of keeping me, holding onto me, graphic and disturbing sexual fantasies dripping onto their keyboards, and darkening my screen. I laughed along, telling myself it was just a fucked up sense of humor. But inside me, metaphorical bruises started to multiply, and the shadows under my eyes deepened.
Green. It symbolizes growth, freshness, and harmony. It’s the smell of freshly cut grass in the morning. It’s the promise of new beginnings. It’s the chlorine gas inside the can.
His favorite color was green. When I met him, the world had opened up again, like the spring after a long winter. He was a breath of fresh air, a new beginning. No grand promises, no declarations of undying love. At first, it was good–simple, easy. I was allowed to be a kid again. I was allowed to be fourteen. I didn’t have to paint the grass to be greener; act more mature, act in ways that would please someone in high school. So when he wouldn’t notice me for hours–his record, six–I wanted to believe this was another kind of love. Calmer. Stable. I didn’t realize it, but the gas canister had started to leak. And while the gas leaked into my lungs, I sat and held my breath, until I suffocated and I fled.
​
White. It’s the image of purity. Honesty. It’s the color of untouched snow. It’s the unwrinkled paper sitting on your desk. It’s the foam on top of a freshly poured beer. It’s the cast on your broken arm. It’s the lines of cocaine on a kitchen counter, cut neatly with a TAP card.
The untouched snow, apparently calls out to everyone but me, to walk across it with muddy boots. Does the crisp paper feel more beautiful when it’s written on? Even if the words written are heinous profanities? Or dark fantasies? Does it dream of love letters? Sonnets? Patiently waiting for mine, I stand in a room, staring at the spilled drink on the floor, most of the white foam dissolving into the carpet. One of them comes up to me, with a face that could make the clouds part, and leans on my shoulder. Does a cast hide the brokenness of an arm until it is fixed? Is that what I do, with the makeup, and the clothes? Or maybe I’m a drug addict, forever chasing the high of love. But my TAP card is empty, and I’m waiting at the bus stop at the end of the rainbow.
I; She; I
Isu Hong
Within terrifying screams, and thousands of sufferings, I exist. What am I? I am selfish, rude, and disassociative. I sit and silently watch. Whose performance am I watching? How many people am I? Who am I? Who is she? I am me. She is I. It is too much responsibility to be myself. It is easier to be someone else. Selfish. Am I a galaxy pretending to be a person? Or am I a moldy shell, of what appears to be one? Or maybe, all that I am, is the emptiness inside me. The emptiness that morphs into the urge. The urge I’ve been wrestling all my life, resisting its desire to end it. But I won’t. What is living without toying with life? To watch the fear in those pure eyes–the ones that slit my soul with every glance. To perform autopsies on her, and cut open her ugly organs in front of her. Rude. Once, I opened her real eyes, and when I dug them out, I realized, that her core was only real lies. Then, something horrifying occurred. Her lifeless body awoke beneath me. As we stared into each other's eyes, every breath synchronized. I reached out, but our fingertips could never meet–separated by a mirror. Dissociative.
Do you understand the illness that is to be conscious? To be mortified to be made of flesh. To be humiliated by the coursing of blood. To be nauseated by existing. To have the disgusting need to be more than human. To experience the gentle horror of analysis. Truly a deplorable lunacy, to doubt; to over-scrutinize. And if you do not understand, dulce bellum inexpertis. (War is sweet to those who have never fought.)
The medication: to go mad. Separate the mind, the conscience, the soul, from the body. Steady the body, stir the mind. Comprehend that definition does not rely on what I am, but subsists in what I am not. Start revolutions within the simplicity of existence. End war. (It never does). Love violently. Speak through poetry. Emulate Dickinson. Choose to stay in the attic, unveiling the intricately woven brilliance of every breath. Avoid the gaze, hold no interest in locking eyes with your reflection. Never listen to the oxygen swirl into the deadly inside the lungs. Do not notice your fingertips, the ends of hair brushing against the shoulders, the feeling of the fabric on your thighs.
It’s a fitting punishment, for a grotesque monstrosity. Do I write to delay complete madness? Or perhaps, I write to stare at the soul at the bottom of the well. For she, is life, my soul, my mind. Mold grows at her deformed fingertips. Deep scars she hides. Her voice cracked and bloody, raw from screaming to fill the silence. But even full of sorrow, rage, love, all she can do is haunt. She cries. And as tears roll down her pale cheeks, she slowly fills the well. The water in the wishing well ripples, ever so slightly. My task? To hide her reflection. She is forbidden to see the daylight. But sometimes within the melancholy, I repeat my wish: “Come back. Even as a dream or a shadow”, I whisper to the drowned girl, at the bottom of the well.
***
I wish for one thing a hundred ways, a thousand times. How odd, that I can plead the same wish over and over, and all she sees is the rings of water. Is it that the well does not grant the wishes of the mad? Is it that she cannot see my reflection? For I sit, scrawling onto its walls. She moves above me, unaware, disconnected from my drowned cries.
I go to reread what I’ve written; I swallow my vomit a hundred ways, a thousand times. The first scrawl, a pathetic cry, desperately reaching for the end. The second, a vow. The last, jagged carvings. Pockets of air; a wave of relief as the scarlet blade floats to the top. With the knife, a string of letters–ink bleeding, tear-stained. Dissolving entirely before the surface. Fueled by the clinical satisfaction of watching myself destruct, the solitary confinement of my soul.
As she sits through lectures and walks through corridors, I drown in the flood I’ve created. Silently granting the melancholy wishes of those who seek. I sit and silently watch, as I bathe in their agony, and spit out honey-dipped nothings. She is a corpse, moving, while her emotion sits inside the well, suffocating my every breath. Steady the body, stir the mind. Perhaps it is better this way, finding eternal comfort in hiding.
As the sky darkens purple, I am able to violate her rhythm. A complete dissociation from reality, plunging the body into the well to join its soul. She suffocates, and I regain my breath as I float to the top. I stare into her eyes, from the surface–a luxury. I forcefully suffocate myself. As we stared into each other's eyes and our scarce breathing synchronized. I reached out, but our fingertips could never meet–separated.
This was her wish, was it not? For my return? Does she understand that every version of our story ends with one of us being slaughtered? I’ve scrawled my last letter to her. A love letter, a gentle horror-ish gift.
“And all of my devotion turns violent. I’ll paint you the galaxy with bloodied purple bruises. I’ll feed you my organs, one by one. My liver. My lungs. My heart. I’ll hollow out every bone to feed you my bone marrow. (Cannibalism is the highest form of intimacy, don’t you think?) Or maybe you’d prefer I cut you open and crawl into your skin, to hold your heart. You are my home. Don’t you understand? Do not perceive me as misanthropic. For I am outrageously sentimental. A romantic. Do you understand? Can you see?”
***
We tell our stories differently, don’t we? She and I? I don’t know if we will ever truly become whole again. Maybe I’ve gotten too skilled, detaching myself from her. A terrifying chaos ensues when she and I allow ourselves to meet at the fingertips; when we become one. I love the water, but I never learned to swim. (What a tragic manner of saying,) “I love her, but I will not survive her.”
Dearest Priscilla
Isu Hong
Dearest Priscilla,
​
There is irony in the intimacy of what could’ve been; in every life, in every timeline, I hope Heaven alone wouldn’t dare to separate us. I write to you in my last moments as I bleed out under fluorescent lights. The paper gown they have me in is ill-fitting and uncomfortable–it reminds me of the suit I wore on our anniversary. You asked me how much I loved you under the December storm, under glow-in-the-dark stars. I answered with some halfwitted cliché, something I probably had read on a Hallmark Card. Now, I reminisce on our time together, and I am ready to answer your question–albeit four years too late. I love you to death. Call my name above my grave, and I promise my love will rise to meet you, even then.
​
You must be wondering why I write to you in my last moments. For the first time in four years. After I left you out on Fifth Avenue in your red coat–have I ever told you detested the color?--before my soul can patiently wait for our reunion, I owe you the truth, the story of how I passed.
I dreamed of becoming a painter, desperate to visualize what drove my mother to hang herself on that tree, while my brother and I watched helplessly from the locked car. It wasn’t until years later that I learned she had been diagnosed with schizophrenia—a diagnosis that explained so much yet left me with more questions than answers. She had tucked my brother and I into bed the night before, reading us a book that she had been working on.
​
Did I ever tell you that she was an author? Ira had already fallen asleep before the story ended. I remember her flipping through pages when she noticed. She pointed at a page, where the words ended at the middle of the page. I asked her why there was so much space, and she responded that the book wasn’t yet finished. Now, the book resides on my desk, untouched. Her life—her story—ended before it could be completed. I often wondered if mine, too, was an unfinished book, waiting for someone to turn the page.
When I left you on that street, my mother’s insanity had already caught up to me; the looming madness I had been running from my entire life. I had begun staring at the ghost of my mother in my darkness—her madness had started creeping into me, taking root where my consciousness once lived.
​
The first time I saw her again, it was the night of our anniversary, under the same glowing stars on your ceiling. There she was, a beautiful stranger staring back at me. You asked me if I was okay and I muttered, "Aren’t mirrors incredible?"
I began to see more after that night. I opened my eyes to something I had been failing to see for the past twenty-seven years. Hear the voices of my ancestry, the undead, and their whispers that clung to the edges of my thoughts, their words buried deep in the recesses of my mind. They spoke of things I was never meant to hear—echoes of my mother’s despair, fragments of her broken soul that had been passed down through generations. And there, in the silence of your room, I realized: I had become her. In the way her madness lived inside me, pulsing, insistent, unraveling what little I had left of myself. I had become a mosaic of fractured pieces, shattered by the weight of a family’s grief. I had tried to outrun it, to outrun her, and in turn, you.
​
My insanity became their masterpiece. And I began to take control of it, little by little. Priscilla, my dearest, I vowed to reign complete control of my ghosts before I returned for you! But I had begun to see it leak into the mind of my brother.
​
The madness had always been there, lurking in the corners of his mind, a family inheritance we could never escape. At first, it was subtle. The way my Ira’s eyes would dart nervously when he thought no one was looking, or how he'd whisper things under his breath when the house fell silent. His words began to slip into the same paranoid ramblings my mother would utter. He'd speak of voices in the walls, of the shadows that followed him, of people who had never existed.
​
I should’ve recognized it sooner. The madness wasn’t just something that happened to her—it was in all of us, waiting. I had seen it in his eyes—the same vacant, lost look my mother had when she began to slip away. He was turning, and I could feel it spreading between us like a plague. I’d seen what it did to my mother, how it twisted her into something unrecognizable. It was pulling him into its abyss, and he didn’t have the strength to push himself out like I had been doing.
​
So, I made the decision. I wasn’t saving him from himself, or saving me from him. I was saving us both—from the inevitable descent, from the ruin that would consume us whole. I know Priscilla, he wasn’t mine to save. But my love, wouldn’t you agree that it was merciful to end the suffering before it takes hold fully? Was I not doing the most humane thing? I had to stop it—before it could finish him off like it did her.
​
But mercy comes at a cost. I wanted to be the man able to conquer the darkness, step outside the family legacy, burying the ghosts. I wanted to stand under your glow-in-the-dark stars, during that December storm and answer your question without my mother beckoning me to join her. But I saw too clearly what lay ahead–a life where the madness consumes everything, where we all become unfinished books, our stories abandoned mid-sentence.
​
I spared him, Priscilla, by taking the burden of his weight onto myself. Priscilla, you know why I won't survive this. It is the inevitable truth we’ve carried together, a bond deeper than flesh and bone, deeper than our fractured bloodline. I wasn’t just saving Ira—I was saving us both.
​
The doctors always said we were a miracle, two hearts stitched together, two lives somehow sustained in one fragile body. Ira was the first to slip away, but I knew the moment I felt it—the hollowness where he had always been. He took the madness with him, and now I’m left with the aftermath, the weight of the choices I made for us.
The fluorescent lights above me hum like a dirge now, sterile and detached, mocking my decision. I feel the blood soaking through this paper gown, pooling beneath me. Funny, isn’t it, how I always hated the color red? Too loud, too final. But here I am, painted in it, leaving a piece of myself behind for you to find.
​
Priscilla, they’ll say I was weak. A man undone by his inheritance, unable to fight what ran in his veins. They’ll call it a tragedy. But you, my love, will know the truth: this was my masterpiece. The madness didn’t win—I did. By ending my story, I’ve given him a chance to finish his.
​
This is my final act of love, for him, for you, for all of us. My story ends here, under these sterile lights, in this ill-fitting paper gown, soaked in the color I’ve always hated. But, Priscilla, please understand—I did this for the both of us. I chose mercy.
Call my name above my grave, and I promise my love will rise to meet you, even then. My body will rest beneath the earth, but my love for you will echo in the cracks of the world. You asked me once how much I loved you.
​
I love you to death, Priscilla. To the very edge of it and beyond.
​
Yours eternally,
William
​
Patient Record
_____________________________________________________​​
Names: Ira and William Adler
Condition: Conjoined twins at the thorax. Shared vascular system.
Date of Admission: June 25, 2004
Time of Death: 00:23
_____________________________________________________
Physician’s Notes: Cause of death: Exsanguination.
Love Letters to No One
Isu Hong
Hi. I’m just writing to tell you that today felt like the first day of my life. I didn’t do anything different. It was a normal day. I walked along the same streets, went to the same classes, talked to the same people. It was a normal day. But inexplicably, there was something unfamiliar, subtle, strange, new. I don’t know how to describe it, but I took my first breath today. I opened my eyes for the first time. I felt love for the first time. I took in the sunshine for the first time. Hope you’re doing well.
That was the first message. I had just gotten a new number. I thought nothing of it at first. I didn’t respond. Didn’t block the number. Just left it alone. Barely skimmed through the text, if I’m going to be honest. I think I was on my way to meet my mother when I got the text. Or maybe going to pick up coffee. I don’t remember. I only started really thinking about the texts when the next one arrived.
Hi. Today, I went to a vintage shop. On a shelf at the very back, I saw a pair of gently used wings. The tag read, “pair of wings–gently used.” They were a little yellow and coated in dust. Under the shelf was a box of old letters. I opened the one at the very bottom and it told a story. I think it was the old woman’s. (You know, the one asleep at the big oak desk?) It told the story of a mother and son, a love so fleeting and great. She wrote that she was waiting for his return. That she’d hold onto his wings forever, just in case he wanted them back. At the very end, she wrote that she didn’t want him walking for too long. She didn’t want him to forget the feel of the wind beneath his wings. I know you hate walking. Maybe I’ll go back and bring back wings for you. I still have your sneakers. (The grey ones covered in dirt?) I have space for them on the shoe rack. Just in case you want to put them back. Hope you’re wearing cleaner shoes.
It was two in the morning when I got that text. I wasn’t asleep; I was running my fingers through my son’s hair. I was listening to the dog snore. I was watching the silhouette of a cat dancing in the building across from mine. I felt bad for her—at least, I assumed it was a her. Whoever she was. Did she not realize that I was a stranger? That I had no idea who she was? Or maybe, she had no one in her life who cared enough to respond. Maybe it was easier to text a random number than to text whoever she was talking to. I read the text about 50 times. I had nothing else to do. My son was asleep next to me. I wasn’t going to wake him up. His little legs were wrapped around mine, warm and heavy, anchoring me here. I watched the slow rise and fall of his breath, feeling something unfamiliar settle in my chest. When had I started thinking of time like this—something slipping through my fingers? I had no wings to keep for him, no letters to write. But I felt it all the same, the quiet weight of something I couldn’t name. Would I feel the same way as the old woman when he went off to college? His first day of kindergarten? What were his wings? Maybe it was his little red coat. Maybe it was Mr. Rabbit. Whatever it was, I promised myself I’d find a place for all of it waiting for him back home.
Hi. Are you a floor person? I am. Lying on the hardwood floors, staring up at the ceiling. I think it’s the most romantic part of my apartment. I can’t tell you how many paintings I’ve imagined. They’re never as good as the ones you’d create. But I like trying. I think I’m starting to get why you loved painting so much. My shitty renditions of Monet’s Water Lilies, The Hay Wain, and The Garden of Earthly Delights. They’re all on there, imprinted and tear-stained. You just have to look closely. Sometimes, I wish you’d sneak in, in the middle of the night. Paint the ceiling. Use your oil paints and your pastels. (They’re still on the closet floor). You wouldn’t even have to let me know you were there. I’d know. Hope your canvases are never blank.
I got the text almost a month after the last two. I gotta be honest, I was a little disappointed when the texts ended. I had been looking forward to these little spouts of poetry. Oddly romantic and deeply sad. A bittersweet delight, kind of like dark chocolate. So, when the third text arrived, it triggered something in me. Something almost as obsessive as this girl was. Curiosity. Who was this stranger? Who was she writing to? What happened between them? At first, I told myself I was just curious. A passing thought. But then, I stopped walking past vintage stores—I stepped inside. Every question I had crept out of the back of my mind, lurking into the corners of vintage stores and art galleries. Every quiet moment felt like waiting for the next text, but my phone remained still as if mourning her silence. I told myself I wasn’t obsessed. But I was lying. I had started to become obsessed with their story, almost as much as she was.
One day, I was scrolling through my phone, and I got an ad. One for a background search website. Apparently, companies use things like these all the time when looking at a prospective candidate. And it was all public knowledge. All I needed was a name, a phone number, and my answers would be staring back at me. Now, all I needed to do was decide which question was more important. Who was the stranger or the recipient? Ironically, it was she who helped me answer.
Hi. Today, I had the best cup of coffee in the world. I took a picture to commemorate after the cup was empty. (How would I have known it was the best cup of coffee when the cup was full?) I had my first cup in the afternoon. My second cup at night. I dream of you so often that you no longer feel real. I needed to stay awake. Don’t you understand? My being desperately needs you to exist. Someone once told me. Grief is the last act of love. It never ends. It is a translation of love into forever–a sacrifice. I cannot grieve if you do not exist. It exists within my world. My life revolves around yours. I am eternally yours. Hope your coffee doesn’t keep you awake at night.
She sent me that text a month ago. She hadn’t texted since, and as much as I hoped she was doing better, I was getting anxious awaiting the next gray square on my phone to replace the one before. Recently, I realized. This stranger. Her existence would not have been known to me if not for the recipient. By some cruel joke of the universe, I had replaced the original recipient, wherever he was. I wanted to know who I was supposed to be. Who I had so ignorantly taken the seat of.
I kept telling myself that it was just a passing curiosity. But when my son asked me to read him a bedtime story, and I hesitated—my phone in my hand, waiting for a text that wouldn’t come—I felt something like guilt settle in my stomach. When had this story become more real to me than my own?
​
Her messages had read like poetry—fragments of a story I had come to interpret, to analyze like a high school student scribbling notes in the margins. I thought I understood the themes. Love, loss, longing. But poetry carries a reality, whether real or imagined, and I had never questioned which one I was reading.
I hesitated before typing my number into the search bar. My state—New York.
ENTER.
The screen loaded. A name appeared. ***** *****. (Taken out for privacy reasons).
I scrolled.
His obituary.
And then, another name. Another story. Another ending I hadn’t predicted. Had I been wrong about all of it? The meaning I had crafted, the person I had imagined, the grief I had come to know secondhand—was any of it real? Or had I, in my obsession, become just another reader, mistaking metaphors for truth?
​
Tragic Coincidence: Woman Dies on Anniversary of Boyfriend’s Death.
New York – Nearly one year to the day after the tragic passing of 23-year-old ***** *****, another heartbreaking loss has struck. ****** *** 22, was found dead in her apartment late last night, her death was ruled as self-inflicted.
Friends describe her as deeply affected by her boyfriend’s passing, noting that she had never fully recovered from the loss. Strangely, records indicate that she died within minutes of the exact time of his accident last year.
"She always said she felt like part of her died with him," one friend shared.
Her last message still sat in my phone.
Hope your morning coffee doesn’t keep you awake.
The timestamp: 11:47 PM. I checked the article. Her time of death—11:48.
Ill
Isu Hong
Early in March of two thousand-seventeen, my mother fell ill. My father decided that she needed to be taken to the emergency room and I went with her, while he stayed home with Jason—my younger brother. I remember looking up at the doctor and staring at his chapped lips moving. Congestive Heart Failure. That was the diagnosis. I remember my mother looking into my eyes and comforting me—irony at its finest—telling me that everything was going to be okay. That she would overcome this. She was trembling herself, and squeezing my hand tighter than I thought was humanly possible. I remember sobbing in her arms while the doctor choked out that he was sorry, that the hospital didn’t have the resources to care for my mother’s diagnosis. He gave us a recommendation to another hospital, one over an hour away, that had the resources to better care for her.
We sold almost everything we owned, to afford a fraction of the hospital bills. Jason cried when we took his train set and replaced it with the old badminton set we had buried in a closet somewhere. My father picked up extra shifts and 2 part-time jobs. Whatever free time he had was spent on a bus to visit the love of his life, or passed out on the couch. He refused to sleep in their bed, always stating it was more comfortable on the couch. Sometimes, I’d catch him silent, standing in the doorway, eyes fixed on their framed wedding photo on the wall. The photo was not well preserved or well taken for that matter, blurry, and their faces contorted in mid-conversation. The edges were frayed and stained with water, the color fading more each year. My father wore a long-sleeved button-up, with bleach stains up and down the front, sleeves bunched up, and ill-fitted dark brown pants. His wire-frames emphasized the pure happiness in his eyes, and his curls seemed to spill out the top of his head. My mother wore a long silky, white gown, sleeveless and low-cut. Two daisies rested on her right ear, contrasting her dark hair, illuminated by sunlight. A thin silver chain weighed down by a tiny rectangular turquoise pendant rested on her neck. She told me that my father bought it for her after they found out she was pregnant with me. Maybe jewelry was cheaper back then because I was pretty sure this necklace was the most expensive thing she owned after getting married.
The necklace had been handed down to me on my sixteenth birthday. I’d never taken it off, only to shower. On my seventeenth birthday—on two-thousand seventeen funnily enough—my parents took Jason and me to the mall, and when we walked past a jewelry store, I remember my mother lingered at its display window. I don’t know if she knew I saw this, but she was staring at a pair of earrings. Square-cut sapphire earrings, silver prongs clutching onto the stones from the sides. That day, I promised myself I would study harder and become successful enough to afford my mother a pair more exquisite someday. But when she fell ill, I didn’t know if that would be possible.
Within the coming months, my mother’s condition fluctuated. There were days she seemed stronger, and that’s when she’d allow Jason and I to visit her. I could see in her eyes that she didn’t want to worry us. But I could tell it was exhausting for her, especially keeping Jason entertained, with his rowdy way of driving a yellow toy taxi around the room. Sometimes, while we were leaving her hospital room, I could see that she would slump over from exhaustion, like my phone freshly out of credit.
On a crisp autumn morning, just as leaves began to turn, my mother’s health took a turn for the better. The doctors were cautiously optimistic, and for the first time in months, I allowed myself to dream of the future. That Christmas, we gathered in her hospital room, a small tree adorned with handmade ornaments casting a warm glow. As I handed her a carefully wrapped box, her eyes filled with tears. Inside were the sapphire earrings she had admired so many months ago. Though they were not the most expensive, they were bought with every penny I had saved. She hugged me tightly, her trembling hands clutching the earrings as if they were the most precious gift she had ever received. At that moment, I realized that our love for her was the greatest resource of all, and no matter what challenges lay ahead, we would face them together, as a family.