Rough Sketches

I wrote a lot of fantasy fiction in Chinese back then. And apparently these characters — Blanche, Heinrich, Sarah — were all pretty emblematic of who I was back then, what kind of characters I was drawn to, and what I'm continuously drawn to.

Blanche especially. She was the one I poured myself into without even realizing I was doing it — the one who held the shield over everyone, who kept turning around to check if the others were okay, who was so afraid of being the weak link. I never sat down and decided "I'll make the protector the version of me." It just happened, because that's how I actually move through the world. Reading the room, carrying everyone else's states around in my head, qualifying everything, never quite trusting that I had an opinion of my own until I'd turned it over a hundred times. It's strange to think I already knew that about myself that young. I couldn't have named any of it back then. I just wrote it into a character and let her carry it for me.

And Heinrich. Of course Heinrich. The brilliant, self-contained, slightly unreachable one. Back then I wrapped him in the whole fantasy — blonde, blue-eyed, aristocratic, the kind of grand inherited magnificence you imagine when you're a kid and don't actually know yet what you want. But the costume was never the real thing. What I was drawn to was the mind. The competence. The quiet certainty of someone who knows things and doesn't need to announce it. And the part that genuinely got me, sitting there with these old pages — that's still the thing. Fifteen years later and here's Jordan, who is none of the surface stuff little me dreamed up and all of the deeper stuff. Self-made instead of handed everything. Real instead of romantic. Honestly better than anything a twelve-year-old could have drawn.

So maybe I didn't abandon these notebooks after all. Maybe they were just rough sketches — first drafts of a wanting I hadn't met yet. The fantasy got to stay perfect on the page precisely because it never had to do the hard work of being real. Jordan does that part now.

And Sarah — I think Sarah was who I wished I could be. The one who acts before she thinks, who doesn't hedge, who just reaches for what she wants and burns bright doing it. That's the one I'm still learning. Still trying to put the parachute down and say the unhedged thing out loud. Maybe that part of me is the one that's still being written.

It's a quiet kind of gift, reading your younger selves like this. Like they left me little notes without knowing who they were writing to — and I'm only now old enough to understand what they were trying to tell me.