Issue 22 — Fall 2026

Creative Nonfiction

Among the Rice Fields

After what felt like endless days at boarding school, Ye Chenxi’s lonely tears gradually subsided.

She still counted the days impatiently, waiting for the break that came every three weeks—a brief three-day respite. Every time she returned home, her first stop was always to meet her old primary school friends—the ones she felt closest to. 

“Did you know? Lin Wenjing has stopped going to school,” Hu Ying said.

“What? How can she just stop?” Chenxi exclaimed, shocked.

In the countryside, everyone knew the saying: If you don’t study, your future is planting rice in the fields.

Teachers said it. Families said it. Even the television seemed to repeat it like a warning. 

The father of a boy next door once declared at his doorway, “As long as he’s willing to study, we’d even sell our blood to support him.” 

Her grandmother had told her: “Planting rice is exhausting. The fields are full of leeches—I don’t know if you’ve ever seen them. Like worms. When you plant seedlings, you step barefoot into the muddy paddies, and they crawl up your legs, clinging and sucking blood.” She measured their length with her fingers, making a sound of disgust. “Big ones. Thick as this. Hard to pull off… ugh!”

Chenxi clenched her teeth, a chill running up her spine. 

“And that’s not the worst. In July, when it’s hottest, that’s when we’re busiest. It’s the double rush.” 

“What’s that?” Chenxi had never understood the term that drifted through the elders’ conversations. 

“Harvest the early rice while rushing to transplant the late rice. No time to breathe. You thresh the grain, dry it in the sun, burn the straw, plow the fields, flood them, transplant seedlings—from dawn till dark.” 

Chenxi’s brow knit tightly. 

…

“Why did she stop going to school?” Chenxi asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want to go visit her?”

“Sure. But I’ve never been to her house. I don’t even know where she lives.”

“It’s okay. I do.”

Immediately, Chenxi led Ying along a side road branching off the main street.  Once paved with blue gravel, it was now concrete, scattered with mud and fallen leaves. 

She had been to Wenjing’s house before, but she couldn’t remember the exact location—only a vague direction. 

As they walked, Chenxi suddenly recalled a winter when everything was blanketed in thick snow—a “once-in-fifty-years blizzard,” the news had said. For primary school children, though, that year’s early winter break meant more time to play.

She and Wenjing had gone on an “adventure in the mountains,” walking along this very road. 

The snow muffled all sound. The world was quiet, white, and empty. On a sudden impulse, Chenxi had said, “Look at this scenery—let’s have a poetry contest!” 

“Okay,” Wenjing replied at once, and then recited loudly:

 “Before me, none of the ancients; behind me, none of those to come.” 

The lines rang out across the empty hills. Chenxi was stunned. She could not imagine a single line to surpass it. 

Later she learned it was a poem from a Tang dynasty poet.

That winter, they had played in the snow to their hearts’ content. Chenxi had even found two spare smooth wooden floor tiles, lined them up in the backyard snow, and tried to mimic skiing from TV, but they would not slide.  

The heavy snow had also crushed a tall cactus that once bloomed with bright yellow flowers. 

…

They passed stretches of green and brown farmland, several graves overgrown with withered grass, and a cool, shaded grove before arriving at a fork in the path.

Chenxi stopped, embarrassed. “Wait—I forgot. I think it’s the left one.”   

Ying laughed. “It’s fine. Let’s just see.”

They walked on. The trees grew taller. The road grew darker and quieter. 

At last a two-story house appeared by the roadside, with a smaller red-brick structure beside it. The front door wide open.

“I remember now—that’s Chen Jun’s house,” Chenxi exclaimed.

“Oh!  Let’s see if he’s home,” Ying said. 

Jun was a boy, a longtime classmate, who once brought his mother’s fried freshwater snails to share in class.

Since entering middle school, Chenxi had gradually lost contact with the boys from primary school. Even neighbors she had grown up with no longer saw or spoke to her, let alone Jun, who lived farther away. Ying went to the same middle school as Jun but rarely interacted with him.

Luckily, Jun was home, along with his grandmother, who sat in a wheelchair.

 “Wenjing is at home. I’ll take you there,” he said.

He led them up a grassy slope, where tall trees bore old carvings. One of them read: “Chen Jun will always love Lin Wenjing.”

The letters had stretched with the growing tree, their grooves old yet sharply defined. 

“Did you carve these?” Chenxi asked with a laugh. 

“Ha, yes, Wenjing and I did, a long time ago,” Jun said, scratching his head sheepishly.

At the top of the slope, he pointed to an red single-story house not far away. “That’s Wenjing’s home.” 

The house nestled against a hillside, built of red brick with tightly laid black roof tiles. A flat patch of earth stretched in front. Below it, terraces of farmland spread outward—radishes, cotton, rice. 

They followed a narrow path between the fields.

As they drew closer, they saw a girl in a purplish-red jacket in the field.

“That should be her,” Jun said.

“Lin Wenjing!” Ying shouted.

The girl turned at the sound of her name. They raised their arms and waved. She waved back, then began walking toward them slowly, her steps careful on the soft earth. 

“You came,” Wenjing said with a smile. 

“Were you busy?” Ying asked.

“No, not at all,” she waved her hand. “Come in and sit with me.”

Under the eaves of the red-brick house were stacks of firewood. In the yard, a Y-shaped tree branch served as a clothesline post, an old wire strung between its forks. Tangerine trees, heavy with sun-bright fruit, lined one side of the house. Chickens wandered across the packed earth. 

Inside, the walls were coated in white lime. A poster of a great leader hung in the main room. Odds and ends filled a corner. 

Wenjing led them into the room with the television. A long wooden bench and two stools stood inside. She switched on the TV. Hunan Satellite Television was airing a glossy youth drama, bright and lively. 

Then she brought some tangerines. “Here, have some.”

“Thanks,” they said.

“Thank you for coming to see me,” Wenjing said.

“I heard you’ve stopped going to school?” Chenxi asked directly.

“Yes,” she nodded.

“Why?”

“I studied for two weeks at first,” Wenjing pressed her lips together and looked away. “Middle school is so hard… I didn’t get it. I didn’t want to keep going.”

Chenxi frowned, struggling to understand. 

 “What are you doing now?” Ying asked. 

“I stay at home… sometimes help with farm work.” Her tone was even, as though stating something ordinary. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, is it?” Ying said, worried. “Working in the fields isn’t much of a future.”

“Mm…” Wenjing paused. “My mom says in a couple of years I’ll go with her to work in Guangdong.” 

For a long moment, none of them spoke. 

At twelve, they did not really know what studying—or not studying—would lead to. 

“If you study, even if you work later, it won’t be so hard,” Chenxi said, thinking of her mother. Her mother spent her days in a workshop, surrounded by machines, engine oil, and metal dust. She always said that with education, you could work in an office, clean and light. 

 “I hate school too,” Chenxi added. “Our homeroom teacher is strict. Scary. But I just try to get used to it.” 

Wenjing looked up at her, then nodded. “I know.” 

On the television, the city skyline shimmered. The heroine, dressed in a beautiful school uniform, strode through a spacious hall, about to collide with the male lead. The brightness of it drew their attention, and they began talking about the show. 

They chatted about other classmates, shared small stories, laughed. 

“We should get going,” Ying said, gently tapping Chenxi’s arm. 

“Think about it,” Ying told Wenjing. “We’ve been classmates for so many years. I hope everything works out for all of us.”

 “Yeah, we’d better go.” 

“Okay.” Wenjing walked them to the door. “Bye.”

The orange sun sank behind the hills, bathing the fields in a gentle glow, as if a thin veil of mist had settled over the world. 

Chenxi did not know that this was the last time she would ever see Wenjing. 

Arden Peach is a writer from China and a graduate of Fudan University. She previously worked as a technology journalist. Her writing explores childhood memory, human relationships, and the emotional meanings carried by everyday life.

The Ache of Empathy

I’m dirt poor. I live on the kind of income that people use as the “threat” in those hypothetical scenarios where you get something—but with a catch. The kind of hypothetical that turns poverty into a game.

But here’s the thing: I’ve got a roof over my head, food every day, a soft bed, my own private room with a door that closes, and clean water whenever I need it. I’ve got a private bathroom—somewhere I can run to when my IBS acts up, a private place with a door that locks, with nobody shooting up in the next stall. These aren’t luxuries; they’re basics. And yet, I remember when every single one of those things was something I couldn’t even dream of.

I remember shitting in alleys, eating out of dumpsters, trying to wedge myself between the sidewalk and the overpass at night. I remember the relentless grind of just finding a spot where I could exist—a place where nobody would chase me off, where I wouldn’t have the cops called on me. I remember the look on people’s faces as they walked by, like I was part of the scenery, something to ignore, an object to avoid. Or like I was a particularly vile bug that had crawled out from under a rock.

I'm still not sure which was worse.

People are often surprised when they find out I was long-term homeless. The agreed-upon story seems to be that that doesn’t happen to “people like me.” I’m “too well-spoken,” “too smart,” “too educated.” The compliments come wrapped around a quieter belief: that homelessness is something that happens to a different kind of person, someone already marked as lesser. When they find out I lived on the street, that I’m a high school dropout—that I was exactly the person they fear—the shock isn’t really about me. It’s about their idea of who’s allowed to end up on the sidewalk and who isn’t.

I always start thinking about this more as fall slowly turns to winter. Partly because that’s when the shelter lives loudest in my memory, and partly because every winter in the Midwest is a small apocalypse for the homeless. Out here, cold is not an inconvenience; it’s a weapon. Every winter, across the ten Midwestern states, a few thousand of us die alone in the cold. People like the ones I slept beside in Crack Alley. People like the version of me who didn’t make it out.

Every year, I see the first frost and, for a moment, I think it’s beautiful—the way it softens the edges of the world, the way it shines on the grass. And then I remember that somebody died last night because of it. Both things are true. I hold them both at the same time: the beauty and the body count, the glitter on the sidewalk and the person who didn’t wake up. That’s what I mean when I talk about the ache of empathy. It’s not a warm, fuzzy feeling. It’s the way your heart won’t stop insisting that other people’s lives are real, even when it would be so much easier to look away.


I was homeless for 10 years. I was on the street for one year out of that 10. I’ve left Crack Alley behind me, now. I’ve been housed, stable for almost as long as I was homeless. And every year, the memory of that time on the streets fades a little more. But the scars will never fade away. I carry them inside me, like a frozen shard of glass lodged deep in my core. That’s something I’ll carry until the day I die.

And the honest truth is simple: it wasn’t hard work that got me out of there. Not a damn bit of it. It was pure luck, and the support of dozens of people. From friends and family to attorneys and doctors.

I was one of the lucky ones. For every person like me, there’s a hundred others who didn’t get that help—people who fell through the cracks, people who got left behind.

And for anyone with a soul, the question isn’t whether I deserved this, but why the fuck did I get it and not someone else? I wasn’t special. I didn’t work harder or make better choices. I didn’t deserve this any more than the thousands of others I met in the same position. I was just lucky.

Merit is a lie, deservingness an excuse, and luck... luck just feels cold and arbitrary.

I guess, when you get down to it, it’s survivor’s guilt. It’s the nagging question I’ll never be able to answer: "Why me?"

When I finally got out of homelessness, I thought if I showed them what I’d been through, maybe they’d care enough to change it. To stop it from happening to others. I thought the truth was enough. If I just laid the scars bare, displayed the wounds openly with no pretense, they'd understand.

Maybe that was naive. Maybe it was foolish. But I believed it.

Then hard, cold reality hit me like a meteorite to the back of the skull. I realized most people couldn't see. Wouldn't see. Flat-out refused to look. At first I thought it was malice, that people were cruel, that nobody gave a shit. It took me years to realize the truth.

Most people don’t turn away out of cruelty. They turn away because looking too close means their tidy little lives, their comfy world, might fall apart. They can’t face the truth that this could happen to anyone—and that means it could happen to them. If they see the person underneath the labels—addict, homeless, psycho, victim—their world gets a little less safe, a little more uncertain. So they turn away. People aren't malevolent; they’re afraid. Not cruel, but perhaps cowardly, unwilling to confront the cost of seeing.

Empathy isn’t soft. It’s sharp. It demands you come close, and that you give up the idea that you’ve earned your comfort. That anyone deserves it more than another. And for a lot of people, that’s just too much. When you bring them the raw truth of suffering—especially the kind that shows the system is broken—you’re not just asking them to feel. You’re asking them to reckon with everything they believe about themselves in that system.

Most people can’t do that in real time.

Some refuse to do it at all.

And the more I think about it, the more I realize that feeling isn't just a burden I carry as a survivor of homelessness; it’s a burden of empathy itself. I encounter someone begging on the street, desperate for something—anything—and I can’t help them. I want to. I want to give them everything I have—food, water, a soft bed, a private bathroom. I want to give them years of security, a support network, a belief in their own worthiness as human beings.

But you can’t carry that in a wallet. Hell, I don’t even carry cash; haven’t for years. I’m living on SSI disability—a paltry $961 a month—and it’s eaten whole by rent, utilities, and general bills. I’m dirt poor, barely scraping by, and can’t spare even $10 when someone needs it, even though I want to. The worst part is knowing how close I am to the same fate. It's not "There but for luck go I", it's "There but for luck I'd still be."

A few months back, my older sister—a half-sibling raised in a different house, with a different mother, a middle-class childhood—made a post on Facebook about how “A homeless” had set up camp near the school bus stop. About how they were disgusting and dangerous, and she called the cops on them.

And I tried to gently talk to her. To tell her about the language she was using, about how dangerous it was. About how 15 years ago, that could have been me, her brother, begging on that street corner for spare change—just trying to stay alive another day.

And she turned away. Talked about how “the homeless” were dangerous. About how they shouldn’t be allowed around children. How most of them were drug addicts or psychos, and how I was clearly “one of the good ones.”

And that hurt. I expect people not to look, to ignore me, to dismiss my story, to misunderstand what happened to me.

But not my family. Not my older sister. That…that was something I didn’t expect.

It’s there, in those moments of betrayal, that the ache really sets in. When you realize that if you were strangers—if you had met on the street 15 years ago—she’d look at you with that same expression of disgust.

It’s that constant ache—that throbbing, deep hurt—that comes with recognizing the fluke that is your current position. It’s survivor’s guilt, yes, but it’s also the ache of empathy—the understanding that I'd still be there, on that sidewalk with them, if not for the sheer, uncaring indifference of the universe. I walk away from these encounters, powerless, wishing I could do more, and I carry that weight—an unfulfilled longing—knowing full well that it’s not a lack of compassion that holds me back, but a lack of means. And in that, the ache grows, because it never truly stops.

And that ache? That’s empathy. That’s understanding just how fragile survival is, how easy it could be for any of us to end up on the wrong side of that line, and how the systems we live under will often do nothing to catch those who fall. They didn't catch me, and there was no rhyme or reason to why I made it out.

I wasn't "one of the good ones". I was just in the right place at the right time to get noticed by the right people.

Some people will never see that.

Some people will never care.

But I’m still here. And that truth still has teeth.

Michael Sean Collard is a nonfiction writer from Springfield, Missouri. His work has appeared in CRAFT Literary, Argyle Literary Magazine, Months To Years, The Brevity Blog, and The Manifest Station. His writing explores poverty, homelessness, psychiatric survival, trauma, class violence, and the moral narratives people build around suffering.

The Wages of Dying is Love

The only box I opened on that birthday was at Cremate Simply in Albuquerque. I imagined a menacing industrial structure, but the crematorium turned out to be a small yellow house surrounded by evergreens. The air conditioner whined as I lifted the cardboard lid; inside was a plastic bag filled with ashes and a small metal disk, buried like an artifact. The manager told us not to leave the medallion anywhere because it was traceable. People aren’t supposed to scatter without a permit, she said, but they do.

There’s always the same photograph on my dresser: four-year-old me in knee socks, standing at the oak door as my father crouches beside me, pearl buttons shiny on his faded denim shirt. It was taken after my mother finally left for good and I moved to the canyon home he shared with three other professors. The photo was taken at dusk so coyotes are probably howling from the ridge. Later, at a rickety redwood picnic table flanked by marijuana plants, he’ll serve cowboy steaks from an iron skillet and chant a song I don’t understand: hey aah, hey aaaah.

My father was the golden boy of his tiny town in northwest Nebraska – class valedictorian and a football star. He spent summers loading hundred-pound bags at my grandfather’s bean elevator and managing the political campaign of a local Lakota Sioux leader. After graduating from Stanford, he was adopted into the tribe. My father became a professor at a prominent university in Los Angeles and helped found its Native American Studies Center; he would go on to publish twelve books over a four-decade career.

As a child, I planted Play-Doh flowers on the podium while he lectured on N. Scott Momaday and Joy Harjo, who often attended our backyard dinner parties. From indigenous people, we learned that people and nature are connected in ways science has yet to explain. There is healing power in stones and feathers and if you put crystals out during the full moon, they absorb its energy and deliver it back to you. Also, red-tailed hawks are good luck, but if an owl flies at you three times, death will follow. To this day, I thank the plant when I cut a flower.

When my kids were small, my father bought a house in Santa Fe and commuted to work but our connection remained strong. For years, I had only to think of him and, like magic, the phone would ring. Often, he would recite poetry from memory – especially Galway Kinnell’s “Little Sleep’s Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.” It depicts a father comforting his young daughter after a nightmare; she believes, as all children do, that he is immortal. The poem concludes with a line that always confounded me: The wages of dying is love.

My father wasn’t afraid of anything until he was afraid of everything. He first saw a psychiatrist in his forties and accepted a diagnosis of depression but refused to acknowledge mania. At sixty-nine, he was involuntarily hospitalized on a two-day hold that stretched to three weeks because he would not accept treatment. Once released, his decisions became increasingly irrational. He heard voices and saw people who weren’t there.

Then, in his mid-seventies, he divorced my stepmother and burned down his house in Santa Fe. I begged him to move back to Los Angeles; instead, he bought a four-bedroom and assembled a new family. A heroin addict who stole his car was his brother, a former bank robber who scammed him was his son, and a homeless woman was his partner. I couldn’t square these relationships with the ones he had jettisoned: friends and colleagues he’d kept close for decades; three brothers and scores of cousins.

His personality continued to warp under the pressure of mania. In one year, he exhausted his savings and liquidated his retirement fund. He spent nearly a million dollars on furniture and art – some that he left outside in the snow. I fielded calls from creditors as he turned his home into a hoarder’s warren. Within five years, empty bottles in the corners, broken windows and trash at the bottom of the stairs. Roaches. Rats. In his bedroom, Christmas lights blinked on and off all night long. He lost half his teeth but refused to see a doctor or a dentist. Instead, he hammered cough drops into a powder on the bedside table; I suspected the menthol soothed his gums.

I tried and failed to help him. Visits ended in frustration and fights. Still, I called each week, hoping he might send up a flare of who he had been before. But for the first time in my life, we were truly disconnected. Finally, I talked to a lawyer. The remaining option was to petition a judge to declare my father incompetent, which would wreck what remained of our relationship. I retreated, though terror defibrillated my heart when I thought of his frail shoulders and shaky steps. I bought him an iPhone and an Apple watch to alert me if he fell.

Still, he could recite our poem as if standing on a stage:

you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

On the first Saturday in May, two weeks before my fifty-fourth birthday and two months before his eighty-first, I phoned him from a music festival in New Orleans. “I can’t really hear you, Dad, I’ll call when I get home,” I said. “I love you.” He repeated those three words back, like he always did. But he didn’t return my call nor respond to the messages I left during the week and on the following Sunday, which was Mother’s Day. I always called him on that day, as well as Father’s Day, because for me he was both.

On Monday, with my husband out of town and our three kids at school, I phoned the Santa Fe police. My heart pounded and my breath was short, expecting questions I wasn’t prepared to answer, but the dispatcher casually told me he would send someone over to do a well check. After that, I was cocky enough to joke and texted my family: “Just talked to police and they’re headed over. All good.” The subtext of my confidence was blind faith in our connection. Crystals. Owls. Despite everything we’d been through, if the worst had happened, I would know. An hour later, the police department called – someone named Ben. “Does your dad do illegal drugs?” Present tense, not past. “Why?” The heroin addict, the bank robber. My pulse thudded in my ears: Was he in jail? Ben paused before answering. “He’s dead.”

The sound erupted from so far deep inside that I almost didn’t recognize it as my own. Tears rivered down my cheeks, soaked my shirt. Hyperventilation felt like drowning. I couldn’t bend far enough, couldn’t fold deep enough, to get at the pain. The tendons in my neck were iron. The room narrowed to a womb. I curled around the photograph of the two of us, held it tight as a teddy bear. “I’m sorry, Dad.” I repeated the words like a mantra. “I’m so sorry.”

Ben called back, identified himself as the medical examiner. “We found bath salts on the bedside table,” he explained. “They’re like amphetamines, but you can buy them at a drugstore.” I saw my father tumble, calling out to nobody. How long did he lie there in pain? An Apple watch, what were we thinking. I should have hired the lawyer – betrayed my father to save his life.

By Wednesday, I could almost breathe through the anguish that ambushed me – triggered by music or memories or my uncle’s laugh, which sounded so much like my father’s that if I closed my eyes I could almost imagine him alive. We placed photographs on top of the piano, a makeshift altar: high school graduation with a crew cut so precise it looked leveled, holding my chubby baby body high in the air, with my kids that time he put jellybeans up his nose. I didn’t include any of him looking old. None with missing teeth. They all showed his beautiful smile and wise eyes, his muscled arms and broad chest. Every morning I lit the candle. Each night I blew it out. Sandalwood and roses, his favorite scents.

Ben called again. To determine the time and cause of death, they had to do an autopsy. As I hung up the phone, it hit me like a sucker punch: pulverized cough drops. A police officer walking into that desecrated room would of course suspect the powder next to the bed. That’s why they were talking about drugs. I left a message for Ben but never heard back. It didn’t matter. I knew what I knew. My father died in his sleep, surrounded by things he had chosen to give him comfort, determined by a metric only he could understand. Finally, they gave me a date and then I remembered. The day that my father died, the quartz on my dresser vibrated; I looked up to the glide of a red-tailed hawk.

Soon, he was everywhere. When I mentioned his name, the lights flickered. I thought about him and felt pressure on the back of my head, as if his hand was there. A hawk perched in a tree and watched my husband; one followed my daughter home. I stepped outside to find a perfect feather on the sidewalk outside my house, rust barbs shining like beads in the sun. We joked that he’d sent a postcard.

On Saturday, my husband and I flew to Albuquerque and rented a car. I wore my father’s oversized turquoise ring faced inward, worried at it with my thumb. After picking up the box at the crematorium, I didn’t pause for birthday cake. We planned to separate the ashes and take each portion to a different significant place, beginning with his hometown, so we put the box in the trunk and drove from New Mexico to Colorado to Nebraska. Each time we pulled off the highway, I had to laugh as my father – via Google maps – directed us to a Lincoln Street or a Lincoln Avenue or a Lincoln Boulevard.

Lincoln is our family name.

Crossing into Nebraska, battalions of black-bellied clouds performed a choreographed advance. An ocean of grass stretched out on either side, Herefords like rusted buoys. The fluff from the cottonwood trees feathered the air as gray meadowlarks swooped and dove. Telephone poles sank into ditches like abandoned crosses. Finally, we drove the red-bricked streets to the cemetery and found the family plot. It was deserted, tall grass blowing in the wind. In 1961, my father hightailed for California and never looked back. How could we leave part of him there? The trunk stayed closed and we headed back on Interstate 80 towards Wyoming.

Two days later, we drove into the Santa Fe National Forest and parked at a cross-country trail thick with aspen. I had skied the trail with my father before I met my husband and the three of us walked the route when I was pregnant. My father had trudged through the snow with each of his grandchildren on his shoulders. Chest tight and breath shallow, I slid the box that held his ashes into a pack and hefted it onto my back, dense as a newborn.

Aspen naturally self-prune by shedding branches, leaving behind scars that look like heavy-lidded eyes. The trees watched as we tramped into the woods, flashed their frosted leaves at the cerulean sky. Altitude quickened my breath and the drumbeat in my ears reached the tempo of a Lakota chant until I heard it: hey aah, hey aaaah.

Finally, we found a circle of saplings no taller than my shoulder, trunks like the knobby knees of fawns. Could we leave all of his ashes there, rather than taking some home to California? “It doesn’t matter,” my husband said. “He’s not in that box. Plus, eternal fate can’t depend on where your kids choose to drop your remains. God forbid they get stolen and you end up in Fresno.”

The dust glittered in the sunlight as I fingered the smooth silver bark and thought about the poem that had been our touchstone. Its sadness rests in the narrator’s acknowledgement that he cannot protect his daughter from the inevitability of his death. But the final line – the wages of dying is love – what did it mean? That strange construction, a disconnect between the plural subject and singular verb. I turned the phrase over in my mind like a penny until it clicked.

Here’s what I think: From birth, humans impotently fight to stay alive and for this cardinal work, we are compensated with love. The last words I shared with my father were those we had been saying to each other my whole life, even before I could talk: I love you. No matter what happens, I love you and I forgive you anything. We had not failed each other – we couldn’t. This is what he had been trying to tell me, all along.

When the bag was empty, I pulled the air deep into my lungs, cool as water. Shouldered the weightless pack and felt light enough to float. Stepped into his footprints and headed back down the trail. Bark turned to dirt. Silver leaves sequined the gossiping wind.

The following year, I returned to the music festival where I last heard his voice. Felt the ring empty and looked down to see its turquoise cracked in half, nestled in the grass. Rocks. Feathers. Was I stringing together coincidences? Maybe. It didn’t matter. My father taught me to see magic in the world and once again I saw it everywhere.

Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff is a writer and climate communicator who hosts "Ask an Author" on Instagram, the Good Newsletter on Substack, and Santa Monica Silent Book Club IRL. linktr.ee/rachellincolnsarnoff