True Love Will Find You In The End

“Never find happiness. . . It kills your creativity.”
— former co-worker who found happiness

I was gonna write about how I fell in and am in love—sincerely and reciprocatingly—for the first and only time in my life.

I was alive way past long enough and knew myself way past long enough to know that this couldn’t happen again and that this is it, if never again. It wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place, but gg (good game) Hinge for being the world’s unlikeliest last resort to sheer-strength collide worlds together and give me the only chance I’d ever have.

I’ve said I love you once to one person without meaning it / knowing what the hell I was talking about; I’ve typed it once to one person knowing it meant nothing more than a you-missed-your-chance see-you-never flex.

Then at last I’ve had it said to me and said it back to one person.

I don’t live based on a practical world. It seems I live in a crescendo angst world where time and space hold no power over my ability to commit—regardless how far or long apart we’d have to be, knowing that these uncertain elements are no match for the one thing that Is certain, which is how I feel. It may not be a practical world but it is a world based in the most uncompromisingly sincerest of existences—and therefore a world more real than any practically-justified world.

But I can’t blame anyone for existing differently.

And so I’m writing about how I fell in and was in love—sincerely and reciprocatingly—for the first and only time in my life. I’ve been alive way past long enough and know myself way past long enough to know that this won’t happen again and that this was it, and never again. It wasn’t supposed to happen in the first place, but gg Hinge you did your best to transcend your post-digital-dystopian nature to be the world’s unlikeliest sheer-strength collider-together of worlds and giving me the only chance I ever had.

And to any hate-readers celebrating, joke’s on you cause it proves I’m not the one dead inside! I just need to figure out the emotional technology of still being alive even if I no longer have a heart since it’s now given away and broken—no, shattered—and the shards/dust remains are probably being dunked outside a car window on a country road drive to the airport.

Then at last and never again I’ve had it said to me and said it back to one person.

Third in the trilogy is usually the most painful, and if hot-take sometimes—and in this case still—the best.

Oh yeah I saw my Hong Kong homeland for the first time since I was six. I missed my uncle and extended family and was grateful I got at least one more chance to see them.

It was also humbling and cathartic to have their certified verdicts on how good or bad my accent is. Worst than I’d like, better than I dreaded. You win, Wally.

On Hong Kong and the ancestral villages, I reconciled with the bits and pieces I believe I remember with what I clearly didn’t remember or is no longer around to remember or forget.

I feel more in touch with my Cantoneseness but more an intergenerationally-uprooted Hong Kong diaspora than ever.

I feel more like a Leung than ever but know that by patriarchal tradition I’m banished to being a Chiu. Poetically all the places and remaining family members in the Leung village—including the house, burial sites, and sites of upbringing—were found and never lost, while in the Chiu village no one was reachable and no one knew where the damn hell anything was. I shed a tear of resentment at my dad having left nothing to trace. Not that I needed to, but his abandonment was too on the nose.

I left Hong Kong not knowing when I’d be back. I certainly cannot afford it, and my successful across-the-country doctor brother sponsoring it this time was the least he could do for my being stuck home to fend for mom, cancel dad’s debt after a two-year war with the bank and insurers, and building a treadmill for mom to control her blood sugar.

I try to figure out what’s next, searching for a sign. What friends I do have are alive. My stray cat’s still alive and keeps mom happier than I do. And I cleared my dad’s debt which finally clears me of his haunting my ass.

Asshole.

(Him. Not my ass’s hole

(Sorry.

(You’re welcome.

(Yeah I’m still me.))))

True Love Will Find You In The End – but that’s if you’re not the person who wrote that song.

Daniel Johnston never got to have it. He lived and died a never-loved obese schizophrenic chronically-depressed-ill and perpetually society-considered-ugly reject – while everyone else better-looking / more-famous / more-appealing freeloaded off his art as if it were their own to surpass Daniel. He so cartoonishly cannot have it that the youtube search results can’t even let him have his own damngod song.

The greatest irony of the love he poured out was that he was only ever conditionally-loved – as a circus animal, as a brilliant yet undesirable humanoid to use and abuse from an exploitative distance.

I don’t need to hear Daniel’s heartbroken lyrics from Joaquin Phoenix when the latter is having hollowwood sex with Rooney Mara 24/7 and can sabotage film productions left and right without ever worrying about his 80 million net worth USD or fame. It’s Daniel Johnston I would’ve wanted to hug him and ask him what it feels like when everything won’t be okay, and how he can still believe in his own thankless lyrics.

But because that won’t happen because he’s super dead and I was never going to Texas anyway, cause Texas after all that cannot do better than fuckin Ted Cruz – I’ll have to settle with my own version of that true love. Because I know for a fact without knowing Daniel Johnston that the true love he wanted never found him. Actually no, it knew where he was. It just didn’t want him back.

I can only hope it’s still worth stepping out into the light.