the opening scene from Past Lives just played out in front of me on the downtown 6 train tonight and i still have so many questions. i hated Past Lives but i can't stop talking about it so i think Celine Song still won. this film is so brave to ask, what happens if you as an asian woman miss out on your Korean childhood-sweetheart-turned-objectively-hot-guy and he finds you in New York City two decades later, when you're a moderately-successful-but-not-extremely-successful playwright married to the most mid-looking white guy anyone has ever dared to cast as endgame? what then? who's the bad guy here, really? our protagonist disagrees-and-commits to the status-symbol-of-a-life she thinks she's supposed to have so hard that she forgets what it's like to have something she actually wants. what do you do with the lives you could've lived?

less controversial, maybe: there's no point in mourning past lives, actually. we get a tiny, finite amount of time on earth, and there is only the tenuous present and the yet-to-be-written future at stake. you should light your objectively-perfectly-fine life on fire; you should definitely break your lease and move to New York City. it's not like it hasn't been done before: this is the place where women escape to when running away from their problems.

the distance between New York City and San Francisco is 2,565 miles. Vanessa Carlton says that she'd walk a thousand miles if she could just see you tonight, but that would only get her to Denver. if you were a navy sailor and i was a codebreaker sworn to secrecy at Arlington Hall in WWII, i would write you long letters filled with yearning inbetween trying to save the world. i'd make you a Spotify playlist. i mean a CD-ROM? i mean a collection of vinyl records. ok fine, maybe i would just play our song on the jukebox when you came to visit me in port. we're the lucky ones: these days you can close thousands of miles with instagram messages, waking up to each other's texts sent overnight. how does wifi really work, anyway? and where do all the people who live in my phone go to sleep at night? do you think they're looking up at the same moon?

New York City — like the internet — is a great equalizer: here, you can be a frog or a schizoposting Jane Street quant and no one can tell the difference. are you telling me that i have to pack up my entire life and go to the blue sky website instead now? no thanks. over there they go after the AI researchers with pitchforks; mom come pick me up, i'm scared. i pay thousands of dollars in rent to live here in this city of rats and i'm not leaving this time. this place is cursed but it's ours; we made it. no, we literally did — OpenAI might be nothing without its people but twitter is nothing without its tweets. all of my friends are moving to San Francisco but all my friends in New York are people who left San Francisco to be here. i've always been good at accidentally finding people who come from away. on twitter it seems like everyone is from somewhere very far away, but sometimes they work at the startup next door. sometimes the anime pfp schizo anon sits at the desk next to you.

when people think they're too good for social media i know that we'll never really see each other because i like people who understand that this life is a stage and we're every character; sometimes you're the main character and sometimes you're doing side plots. the algorithm takes no prisoners but you can just keep writing things, and eventually some tiny slice of the internet becomes home. posting is the work: when superintelligence comes we will have staked our claims on a tiny piece of its brain. if this is a simulation then i want my rightful place in the universe, because i wrote a thousand tweets for its training data. this is what they mean when they say you can write truth into existence. there are no main characters here; the only role is jester, and we all take turns being the jester. the jester needs a place to call home, too.

so here's what you do, if you're serious about settling down here in this clown show town which promises nothing but transience: fall in love; start right away. pick a third place and decide that you'll go every weekend. walk around chinatown trying egg tarts at different places until you find a new favourite bakery. marvel at first snow. go to your favourite museum, once when it's raining and another time at golden hour. ride a bicycle over every single New York City bridge so you can stackrank them in an educated manner if anyone ever asks (they probably won't, but you should still be able to do this): the Brooklyn Bridge (canonically pretty) is better than the Pulaski Bridge (lovely, almost flat) which is better than the Queensboro Bridge (impossible to get onto from Manhattan at midnight), and all are superior to the Manhattan Bridge (terrible in every way). the Williamsburg Bridge is an exception. find a favourite karaoke bar and go to weird shows in bushwick on a monday night with a friend of a friend you met at a birthday party exactly once. sit in a second-gen chinatown bar with a brand new friend swapping stories and hyping each other up like yes bestie go fuck some white men before you go settle down with a nice asian guy. say yes to raves which only really begin after one o'clock in the morning. try highly-rated pizza places so you can pick fights about them when it comes up in conversation in the office. stay in watching a movie on a friday night sometimes, because you do pay thousands of dollars for this shoebox apartment so you might as well make some use of it. buy kitchen appliances. adopt a cat, or a rat, or maybe start with a bonsai tree? kiss on the street, and in the elevator, and in the aisles of the japanese grocery store. make lists of things to do here; make memories because this is not a movie and there are no second chances, no simulation, no other lives: this is it; this is all there is, actually. make the most of every first time and every last time in this one and only life.
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