There is only one play I love: John Proctor is the Villain. It is a modern-day feminist retelling of The Crucible. I read it for the first time exactly two autumns ago. While I read, I cried quietly and painstakingly, careful not to disturb the classmates sitting around me.
It made such a deep impression on me that my brain creased an extra time, and stored all of what I love about this formidable work of art inside of it. You can’t know me without knowing my love for this play.
This fall, my school is putting on John Proctor is the Villain. I wanted, more than anything, to star in the leading role.
I was rejected. Not just rejected, but forgotten–an infinitely worse fate. I didn’t receive the rejection until I reached out to the director on the evening the casting results were supposed to be announced, and asked her if she had any updates for me. A few minutes later, a rejection letter arrived in my inbox.
I wanted to ask the director why she hated me, why she killed my dream, why she couldn’t see my desperation to be in this play, why she couldn’t let me have this one thing that I wanted.
But that would have been uncalled for, so I settled for asking if she had any feedback for me.
“I liked what you did. There were just others who had stronger auditions. If I had a suggestion for the future, it would be to worry less about your external presentation and more about the text itself. Why are the words in the text being said? What is the action you are playing?”
And then,
“How can you live in the questions rather than jumping to a conclusion?”
One crucial motif in the play John Proctor is the Villain is a song called Green Light by Lorde. Throughout the play, the characters discuss the meaning of the lyrics, and at the very end of the play, they dance to it. The song is a source of liberation for the main characters.
I wish I could get my things and just let go
I’m waiting for it, that green light, I want it.
On one warm Saturday in September, I went to Belmar Beach in New Jersey, which is known for surfing. Sure enough, dozens of wetsuited surfers dotted the horizon, laying belly-down on their boards. I paid them no mind and jumped into the water, swimming farther out than anyone else there.
Instantly, my worldly worries seeped out of my body. It was like the salt sucked out the horrors burrowed in the pores in my skin.
I floated for a while, and then began diving headfirst, pummeling as far down as I dared before erupting back up to the surface, gasping for air as soon as my head broke the water.
It was always my dream to be a mermaid. I felt I had an affinity for the ocean like none of my peers. I was special. The water called me. I could move it. More importantly, it moved me.
When I was a kid, I watched YouTube tutorials on how to turn into a mermaid. There was one video in particular that burns clearly in my mind to this day. A girl—about the age I was at the time I watched it (seven or eight)—held two seashells in each of her chubby hands, and placed one on each knee. “All you have to do now is say, ‘I wish I could be a mermaid I wish I could be a mermaid I wish I could be a mermaid.’ Then you’ll turn into a mermaid.”
I thought about this as I continued diving down into the water and swimming back up to the surface.
All of a sudden, voices crept up near me.
“What is that?” The voice called. Another voice answered that he didn’t know.
“Oh!”
“What,” the other replied.
“It’s a chink!”
Laughter bubbled up between the two voices.
“A chink a chink a chink!”
I couldn’t quite make out the faces attached to the voices. The water was getting progressively choppier, and the waves swelled several feet above my head before collapsing onto me and sending me tumbling through its salty depths.
I heard the voices chant chink chink chink somewhere close by, a demeaning rhythm that beat against my skull like the water around me.
I returned to shore shortly after.
I tried to give the voices the benefit of the doubt, because maybe I heard them wrong. But the more I thought about it, the less I could think of any other words that started with a ch- sound and ended with -ink.
I realized, then, that I was not a mermaid, and would never be. I was only Chinese, and would only ever be.
The other day, in my creative writing class, I cried for twenty minutes in front of my entire class.
We were workshopping a piece I had written. To be clear, I wasn’t crying about the critiques my classmates were offering. I was crying about the subject matter I had written about.
I wrote about a formative, traumatic experience I underwent in freshman year of college. Like my favorite play, it caused my brain to create another crease where all of the memories associated with the event were stored inside.
To the person who impressed that trauma into me, it was just another day. For me, it changed my life.
I remember my professor—who had witnessed the event happen but did nothing to stop it—gathered me and that person for a reconciliation meeting weeks after the fact. The professor asked her to explain why she did what she did and whether or not she felt any remorse.
The student responded that, if she could go back in time to when it happened, she would not have done anything differently. Moreover, if it happened again in the future, she would not do anything differently.
Years later, as I recall this meeting between the three of us, I think less about how hurt and powerless I felt, and more about how awed I am by her assuredness in the version of herself in the past, present, and future. While the world shifted and transformed around her, she would not have done anything differently. She would remain a horrid constant amidst the ever-changing landscape that time created.
Could I ever have so much conviction?
Last weekend, I went to New York City with my best friend. We spent the entire weekend going to places that I wanted to go to and doing the things that I wanted to do. I also forced her to take hundreds, if not thousands, of photos of me on my camera.
In one particular moment of the trip, I was standing on a busy street in Manhattan’s Chinatown in a qipao posing against the lanterns strung across the buildings. Peyton squatted on the filthy New York sidewalk and took photos of me, which I relentlessly criticized for their lack of direction and aesthetically displeasing composition.
A man in his thirties appeared at my shoulder while Peyton patiently snapped her umpteenth photo of me.
“Can I take a picture of you?” He had an accent which I could not identify. He was bug-eyed, balding, and wearing a tattered gray zip-up jacket, which was, at the moment, unzipped.
He repeated his question several times, to which I responded no several times. He just shrugged, took out his phone, and began taking photos of me.
Peyton told him to stop and get the fuck away from us. He called me disgusting and slinked away, subsumed by the night and the hundreds of other strangers that walked by us that night.
I became aware, then, of how little power I had in this world. That strange man could take as many pictures as he wanted of me, like I was an object to gawk at, and all I could do was pose.
Another time in New York, I was sitting in a coffee shop drinking a watered-down chai latte I purchased for seven or eight dollars.
A boy of about five years old wandered into the coffee shop carrying a box of candy. The barista working the counter curled his lip up in disgust, but didn’t say anything.
The boy asked if I wanted to buy some candy. His beautiful, brown, doll eyes peered up hopefully at me under his bowl cut. He smiled a toothy half-grin.
“Sure, I’ll buy this one. How much is it?”
“Chree fifty. Cash please.”
I didn’t have cash. He let me Venmo him. The Venmo user was under the name Angela Gomez. I Venmoed Angela Gomez ten dollars, because I didn’t know how else to express my pity and heartbrokenness for this five-year-old boy peddling Kinder Buenos in the streets of New York.
Later I realized that, rather than helping him, I probably just subjected him to more peddling, because whoever was making him do that understood that people would feel bad for the little boy and thus give Angela Gomez more money.
Everything I did just made everything worse.
I visited a psychic on one depressing Sunday afternoon in Philadelphia. Peyton and I entered the dingy basement where the psychic was supposedly located. The room reeked of weed and mold. A cat jumped up from behind the wall and meowed loudly at us. Before my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, a voice croaked up at us.
“What do you want?”
“Uh, oh, um I guess a reading.”
The voice materialized into a face and I made out the shape of a thirty or forty-year-old woman with overgrown roots in athleisure sitting in a lawn chair.
“Which one of yous is getting the reading?”
I said that I was.
“Why isn’t she getting a reading?”
Peyton gave her a polite non-answer.
The psychic looked at me in a vaguely irritated manner, and then begrudgingly gestured to the other lawn chair in her dingy, mold-infested basement (which was not equipped with any other furniture besides one dusty, laminated table that sat between us).
Before we started, she told me to CashApp her.
“I don’t have CashApp. Can I Venmo or Zelle you?”
“No. Download CashApp.”
I downloaded CashApp and paid her.
Before we started the reading, I asked her about her job. “When did you start doing this?” I gestured to the amorphous space around her.
“I didn’t start doing it, I was BORN with this gift. I was born with it. It’s my biggest blessing and CURSE.” Her voice came out gruffly and ominously. A veteran cigarette smoker.
“But I started my business about when I was twenty.”
I continued asking her questions about her gift, and she asked me why I was asking so many goddamn questions.
At around this point, Peyton asked, “Excuse me, should I leave? I don’t know if maybe you two wanted some privacy or–”
“–Yes typically I ask others to leave when I’m with my client.”
Peyton made a move to leave.
“But you know, you, sweetheart, have great energy. Wonderful energy. Really, really good energy.”
The psychic looked back at me pointedly and did not say the same thing.
I decided, then, that I hated her.
Peyton left, and the reading commenced.
She mostly talked about herself and her gift and how much of a blessing and a curse it was, but when she did remember that I paid for a reading, she would tell me the usual platitudes.
“People envy you,”
“Expect travel in your future,”
“Get out of your own head,”
“People have betrayed you in the past.”
Then, she gestured to the tarot cards on her desk. I noticed that they were the same Rider-Waite tarot deck that I had, which I purchased on Amazon for twelve dollars.
“I charge twenty-five for a tarot reading, but here, I’ll pull one card for yous for free.”
I had little expectations for the card she was going to pull, and in fact, I hoped and prayed that she would pull the Death card just so I would have something funny to tell Peyton afterwards.
Instead, she pulled out the most un-funny card I could have possibly conceived. It was un-funny, because it was true to my life’s circumstances.
A dejected-looking man in a hood stared at me. The word HERMIT was written across the card.
The fake psychic who I hated so much and who was now attempting to get me to purchase regular sessions with her had just pulled the card with the most accurate, one-word description of the only serious ill that plagued me in life: loneliness.
We looked at each other for a beat. The psychic dramatically replaced the card into the deck. I noticed that next to the deck lie several half-drank bottles of Coke (one in a can and another in a bottle) a Twinkie wrapper, and the e.l.f. Halo Glow highlighter stick.
I sighed inwardly when I noticed the last item. I had just purchased that highlighter stick a few weeks ago. It felt wrong to me that this woman who I didn’t know and simultaneously hated should highlight her cheekbones with the same makeup product as me.
On my way out, she said, “You should let your hair down, sweetie.”
I had put my hair in two buns that day.
Speaking of hair, Peyton’s mom visited her at college some time ago. I was with her when her mom arrived. Upon seeing her daughter, Mrs. Davis exclaimed, “Oh, Pey Pey, I love that hair on you!”
Peyton had worn her hair up in a style she normally doesn’t do. I looked expectantly at Peyton to say something. She replied noncommittally, “Oh, thanks.”
I would say it was the warmth and genuineness in Mrs. Davis’ voice that shocked me, but it was more so the fact that I witnessed a mother say something nice to her daughter. I didn’t know mothers did that on purpose.
Last Thursday, I went home for a day. Not to see my parents, but to interview my neighbor for a school project. Unfortunately, I did end up seeing my parents as well.
My mother took me out to dinner, and while we were sitting there, gritting our teeth, trying not to scream at each other or start crying, she remarked, “Is that the new hair you’re doing?”
It was the two buns again, the same hairstyle I had worn to the psychic’s reading.
“Yeah, why?”
“Nothing.”
“Do you like it?”
“Your hair looks better down.”
Now two forty-year-old women disapproved of my hair. Fine. I could take that. I respect my mother’s opinion.
It’s just that when I used to wear my hair down, she would tell me that it looked much better up and out of my face.
It was a grim reminder that my mother would never like anything I did. She would only like the opposite.
I have been incredibly neurotic about time my whole life. Recently, though, I’ve been acutely aware of just how obsessive and unhealthy my relationship with time has gotten.
Every morning, I wake up and think about how little time I have. I go to bed thinking about how much time I wasted.
I cut up my time like a stick of butter, into small chunks. I dissect my time very carefully. I create lists for every single day by the thirty-minute interval. I nervously break down when I am behind schedule.
I manage time the best I can, but unfortunately, it manages me instead. It dictates my mood. It makes me anxious when I don’t have enough. It makes me depressed when I have too much of it and nothing to do.
Lately, time has become more than just an omnipresent nuisance that controls my life with an iron grip. It has become a completely mystical concept to me, something elusive and basically unable to get a grasp on or a glimpse of, ever.
Time isn’t like a stick of butter anymore. It melts. Every time I compulsively make my half-hour interval schedule lists and think that I’m close to having enough time, it melts away and trickles down the gutters of my existence until I don’t have it anymore. I don’t have any time.
I don’t have time to do anything.
Sometimes I think about the fact that we all just live until we run out of time. We don’t die; we just run out of time. We just cease to exist when there is no more time allotted to us.
I keep trying to force control over time, but I feel powerless to hold onto it. And it’s not just that I’m powerless to do it, it’s that it’s quite literally impossible. Every time I want to stay in one particular chunk of time, the time keeps going anyway. It never stops. I keep trying to cage it into my thirty-minute interval schedules, but it never ever stays there until I finish what I want to do.
It just keeps moving and moving. And I just keep trying and failing to catch up, trying and failing to slow it down.
I never understood the masterpiece The Great Gatsby. Society kept telling me it was a masterpiece. It kept telling me that it was one of the best books of the twentieth century, if not the best novel ever conceived.
I felt extreme FOMO because I wasn’t in on how revolutionary and life-changing and beautiful and profound and touching the book was.
This past summer, I resolved to read it again and actually get it this time. I was going to understand why The Great Gatsby was a masterpiece if it killed me.
I read it for the second time, and to my dismay, I did not get it still.
One night a couple weeks ago, Peyton came to my dorm when I was really depressed. I mean, I was really depressed. For the past several days, I would burst out into tears every hour or so.
She sat at my desk chair as I lay flaccidly across the bed. “I wanna talk about The Great Gatsby,” I said to her.
“Oh, um, yeah of course. I don’t know too much about it since I haven’t read it in a long time, but–”
“–I wanna talk about The Great Gatsby,” I said again.
The conversation began with me probing her for an explanation of the green light. She said she didn’t quite remember what the green light symbolized. I forgave her for this, because I didn’t either, and I was the one who actually read and annotated the book, twice.
While Peyton busied herself with figuring out the symbolism of the green light via the Internet, I started talking out of my ass until it became so cerebral and intellectually astute that it felt like it was coming out of my functioning brain.
“I get it now, I get it, I actually get it. The book isn’t about getting back the girl. It’s about getting back time. Getting a girl back is easy, or at least it’s possible. Getting a new girl, or more girls, is even easier, or at least, again, possible.
But what made Gatsby’s struggle so poignant, so profound, so sickening, so heart-wrenching, so indicative of the human condition, and so impossible was the fact that he was trying to get back time. He wanted to go back to a certain time. The time when he still had Daisy, the time when she still loved him. He wanted more time. He wanted enough time to make enough money to marry Daisy. But Daisy couldn’t wait forever so she let Tom marry her.
The whole struggle for Gatsby was him trying to recreate the circumstances of that particular time in the past and win back Daisy. But that’s the thing about time. You can’t ever rewind it. That’s why he’s always knocking down clocks and shit. Time kept passing, and the time to get Daisy was over, but he just couldn’t admit it.
Gatsby didn’t lose the girl; he just ran out of time. And anyways, the point is, he didn’t want Daisy. He wanted more time.”
The green light remained a mystical, elusive thing for Gatsby throughout the novel. It appeared ominously, tauntingly, almost within reach but never fully in his grasp. But how come? After all, it was just a short drive away, literally right across the water.
But that’s why the green light symbolizes time that can never be gotten back. It seems so within reach, but it will never come back around. And it’s a light, as opposed to a solid object; there is nothing to grasp onto. Like time, it just passes and passes, and no matter how close you get to it, you can’t really hold it in your hands. You can’t stop it from moving.
'Cause honey I'll come get my things, but I can't let go
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
Oh, honey I'll come get my things, but I can't let go
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
Yes, honey I'll come get my things, but I can't let go
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
Oh, I wish I could get my things and just let go
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
I'm waiting for it, that green light, I want it
Last Monday, I finished work and headed to the train station to go back to school. Upon entering the station, I was immediately submerged into a deluge of green. In all the months I’ve visited that train station, I have never, ever seen it look like this.
This is so lovely, so poignant. I always love these glimpses into your brain because there is always something magnificent happening up there.
I’ve always seen the green light as something purposefully elusive. You’re not supposed to find it, you’re not meant to hold it. It’s like a mirage in the road - as soon as you think you’re close to it, it disappears and relocates somewhere further down the road again and again and again.
So it’s truly powerful and artistic that the universe put you in exactly the right place at exactly the right time to capture that moment. And it’s even more incredible that you’re in touch with yourself enough to see that and find it worthy of note - to tie together the events in your life with meaning and purpose. I think that’s proof enough that you *are* making the most of the time you have here.
Hugs.
Saw masterpiece work with you making me admire you, feel for you, be you, separ6from you, ask you why would you do this but also then be pacified by you with the green light and hope in the end.
If this is not mark of a genius what is?
All those writers, poets, reformists, painters used pain and their work became famous.
What do you want? A happy average life where you are at peace or a famous life where you are seen, your pain is in people's syllabus and forces people to think.
One gives you salvation, one gives you Punya because you made souls seek. For there is nothing bigger & better for souls to do but to seek.