– On Reds, Oranges, Yellows, and Browns –

I prefer dawn over dusk and mountains over the beach.

In their stillness, I like to imagine what I would do if I had multiple lifetimes.

Maybe I’d become a lepidopterist focused on butterfly migration; or spend my days riding horses on the Kazakh Steppe; become a caretaker at an elephant sanctuary; or be an intergalactic explorer consumed with the mysteries of the cosmos.

Or perhaps I would become something else entirely: a gleeful panda playing with a bamboo stick; a rock formation standing guard over a valley; a rippling cornfield, stalks swaying to its own rhythm.

Books, libraries, and the piano served as my steadfast babysitters during childhood.

Woven through those formative memories of artists’ voices across time and lands are the disparate, often confusing threads of my own life as an immigrant navigating two cultures and languages: anime and J-pop with American sit-coms and R&B; washoku (和食) and hamburgers; Natsume Soseki and Toni Morrison; Top 40s radio with Schumann and Chopin; samurai epics and Monday night suspense dramas alongside Hollywood blockbuster entertainment.

I did not feel I fully belonged in Japan, in Hawaii, or in the United States and one of the first essays I wrote was entitled “私のふるさとはどこ?” (Watashi no Furusato wa Doko – Where is My Hometown?). 

At the time, I was quite proud of it. Now, I wonder if I became an artist because I needed to retreat into a world of my own making and of my own belonging.

When I first moved to New York City, I discovered that my favorite season is autumn; to be clear, I love autumn in the city.

The air’s crispness holds a certain bite that matches the snappy tempo of life jostling through its arteries of sidewalks and subways.

Seeing fall foliage transgressing the sterility of concrete, steel, and asphalt gives me a particular satisfaction, one I don’t experience when viewing the rich ochres and crimsons in their natural homes.

Context is what I find intriguing.

Every year, the slash of bright, turning color against the urban gray of greed and profit is a defiant act, nature’s unapologetic claiming of self and a “fuck off” to humanity’s arrogance and destruction.

Its tenacious beauty reassures me.

The same type of context fuels my love (some might say obsession) for fireplaces.

It is not the form or the setting or the practicalities that I find captivating; rather, it is the sensation arising from the juxtaposition of fire’s warmth next to the cold.

This gap (ギャップ) fascinates and comforts me, the contrasting chasm between heat and ice, color and blandness, internal and external, who we are alongside (and sometimes in spite of) who others want us to be.

That gap is what I know, the space in-between worlds I’ve long inhabited. It is freedom as both an untethering and a constraint, a privilege and a responsibility.

Maybe that’s why I enjoy meals outdoors, on terraces, rooftops, balconies, patios, piazzas, in backyards or parks – places where the simple joys of conversation and food are not caged in by boxy ceilings and walls.

After all, it is there in the outdoors where I greet the sky every morning and find my footing.

That expanse above immediately transports me back to the summer when the ceaseless hum of cicadas and sweltering humidity drenched my skin, and the long days were filled with nothing more than the sweet liberation of running through fields in Japan with my cousins.

While these memories color my days, they never imbue my nights.

Instead, my dreams are paintings of places I have not been to: Dali-esque surrealscapes of experiences I have yet to have with people I don’t yet know.

Awakening from them carries with it a faint longing for something unidentifiable, a distinct nostalgia that lingers during those first few moments.

I try to hold on to those images – to remember – but they remain fleeting, slipping through my fingers like fine sand.

If I just had more time to observe, to listen, to experience.

The first thing I notice about others is their hands: the contours of the knuckles, the texture of their skin, the shape of their fingertips and the speed at which they move.

Hands hold so many stories, as many as there are voices to tell them.

One of my earliest memories is of listening to the voices of leaves.

I was convinced I knew the exact number of leaves speaking to me, each sharing their story.

When Hawaii’s gentle trade winds brushed against the extended arms of a tree, the two would entwine in an intimate, loving embrace.

I’d close my eyes and listen to the leaves murmuring in pleasure, the crescendo and diminuendo of their rustling vibration and respond, “248” or “513”.

I listened because naming as many of them as I could felt important.

It is what I had already learned from my most precious relationship.

Music remains my first love, the childhood sweetheart whom I married. Our relationship has traversed the gamut from youth’s innocence to a depth of tender acceptance, steadiness, and fondness that only happens with time.

It is always there, imprinted on my soul, and a cherished continuity from the past.

Writing, on the other hand, is my lover; our relationship is a torrid affair, mercurial and raw.

Written language presents both the risk and tantalizing allure of expressing on the page in a way that cannot be said aloud.

Exciting yet also painful.

I love writing. Sometimes I loathe it.

But despite the passionate chaos of our connection, the careening highs and lows, and the times we’ve been apart, I can never completely walk away from it.

I return to writing, welcome it into my life, over and over again.

And so I find myself here, coming back to a love layered with memories and dreams, gaps and continuity, constraints and freedom, defiance and wonder.

I do not create because I have answers.

I create because I have questions for which I have no answers. 

– GA (November 2025)

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