I press myself into a density of the withheld. I am dropping silently into the depths, leaving only a trail of screaming bubbles that burst somewhere distant unseen.

#CreativeWriting #PersonalNarrative #Poetry

No matter how great I’ve shown myself to be in someone else’s eyes, I will become immediately self-effacing, I will ensure that your momentary passion is deflected, I will go dark when you want me to be alight, I will ensure that whatever flame you were electing me to ascend will be snuffed.

. . .ensuring that I could walk away without holding on to any hope.

Even when it turned out you were in love with me, infatuated with me, listening outside of my dorm room waiting for me to become a human being with a history that you could hold. It was too late.

So I could be something no one could hold onto, to be a little less controlled, a little less self-conscious, a little less self-defeating. So I could just be with you as a complete stranger there in that moment, flowing with nothing else between us, . . .

Let it be lost, I must have told myself at some point, from whence I decided memory was not a thing I needed to be beholden to. I decided I didn’t need to hold on to anything. I was the monk, I was the void, I was a sieve to everything in the moment, letting it run through me.

The findings underscore the importance of looking beyond simple averages to understand the complex effects of #bilingual experience.

Instead of relying on conventional averages, the study modeled performance as a continuous function of time, revealing that higher levels of English immersion were associated with slower initial performance, but a higher usage of English relative to Mandarin was linked to faster overall learning.