I take a trip. We go to L.A. because that's what you do. You have to leave a place to figure out if it's here you really live - whether or not it's home. It's hot. The sky is a wall of blue. I want to press my fingers into its glossy weight. We're driving back to Oakland, and when I look up and breathe, it's heavy; as though fiction and reality have blurred through the translucent backs of one another. A double landscape that could swallow me whole. Vacation is always a too-fragile boundary. It leaves its psychic residue everywhere. The fantasy of the good life and the reality of the lived one, jumbled into useless, staticky lint.

The story is simple enough. She moves to New York for Art. She is young. She isn't beautiful, but she has a nice ass. She attends graduate school. She eats cheese in white-walled galleries and jokes often with her friends about how stealing catered food will keep them full. This is a lie. She is hungry in almost every respect but has no problem actually keeping food in her belly. When she's not in class, her time is empty. She goes to readings and talks about Art. It is not uncommon for her to make friends by sleeping with them first. She shares her bed with boys who are not beautiful but who she believes have beautiful thoughts. She tells them they are not allowed to stay the night but then gifts them other intimacies instead. [...] She thinks of herself as one of the selected few. [...] She criticizes an ignorant majority jostling for popularity and normalcy. She reveres Form. [...] she watches her friends steal car keys from a fancy apartment where a reading is being held because they think the host is rich. Her friends think rich people shouldn't be poets. At this point, she comes clean about the fact that she has rich parents.

It's years ago, and I am a sickly, chubby child. I study hard, but no one would call me clever. I'm not yet at the age where there appears to be no difference between the two. On my first day of school, another child tells me I'm fat, like an ugly plum. I decide other people are no longer worth my time, yet I seek out ways to impress them in order to appear superior. [...]

[...] in the US, heritage is mobilized as an individualistic, institutional myth. It would have us believe that by reviving our family narratives and traditions, by demanding representational equity, indeed, by raising "awareness" of our ethnic differences, we can address, even eradicate, the scourge of racial inequality.

Heritage would have us believe that if we receive truly equal opportunities, we can finally excel and secure the better futures we seek. From best-of Asian-American lists, governmental grants, and foundation awards to affirmative action, heritage works best when it's visible, and often presents as progress toward a miraculous meritocracy. [...] heritage, as part of a societal belief in the narrative of "it gets better," would have us look away. It would proclaim that racial equality alone can eradicate everything from poverty to violence, when in fact it's nothing but part of a Band-Aid solution to the problems of late-stage capitalism. [...]

Identity - we worship at its shrine even as it keeps us docile, all the while declaring itself infallible because of its authenticity.

I don't remember the last time I saw the ashtray we made in Brighton Beach, but I think it was right before the breakup. Neither of us was crying, but the touches between us had become rote and glazed, we already knew. It was spring, and the exhaust fan blowing the cigarette ash out your living room window was half broken; it spit back sooty chunks. I was sitting on your lap. Ash all over your pink shirt. The yellowing cigarette stub in my hand. It was all turning my stomach. But I looked down at us on the ashtray, smiling and plump, the plaid of your scarf in its bright primary colors, my hair in two sensible braids, and the way my heart sweetened seemed true.

Whatever, reality can never be objective. [...]

Amour is a movie about an aging couple. They live happily together in a charming Parisian apartment. They are still in love. That's why the movie is called Amour. [...] One day, Emanuelle has a stroke while they're eating breakfast. Time stops. When it starts again, she is bed-ridden and incapable of speaking. She blubbers. She is transformed from elegant pianist to invalid. She is a formless mass of flesh that cannot care for itself. Her fluids leak out onto the clean floors. her living decay begins to contaminate the regal antiques and charming ornamentation. Her husband tries to take care of her. He degenerates from loving spouse to cruel, resentful caregiver. He has dreams of drowning in icy water in the basement of his own house. His wife refuses to eat. She can no longer stand. He becomes so tearfully frustrated that he slaps her, hard. A rigid part of him dissolves. [...] The different rooms of the apartment begin to deteriorate from disuse. He covers the craftsman furniture with dead plastic sheeting. He goes out to the shop to buy fresh flowers. He seals the entry to Emmanuelle's bedroom with tape. Their home becomes a dusty and beautiful tomb for the two figures within it. He is trying to preserve the gently rotting vestiges of their life together.

It's no wonder, as Wendy Brown points out, that suffering has always been the barometer of authenticity, and authenticity has in turn become proof of identity. Your bleeding wound is the evidence that allows you to name yourself part of a group; shared wounds have historically been the impetus for political solidarity. Movements are brotherhoods of suffering that gather numbers and grow, forming the bonds that are the basis of our politics, our shared homes. But for Brown, this increased focus on the shared wound also yields the compulsive policing of membership in any given identity group. It can become an unnecessary distraction. It can prevent us from focusing our energies against the process of the wounding. It stops us from detecting and addressing the structural and historical elements that harmed us in the first place

The scene in Amour I like best: In it, the air seems cold and blue from all the dust. Ambient particles swarm even though there are protective sheets draped over everything. The room is stark, stripped of all the character the couple once lovingly embellished it with. One window is open, the light streaming through hesitantly, as though it has forgotten that it is no longer permitted to enter this apartment, this house embalmed in layers of grief and plastic and imminent rot. A pigeon flies in. The husband tries to catch it so he can let it out. He is old. You don't hear his knees creak, but you can feel them in your bones. He chases this pigeon, slowly, clumsily; for what feels like a very long time. When he finally catches it, he is panting, gasping. He grasps it firmly in his two gnarled hands, as though he's afraid it might leave, when in fact he's trying to calm it. Holds it so tightly we don't know if he will crush its bones. It looks like he will. Like he wants to. He holds it for long enough that it feels as if he [sic] decision will never be made. As though she's smothering it so slowly we can barely see it happening. It is an eerie echo of how moments before, he has smothered his invalid wife with her pillow. He caresses the pigeon. The camera cuts away. [...] clutching the bird, trembling, not from ecstasy, but from hesitancy, as though he's unsure if the life-sustaining gesture is the ethical action to take. As though at any moment, he may decide it's more humane to wring its neck instead. The cruelest moment in Amour is when we realize he has let the pigeon go free.