White Shirts (Tetraptych, 2026)

Just once I’d like to keep a white shirt clean. Every white shirt in my closet hangs blemished by my clumsiness - spilled almond oil, blots of sweat, drops of food, all if it seeps into the seams, it stays stuck in the fabric like a memory. And the white pants, I can’t forget the 2 pairs of white pants I own and never wear. Honestly, I’m afraid my period will surprise me and stain them crimson. Yes, this has happened before - a nice girl tapped me on the shoulder and let me know. What I didn’t know: my body was not simply bleeding, but building concepts of desire. It was the beginning of the cycle: feel something?, pull my hair out, bleed me dry. There was a time I couldn’t distinguish boy from girl. Now I ask: how can I contort myself into Venus?

Lately desire has spilled from me like an overflowing cup. Not like a waterfall, but a gentle stream. It’s only natural, merely my body’s attempt to pack up boredom with dopamine. I’m experiencing the full range of a young woman’s emotions: desire, jealousy, envy, madness, and in the end, joy. I don’t know what this has to do with white shirts. Maybe that each stain represents an action - something I have done causes an irreversible change. White shirts, are they manufacturered to be canvases? Or, was there a way to avoid these stains? If I had moved in the right path, if I had made the correct choice(s), if if if, see how easy it is to fit the entirety of human experience into if statements?

The pervasiveness of the if statement, As if it’s an absolute truth: if I had just done this, then I would be/have that. I’m going to reference Dr. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, as I love to do. On machine learning algorithms, she says: “You determine the future based on the past. Very concretely [machine learning algorithms are] not only trained on past data, but they’re verified as true if they repeat this past data.” If you start to see yourself as an algorithm, an amalgation of inputs, in which, with the expected inputs, you’ll get some expected outputs, your view of life - it’s possibilities, starts to narrow. You feel like you’ve missed the inputs, and you’ll never get a chance to get that back, so the output is impossible. You’ve turned yourself into a loop of shoulds. I think in her literature, what Dr. Chun is getting at is that we are not algorithms. We are not machines constrained to the precision/inprecision of numbers. Even if you had done whatever things you feel would have produced the thing you desire, well, you could get struck by a meteor. There’s so many factors that determine the paths of our lives, and non-factors too. I’m saying that the one thing you can control, being a human being, is your movements right now. You can sit in a chair and muse about if. Or you can get up and do.

Still, I struggle with accepting that time only moves forward. When I was younger, I had this dream that I would return to the frolicking days of elementary school. Then, I woke up and realized those days would remain only in memory. Meanwhile, the white shirts, back to the white shirts… even with bottles of bleach, I can’t return those shirts to their original state, they remain changed. Everything changes in indiscernable movements, butterfly effecting into something unrecognizable. Meanwhile, I’m being told that I’ve changed but I don’t see it. One silly habit I have: stand in front of the full body mirror and angle: bend and see how my skin folds, quad stomp and note the (minimal) muscle striations in my thighs, suck in, flatten, breath out, do it again. I didn’t realize I did it so often, until there was a man on my bed, watching. Now, I had an observer. There is nothing more terrifying than the look of desire in a man’s eyes. And yet, it’s alluring. The thrill of the chase. You get it, right?

Yesterday, a fly flew around my bathroom. I swatted it with my towel but it slipped past and disappeared. I spotted it on the wall, grabbed the hand vacuum, and aimed. I noticed it seemed resigned to its demise, it didn’t moved as the vacuum siphoned it away. Maybe it had died right there and was stuck - a carcass on the wall. What is it like to end with such peace?