I have forced myself to reckon with an uncomfortable truth—and I can’t believe I’m writing this down. I guess this journal is really proving to be a safe space—that I spend an awfully high percentage of my time thinking about Louise. Like, two-thirds. Or maybe, five-sevenths. Which doesn’t make any sense! I barely know her. Yet my arm still tingles where her hand brushed, and I can’t help wonder what she meant in that touch. Was it something she did often, or an attempt to connect with me specifically? It had been brief, soft, questioning. Like the first time I sent an email to my father across the world.

Maybe she’s just a certain kind of intriguing I’ve never encountered before. Like a coding puzzle that keeps me up at night. A coding puzzle that’s thoughtful and clever and magnetic and tall and athletic and whose messages I look forward to every day.

Ah, who am I kidding? I grabbed grandmother’s pencil.

I wanted to draw again, to feel the smoothness of making a mark on paper, to take my eyes away from my phone and the lack of communication it promised. I didn’t know what to draw. Instead, I let the pencil carry my hand, the strokes clear my mind.

In the end, it was not anything concrete, merely an abstract series of tangled lines. There was too much confusion all around—not only how grandmother’s memory would be the next day, or what I was doing with this pencil, but also what was developing between me and Louise, what did I want it to be, what did she want it to be, and how could I even be thinking about this, in the face of grandmother’s illness?

I would discard this paper, I decided. Knowing this gave me a freedom I would not otherwise have had. I glanced at my phone again, another sinking feeling when I saw there was still no notification. I added a caption to my scribble, a line that fit my mood, right below the tangle of lines.

How can you make me feel this way?

I tore the paper into shreds, then crumpled the pieces into a ball. I brought it to the kitchen to toss.

When I returned to my room, there was a response from her.

♥️

I resumed my tangle of lines.

Chapter 8

From the Reforged pencil of Wong Yun

The first words I Reforged were hello, hello, hello! It was from a sample pencil, one your mother brought down from the wall that customers used to decide which pencil heart suited them best. It was a heart without its wooden body, which made it all the easier to Reforge.

Mother demonstrated with a real pencil first, while you and your mother observed. Mother closed the company early that day, drawing all the curtains. We did not have many customers during that time.