Hey 👋, it's Kohzy.

Mosaic on the facade of a Sanger-Harris department store in Dallas, Texas (now demolished)

Since October, I have been without a job. Voluntarily, it should be said - I've left Intersection, updated LinkedIn and my website bio, and joined the Great Resignation. I plan to keep being on sabbatical for a few more months.

There is a Chinese verb, 沉淀 (chen2 dian4).

The literal meaning of 沉淀 is the phenomenon of sediment separating and settling at the bottom of an aqueous solution. But the words are often used in the context of advice: after a period of chaos or confusion, you may be advised to 沉淀 for a while - to “let the dust inside you settle” or maybe more lyrically, to “calm the waves inside you.”

Had a health scare? Maybe you should take it easy and 沉淀.

Went through a bad breakup? Perhaps you should withdraw to a quiet place and 沉淀.

There is a bottle of sriracha sauce on the dining table, and it hasn’t been used for a while. Over time, a layer of water has separated out and sits on the surface of the sauce.

I give the bottle a little nudge, causing a ripple to shimmer across the pool of semi-transparent liquid.

There are moments these days where I feel like this bottle of sauce. I have sat in stasis, and my good bits have separated out and sunken, unreachable. All I can tap on is that runny juice water right at the surface, insufficient to spice up any meal, making all the food it touches soggy.

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I was recently asked by a friend to quickly envision my life in one year’s time, and to write it down. And by quick, I meant quick: this came together in fifteen minutes. Here’s what I wrote:

It is a large room, high ceilings, the kind of space that I would not have been able to afford before the pandemic. When you come in, the first thing you notice are the large windows all the way at the other end of the space, and you run up to it: the windows are ajar, and you lean your face into the cool breeze filtering in. Eyes closed, you hear the chatter of people on the sidewalk down below, a mother pleading with her child to catch up as they pass by, the beep-beep of a car in reverse as it parks curbside.

Dead, broken men

At McNally Jackson the other day, a book synopsis caught my eye. The book itself escapes me; all I recall is the last sentence of the blurb, which filled me with a sudden sadness: “He died a broken man.”

Is it a person’s greatest fear to die broken? It has always been okay to be broken at some point; to expect to get through life unscathed is perhaps unrealistic. To be broken, again and again, but to emerge every time stronger - that is the narrative arc of a hero. But to reach life’s end not having dug oneself out of the latest trauma - I can think of few things worse than that.

It seems likes only men die broken. There are about 107,000 Google results for , and 3,000 for

分钟 （Minutes)

I am running through Beijing’s South Rail Station. Half tripping because my suitcase refuses to roll straight; the swivelling mechanism on the bottom right wheel has been broken for years. My eyes are trained on the train information board that looms over the departure hall. I am near platform 15B. I’m looking for 10A. I look back down and just miss bowling over an old woman. My train is four minutes away from leaving, and I am not on it.

Time standardization began in the middle of the 19th century with railroads. Before that, time had been a hyperlocal thing: you were told it was 3:30pm in your town based on the clock tower at City Hall, but simultaneously it could be a different time in another place not too far away. This was local time. It was a complete mystery what time it should be in another town thousands of miles away. But the railroads needed their passengers to get on trains on time, and so they first created schedules, then the standardized time zones that we use today.