I'm aware that I play a different game. My vocabulary might be too different, and too "casual" coded for others. Cards with text boxes so long and strange that people have to read them twice. These are my cards. These are the ones I keep. The rest can sound like noise to me; they don't belong in the worlds I want to build.

In many circles, helpfulness is seen as unintelligent. Empathy is read as naivety. If you give something away for free, then surely you must not understand the value of what you have. But I do understand the value. I just measure it differently.

Group hug became my philosophy. Not the naive kind — not "let's all draw cards and hold hands" — but the deliberate, systems-driven kind. The kind where giving resources is a form of regulation.

It was November, and I found myself standing before a starter kit from the Final Fantasy set. A twenty dollar rectangular promise of something I didn't yet understand.

Standing above the current generation below, the young bodies, tattooed arms, and unburdened confidence, holds aloft a joy hard-won against a lifetime of denial. There is contrast between his historical struggle and the present-day liberation of the crowd, underscoring the weight and cost of the freedoms being celebrated.

Prayers, Outside captures a profound instance of private devotion unfolding in a public space. Set against the familiar, gritty pavement near Sydney Town Hall over at George Street at approximately 5 pm, the image frames a father and son engaged in their Asr (afternoon) prayer.

I remembered how, back in university, I chose to study in China without knowing why. Maybe to test my own endurance. It was hard. Loneliness came to dull the pain, and in that dullness I found a strange kind of comfort. You were there.

What is it we’re trying to see when we stare so hard out of these large windows? Are we looking for proof that we were here, or for something that might give us permission to leave?