I was at the only table of one in the highest restaurant hovering above Hong Kong, picking at a mochi mignardise I could not finish. The waiter refilled my cup for the third time, and I felt the weight of isolation pressing in. It wasn’t the silence that unnerved me, usually I find it comforting. All those late nights stretching into 5 a.m. I was savoring solitude in the absence of sound. Rather, the realization that, perhaps for the first time, I was waiting on a witness.

I was in Hong Kong alone. I did make plans to see a high school friend in Guangzhou, a city I hadn’t seen in twelve years. Last time I was there was mere weeks after learning we were moving to America. Revisiting it in my head feels like a dream now, the stickiness of the air clinging to my skin laced with car exhaust and summer dust. Emerging from the subway stop at Zhujiang Xincheng, I had a world to behold. That was my first time being excused for a trip, albeit a business trip. But even an interview at the American Embassy was exciting at eleven.

My last Hong Kong trip was much more recent. I was there after graduation with a friend and ex. That’s when I fell in love with the city’s aesthetic chaos and cultural pulse. This time, I was fully alone.

I used to be convinced I could live that way forever. All I needed was to commune freely with the universe: through music, words, and fantasy. Not someone’s embrace. I had proof, too. Fireworks lighting up the empty Roman streets on New Year’s Eve exactly as a teenager shouted Buon Anno, sparks trembling on his eyelashes with pyro’s bursts. The rain drenching my luggage as I hauled them up the New York subway platforms. The horizon consuming the sun as I watched from my balcony on the beach of Seminyak. In those lonely moments, I felt invincible.

As someone who has a why, I should be able to bear any how. But when I gazed at the shimmering Victoria Harbor from the 102nd floor, tiny vessels dotting the big, big world, the solitude was strange. I couldn’t stop thinking: Wouldn’t it be nice to have someone to share this with?

“Better than anything is being understood,” Pitchfork writes in its review of the record by boygenius. But I feared being defeated by those comfortable moments — someone’s validation, the warmth of touch, dinner waiting for me after work. To need is to concede. Dependence compromised ambition. Softened your edges and made you weak. So I tried to do everything myself, back then I was young and proud. In college, where people and plans were omnipresent, solitude felt precious and chosen. I relished being different, standing alone as the other. Building my monastery, stone by stone until the walls were high enough to block out the storm.

Likewise, the sun. Then you start to miss the sun because we are fickle beings after all: We romanticize what we no longer have. As collegiate memories fade, companionship suddenly sounds appealing. I thought proving I needed no one is strength, but then strength is undefined in the absence of vulnerability.

I don’t have to take on the world alone. It’s okay to depend on others, to say, I am worthy of being held. It’s okay to choose the easier path. To surrender to comfort, even if it’s temporary. Especially because it’s temporary.

I grew up loved, I believe. Even if my parents didn’t always understand me, even if my friends sometimes misjudged me. For the vast majority of my life, I’ve been fortunate to meet genuine, good people. That’s what made me nostalgic. Last winter, I was packing up my drawer of memorabilia: faded cards, Christmas ornaments sent as gifts, co-authored poems from elementary school when we were bored out of our minds. My family is moving away from SoCal soon. There will continue to be fewer and fewer people on the road. But I still look to these marks of permanence left lingering, while everything silently changes, as proof of the ephemeral. As reminders that there’s some cosmic logic to life, that I’ve been loved.

You can’t return to sixteen or twenty; I’ll never be 23 again. Youthful tremors only belong to those youthful years. I can revisit the ancient cobblestones of Rome, the rain-slicked nights in New York, the sunset beaches in Bali — but never with the same exact mind that first witnessed them. Never with the same appreciation for that intense, conscious, elected loneliness. And I’ll never return to this moment, this birthday, with this courage to admit that there might be beauty beyond the bounds of independence and solitude.

It’s the mindset that matters. You can chase a feeling, but you‘ll never again be wandering in youth, no matter how many times you buy osmanthus flowers and raise your glass. I cross every part of my fingers, but who am I to think that I’m different? That there would be an everlasting? Maybe I already know the answer, or maybe I’ll choke on my words. Maybe there won’t be a right answer, or maybe I’m both the one asking the question and the one who has to eventually answer it. In thirty years I’ll be struck by that bullet I fired twelve years ago. What makes it romantic is exactly that it’s unknown.