Lawrence Ypil's latest book, The Experiment of the Tropics, was a finalist at the Lambda awards and on the longlist for the Believer book awards. He received an MFA in Poetry from Washington University in St. Louis and an MFA in Nonfiction from the University of Iowa. He teaches creative writing at Yale-NUS College.
I could say mask: memory and then imagine that you would understand what I wanted to say or that I returned to the hotel I had stayed in but watched it from the scene I had once watched from the window, that once, and imagined I could still wave, get out, or stay in, or hello, that easy narrative of loss and return; that differently that was no difficulty I could say: I was in grief. And if others imagine this hidden under watch the world, it was instead the world that was gone from me, as in childhood a feeling first before that fact touch, the outside only to the extent that it was familiar to what was in, meaning it found the shape of longing, what was no longer there, and if this doesn’t match your childhood then I was not that kind of child.