from the diary of peter piper
year-end reflections, year-beginning musings
My neighbor grows peppers. They are perfect, pointed steeples, bursting in greens and reds; like the platonic form of peppers. The kind of produce that makes anything wrapped in plastic seem ludicrous. Did you know that all peppers come from the Americas and the Caribbean? Peppers are transplants to Korea. I am too, but my mark here will be invisible and my time here will be relatively short.
I think of these peppers as my friends. I have watched them grow this year, from tiny little stubs—the first hints of something new—to long and ripe and confident. It is winter now and they are shriveled and frost coated. Some of them still faintly gleam with the red of their once lush youth. I don’t know why so many were left to rot. I have wondered what would happen if I picked one1 and took it home with me; if I crunched it between my teeth and felt its heat. Heat from the dirt under my apartment. Heat from my adopted home. But I’ve always been too scared—I think I’m worried they won’t taste like how I expect.
I like to think they have watched me too, although I am not sure what they have noticed. Peppers and humans both grow in tiny increments, but peppers have nothing to prove.
2024 has been my year of solitude. I live alone in a rural area of a foreign country. When I arrived, I didn’t know anyone who had even visited Korea before. I now have a great community of friends here from all over the world. However, much of my time is spent alone. And I love this, in a way I never imagined I would. I am aware that the older we get the more committed we become, to people and places and careers. Right now, I have relatively few commitments. I have spent this year basking in that freedom, sampling everything this country and the world has to offer. It has truly been one of the best years of my life, full of new places and friends and experiences. But, perhaps more importantly, it has also been the year where I finally had the time to become friends with myself. Or at least, friendlier. I have rediscovered a home within my skin, after feeling homeless for a long time. I still have a long way to go, but I feel less like a thing that needs to be restrained, which is maybe the greatest freedom of all.
However, this time alone has also allowed me to explore my hidden desires more fully. And I have found something that terrifies me: a hunger to commit to something. You can only truly fail at something you commit to: that’s why so many of us are addicted to the distance and safety that irony provides. Despite that, I have realized that I want to commit to writing, although I am not sure what that really means yet. I have always wanted to be everything, but I know now that each choice leaves a million graves, left to gather dust and moss and be forgotten. But worse is making no choice at all. I can’t be everything. But I can be something, and that is up to me.
I am sentimental and I always make resolutions even if I don’t always follow through on them. Last year, the main resolution I made was to essentially just write. And I did. I dabbled in a bunch of new genres and I started my Substack. It may have been a slow start but that’s infinitely better than nothing. I have been thinking of 2025 as a sequel to 2024. 2024 was the first year since 2020 that I spent living in only one country, but a lot of it was spent still getting my footing here. This year, my new goal is to simply be more consistent. I have many ideas and many started projects, but I have decided to start a monthly series. My plan is to publish the last weekend of the month, but I will probably be late sometimes. I will also allow myself 2 passes, one of which I will possibly use in January because I will be traveling for most of the month. We’ll see. I’m trying to be cautious about this commitment because I am afflicted with a horrible case of perfectionism and I don’t want to set myself up for disappointment. I also have no background in creative writing, so I’m learning as I go. But, I know—painfully and intimately—the annoying truth that any writing is better than no writing. Even something atrocious is better than a blank page.
So with that, I am here to share my new series: Strange Souvenirs.2 In this series, I will write l’histoire d’un souvenir from a city or place I have spent time in. This could be anywhere, from Tokyo to Wisconsin. My stories will be autofiction, but I promise they will all have some basis in truth. I have no idea if this will be interesting to people, but it’s a project that I find exciting. I’m excited about what I will learn from it. I’m excited about Substack and hope to connect with more people here. I’m excited to get better at expressing myself. I am excited. A lot can happen in 12 months. Who knows, maybe come summer, I will be brave enough to pick a pepper.
Love Lize
P.S. AFTER I FUCKING WROTE THIS I WALKED HOME JUST IN TIME TO SEE A DRUNK MAN PISSING ON MY PEPPERS & I’M NOT SURE WHAT TO MAKE OF THAT.
not a peck, just one
I also played with the title “Queer Souvenirs” bc I am queer and it sounds delicious, but I didn’t want the broader meaning of the word to eclipse the vibe I’m going for in this series. Also when I googled it, one of the first things that came up was a threatening Etsy link called “Gifts for Queer” which seemed like a bad omen.