In Ocumicho, Mexican pottery artists lean into the surreal through mischievous and playful depictions of the devil. Before I was born, my father was mustachioed and drove thousands of miles in a Volkswagen bus that didn't look too far off from this one. In his travels, he picked up this ceramic sculpture. For years it sat atop the bookshelf in my childhood bedroom: a blue devil with his head in the clouds. Those, too, were my father's doing. With an airbrush and a delicate hand, he painted fluffy white clouds on my cerulean ceiling so I would always be looking at the sky. But with the devil looking down at me, I was never quite at ease.

Picture this: it’s January 1st, 2009 and you’re 8 years old. You're itching to put new life into a pair of dirty socks and pajama pants you've outgrown after being spirited away by the absolute monster that is the UglyDolls franchise. Luckily your mom use to sew slipcovers for a living, so you scribble some atrocity with two horns and a massive cranium and name him Mr. Spike-McPatch-man. (An excerpt from my diary: "I know it's a long name and all but i think it matches his pesonalaty".) By nightfall, he is born.

I am an only child, but I grew up joined at the hip to a family friend named Estella who was 4 years my elder. She would tease me like an older sister, hiding around the house and jumping out to scare me as I turned corners, but she would show me love like one too, teaching me how to play all of her favorite games: all the pieces in chess neatly drawn on printer paper and inscribed with a handmade instruction manual. I was the recipient of all her hand-me-downs, too. When a Pokemon craze broke out in my 3rd grade class, she dug this Ash Ketchum skateboard out her closet and handed it to me with smug satisfaction.

When I asked my mom to buy me a “bobblehead”, what I really meant was a Hasbro Littlest Pet Shop: those 2-inch-tall rubber toys with bulging anime eyes disproportionately small bodies. But when she planted in front of me this ceramic Chinatown novelty, I made do. Something about his wide, all-knowing grin told me not to worry when things got lost in translation. What about a frog is so lucky? He mimics the lucky cat, with “left hand for business, right hand for home”. Googly eyes dancing around in their sockets, he used to sit in the back of my dad’s Ford Explorer, beckoning us home.

Gwun Yam (觀音 , or Avalokiteśvara) is the Buddhist bodhisattva of compassion; depicted often as a woman, sometimes touting an infant son on her arm. Despite her striking resemblance and common comparison to the Virgin Mary, the two were depicted centuries and oceans apart - it is a scene that transcends cultural and religious bounds.

Growing up, I said goodnight to Gwun Yum and her baby every night. "Give them a kiss" my mother would say, and I'd plant a smooch on each of their foreheads, thanking them for protecting me (from the monsters under my bed.)

If you've never had a pineapple guava, you must do everything in your capacity to change that. They grow by the bucketsful in my grandma's backyard and fit perfectly in the palm of your hand, skin a velvety olive green. When perfectly ripe, they fall to the ground, and as a child I would collect them in a basket, greedy for the tropical, jammy taste of my favorite summer fruit. You can slice them in half longways and dig the flesh out with a spoon, the rounded metal contour a perfect match for their shape. My best friend Lian called them "guayabas” and she and I would sit on my grandma's patio swing, kicking our legs and scraping them clean, guava after guava.

My mom bought a house after my parents' divorce: it was beige and flat with a perfectly rectangular backyard. I remember rummaging in the soil there, not fully able to process that a place which felt so foreign now belonged only to us two. Beneath a parched and leafless bush, I found a chunk of quartz caked in dirt. I held it up to the sun and rotated it in my palm, watching the light refract on its solid faces. Crystal Quartz supposedly symbolizes cleansing and purifying of energy. It felt, at the time, like a treasure left behind for me to find in a suburban plot that was no one's in particular.

If a picture is with a thousand words, a diary is worth a thousand pictures. Chock-full with recounts of all of my crushes, hang-ups, obsessions, and fantasies between the ages of 7 and 13, nothing paints a picture of the past as clearly as this. At the time, it was my relief from a world where my body and mind were developing at rapid speeds to scrawl out my every thought. I have maintained a habit, still, of keeping a diary, although more so as a gift to my future self. While the fear of my unruly memory can at times feel paralyzing, there is comfort in words on paper which are so permanent.

An Aquapet is essentially a phallic snowglobe that plays music. There is a mechanism that puppeteers a small plastic alien encapsulated inside in such a way that will secure the attention of a child for at least a day, at most a week. But Aquapets are born to die - they are the epitome of planned obsolescence, as once the small amount of water inside of them evaporates, the alien will sink the the bottom, never to dance again. One might call it my earliest concept of impermanence.