"initial Reflections" - an Introduction to "life line"

i am in tokyo with my partner and her family. it is the first time i've been back in asia since 2019, when i studied abroad in taipei at nineteen, a semester that quietly rearranged something inside me.

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i'm not sure what made that trip so formative. the age, maybe. the newness of the continent. the people. but i remember being held by it: the architecture, the culture, the way a city could be completely still and completely alive at once. that tension felt like a truth i hadn't had language for yet.

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it was also the moment i published the first physical edition of experimentalist's journal magazine, a small, deliberate thing that marked the beginning of what i now recognize as a practice. i was nineteen and becoming. standing at the edge of who i had always been and whoever was waiting on the other side.

that was seven years ago.

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i am nearly twenty-seven now. i have a partner, a dog, a graduate degree in progress. a career i lead rather than simply occupy. friends who actually see me. a family that has grown older alongside me, which i feel in ways i didn't expect. the art practice has deepened. so has the self.

tokyo carries a strange feeling, not quite new, not quite return. something in between that i don't have a clean word for yet.

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what i do know is that i am more grateful than i know how to say. there were years i didn't know i would arrive here, at this particular life, feeling this particular sense of wholeness. that recognition moves me.

i am hoping this city gives me more of what i came for: clarity, and a renewed hunger for the work ahead.

my work and my community are my lifeline. everything i make is an act of dedication to that.

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bri liams, three one magazine