It’s Monday afternoon, and the bees of capitalism are buzzing. I should be with them, in the hive — but today, I’m a beaten-up bee, idling on my bed. Beeten up, in fact.

Yesterday, I paced a friend on the final, dark miles of the Angeles Crest 100 — a brutal trail race in the heat of the San Gabriel Mountains. Somewhere along the way to my 37th year, I lost the superpower of running through the night without consequence. Today I’m paying the price: lingering drowsiness, a drained kind of soreness, and a general absence of energy.

But it doesn’t really matter. I’m reading On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong. The style of the prose alone could pass for opium laced with cocaine, but it’s the content that has me hooked. A golden thread weaves through the pages — the struggle with blurred identity, the attempt to sharpen it — and it pulls at something in me.

My alarm goes off. Time to return to the lab, finish the experiment. I get up, and the first thing I see is my guitar. She seduces, as always. “Okay. A quick, melancholic one,” I say to myself, still under the spell of the book.

My fingers find a chord. “Almost,” I think, and then I add a B note, plus a little ornament from A to F#. There it is. That’s exactly what I feel like.

I try to name the chord — but it’s ambiguous, hovering between major and minor. It could be either, depending on context. I’ve long known I gravitate toward these in-between harmonies — major chords with major sevenths, chords that blend brightness with ache — but only now, with Vuong’s golden thread tugged through my skull, I see why. It’s the identity of the chord that’s blurred. Like mine.

I remember a photo from a small concert I played recently. What struck me first was how out of place my running watch looked. Then I realized that the two objects — the guitar and the watch — each hold a piece of who I am. But their presence felt wildly different. The watch is fungible. It’s functional, but even though it’s been with me through peaks and oceans, I’d replace it without hesitation. The guitar, on the other hand, is singular. Irreplaceable. One-of-a-kind in feel and tone.

Just an observation about our relationships with things. And yet, coming back to identity… I have no doubt these objects define me. In that photo, I looked like myself. I was myself.

But now I try to imagine what object could represent my scientific identity — something that wouldn’t feel out of place in the frame — and I can’t. Maybe if I were a microscopist? Microscope is a nice object. Maybe. Maybe it’s because science is harder to represent in objects. Maybe. Or maybe I’m just tired today.

Instead of elaborating on the thought, I’ll elaborate on the chord. Just a single take — an improvised musical motif. And one day, maybe, I’ll complete all three:

the motif, the thought, and myself.