Category: Family

The first time

(A companion of sorts to: Hypercritical; Love it if we made it)

Here we are again, having a different version of the same conversation. The first time we did this, it felt like playing in a tropical greenhouse, the red, green and orange reflected on the glass like something from a gilt-edged fairytale. In the background, the blue-winged butterflies trembled, then soared. We tiptoed across walkways strewn with nettles and yellow leaves. We let our hands rest on balustrades of twisted metal. I met your eyes from between the pink, purple and white petals. The intimacy was strange and new and welcomed.

This version of the conversation, a million years later, lies between us like a neglected hotel pool: greenish, milky, off-putting. But it is a part of this, a part of things. Entry into the water is already included in the bill, and therefore we are obliged to wade in, to feel its discomfiting warmth. We do a few laps, unwillingly, and then towel ourselves off with our backs to each other. I sit across from you at the breakfast buffet, my hair still wet at the ends. I hold the fork and knife stiffly, in lieu of sword and shield. The happy chatter of the other guests is overwhelming. We agree, in silence, to pretend this never happened.

If I cleaved myself in half, so that the chunks I inherited at birth fell away in perfect synchronicity, like the boosters falling off a rocket blasting into space, what would be left? What pound of dust, what cracked fistful of red-ribbed stone might be mine? Sometimes I think there’s nothing original to be found here, in this flesh that is less flesh and more an accretion of tendernesses, but that’s a paradox, isn’t it? Wouldn’t that mean we’re all just duplicates of the rotted body of the original Eve? What a curse, indeed. Each new duplication, a lessening of the first soul. But it fits. I do feel less, I do feel lesser. Every year that passes, I feel myself diminish. I feel that something is being slowly eroded away. Then I look at you and feel almost unendurably embarrassed, at the totality of the selfishness that is inherent to my self-loathing, at the vanity of my paranoia.

Let’s get on a train, you and I. Let’s leave this behind. The world flashes by too quickly, as though trying to escape being framed for a crime. But what sin could the branching light, the fallow fields, the crowded houses have committed? Come back, I want to say, my face pressed against the glass. I didn’t get a good look at you, the first time. What is all this, then, but a series of imprecise, half-formed, poorly-informed glances? Sometimes we catch the light but most of the time, we don’t.

Disembarking, late at night, we turn to each other. The dusk that has fallen is proud and unrepentant, the curtain to end the play. I came after you, so I have your hair, your eyes, your bony wrists and ankles. No, that’s not quite right, is it? You came after me, didn’t you? And what did you keep of mine, when you raided the attic of our shared memory? What blue baby blanket, what blistered personality trait, what shred of thread from a scrapbook? You are my past, but I am not quite your future. I never met your expectations. Our legacy is not one of trust, because we don’t have that between us, and never have. Our legacy is one of regret. But I have to laugh, at you, at myself. It annoys you, I know—I was you. A lidded pot of blood put to boil.

If we were both strapped to a polygraph, would we have the same answers? Would we make the same mistakes? I have to cry, at you, at myself. If we were free to go, would we run to the same places, the same pleasures? Writing like this to a past self, I have a sense that I am launching myself into the atmosphere, the stars wheeling around in panic as I fling the pages of our mildewed diary onto the ground below, letting the secrets fertilize the soil, then poison the water. But when I plummet back down, hands clinging numbly to the parachute cords, I open my eyes against the sting of the wind and feel the weakness drain out of me, as though a purifying needle had punctured some putrefying chamber of the soul and released something there, something from the charnel pit there that could never hear the God in the predawn mountain, in the tiny grace of a budding magnolia, that refused to try. This weakness is not immediately replaced by strength, true—that doesn’t come so easily. But, alone in the freezing air, a patchwork of snow and tides beneath me, suddenly I have the feeling that, though I am no swimmer, I could stand to cross any river, if only I could know that you were on the other side. It’s not newfound courage that motivates me, but the realization that you are not just a fantasy, not just an exit wound for the past. You are real to me. Arms folded across my chest, hands cupping my shoulders, I fall back down to the earth in a blaze of lilies. I see your heart-shaped face behind my eyes. Yes, you are real to me. We’ll have this conversation again. It’s not the last time.

Love it if we made it

We sit on a low stone bench and watch the dogs walk by, their owners caught tautly at the ends of leashes. Look up. The massive and purple evening, already hinting at the tearful stars. Look down. Along the rind of the world, the pines are growing in, gloved in dark green. I’m resigned to this situation; in fact, after nine months in the belly of the beast, I think I was born resigned. I blinked away the blood and came to terms with what I saw. The full moon is a maw. My emotions paw at the ground.

I vacillate. I travel between extremes. I think, feverishly, of the grand speech that could save us, and then, fed up, I abandon my plans. I’m tired, and we haven’t even started yet.

A quavering voice rises out from the crevice of my mind, in that place where I descended years ago, gloved and hatted, curled around a ratty rope, determined to consign my heart to the protective chill of the caves. An injury can live in the abyss forever, I thought, and while it would not heal, it would not continue to decay. That was, believe it or not, a gesture of hope. On the return journey, my ribcage ten ounces lighter, I stopped to etch our names on a bank of ice with a scout’s knife, below a sky so totally unblemished it could have been cut out of cornflower-blue construction paper. I sat underneath it and wished for better days. Some colors have a childlike glow to them—the playful insistence of red, the bashful innocence of blue. Know what I mean?

Flash-forward twenty years. Sitting on the couch with my feet up, drinking ice water from a PET bottle, a band-aid on my ankle. An ache in my head like a worm in the soil. I pluck it out and let it lie in my palm. An amulet of my segmented flesh. Do you remember the flavor of our mother’s voice as she spoke on the phone behind the locked door? Conversation that tasted of cigarette ash. The rain is like a car wash. I down a bright orange drink. Do you remember how our father, with the fanaticism of a cultist, would log the nutritional values of our meals in a spreadsheet? I wash my hands over and over. Then I cup my hands to rinse my mouth. My eyes in the mirror are red as carnations. Two blooms on a long windowsill of a face. Today, the pills they buried in the soil bear sour fruit.

Something crawls out of the crevice, blood-soaked. I had thought that by growing up we had managed to escape the worst. But now I realize that I relaxed my guard too soon. I ran a victory lap on the one track in my mind, ignoring the thousand sores on my tongue. I left you at the starting line. I turned around too late. Now, I watch you travel the same path I traveled, and I endure my punishment poorly.

I never saw them do anything together. Even when they were together, they were separate. Know what I mean? The only time I saw the power of their togetherness was in their final act as a couple, and it was almost a work of art. The kind of destruction they enacted took a team effort.

Break away, I beg, though I know this message, written in the stars, is lightyears away from getting to you. Wherever you left your own heart, take it back. A feeling is not forever. A feeling is not forever. A feeling is not forever.

The best they could, but badly

Often I wish that I had natural singing talent, because I think the chalky, malodorous melancholia which I am prone to writing would be more palatable in the form of lyrics.

When I hear that my last grandparent has died, news that arrives to me thirdhand, I feel a single note rise out of my body. It bubbles out of the skin of my chest and bursts in the air. The note is limp, subdued, like the mewl of a dying hare, its pink-ringed eyes caught between the gasp of curved fangs. After the puncture of realization, the moment evaporates into a glimmer of amethyst and then dust. Gone with no ceremony of feeling, no heraldry of sentiment. I’ve spent years wondering what this knowledge would feel like and now I have final confirmation of what I’ve long suspected: the death can happen long before the death happens. You mourn the death before you know you are mourning the death. Blood is merely blood.

Shattering the surface of the frozen pool, memories float up in crates that I slash open, one by one. A vintage perfume bottle with a crystalline stopper. Snow-white ringlets, permed to surreal perfection. The greenish coolness of a tiled room in the afternoon, all the shades drawn. The periodic table, a multi-colored rectangle shaped like a fortress, which she knew by heart. Ocean waves, lapis in the sun. Everything but the face. I wade in to rescue these things for my small kingdom, knee-deep and shivering from the cold, as vultures circle the pool.

Eggs of Leda

I brush out my braid and rip apart the plastic packaging of a pregnancy test. Plum blossoms grow in scattered patterns of pinky purple along the dark, twisted, mottled branches of the tree outside. I sweat, in chalice-shaped patches, onto the torso and sleeves of my polyester shirt. The dye on the test runs suggestively flame-red, but the oracular square that contains my fate is empty. The relief feels like passion; it overwhelms my mind, bowls me over, saturates my mouth and chest like a fistful of sugar cubes. No part of me wants motherhood, or the maroon-tinted, lab-made prediction of motherhood, or the dreamy possibility of it — not even a little bit. Why? All the usual reasons apply here, plus a few of my own, informed by troubled relationships to family, body, and self. Do I want to be convinced otherwise? Not at this time. I don’t object to feeling differently in the future, but I will resist every attempt to reject my present views simply because they don’t align with the desires of others.

Is it wrong to say that I like life (mostly), but I wouldn’t wish it on another? Living a human life is as pleasurable as a blood draw; distressing, eye-averting, but when the results arrive I read them avidly, contemplatively. Every year, I open another red envelope and receive another revelation. Sometimes, the revelations are howlingly sad. Other times, they are like a splash of coral-pink flowers growing along the split between sidewalk and gutter. Neither type of missive is enough to cancel out the other, but they have allowed me to acquire a range of tastes: bitter disappointment, cloying joy and love, rancid terror, chalky grief. Life is something I have come to tolerate. Via exposure therapy, the tolerance might one day morph into hesitant affection.

My geneaology is freckled with cancerous seeds of indulgent, paralyzing melancholy, and I know perfectly well that I’ve grown into that worldview, the way a daughter might inherit her mother’s body, clothes, and mood. I’ve grown into a woman who is cheerfully sad. Don’t think I haven’t considered how that affects my choices. After all, the only comfort in overthinking is the chance to indulge in the power of honest self-reflection, self-flagellation.

Did I have a bad childhood? Did I read too many maudlin books at too young an age? Was I seduced by nihilism before the age of reason? No, yes, maybe. Don’t I want to feel the total, all-encompassing, love-with-abandon that a mother feels for her offspring? Not necessarily. Aren’t I afraid of being alone in my old age? Of course. Can’t I admit to that fear without fearing judgment? Don’t I want to experience all life has to offer? Definitely not. Life has a lot of evil to offer. Good fortune is rare, but pain is everywhere. There are many belief systems that twist that pain into something worth beholding, like rending an old rag into ribbons, and that idolize pain as necessary, prized, intrinsic to meaning. I understand why these beliefs exist, even if I don’t share them. All I know is that pain is everywhere. In the water, on land, and in the recesses of my body, clotted into flesh and bloody discharge. I can’t protect anyone from it.

Time horizon

A gulf yawns between the past and the future. Supposedly, this space is meant to be filled with the present, but I’m not confident I know what this means nor entails. A wide view of the present contains yesterday, today, and tomorrow. A narrower view contains only a single fleeting, blistered millisecond: the now. The now is capricious. Sometimes she hovers above and below me, a current of gilded roses, rippling forward and saturating my perspective in optimistic golden tones. But at other times she is brattier and less eager to please, sticking to my soles and palms like dark, rapidly solidifying lava and pulling me deep into the Earth’s soft, burning-hot mantle. Either way, the now cannot be trusted, though irrevocably I am swept up into its deviousness, which has the same effect on me as impossible, fantastical dreaming.

I am always trying to pierce the waves of shifting transitions. I am always looking for the anchor that reaches from my heart (located so perilously in the now) into the securest version of the future. But I look at my life and can’t detect where now and present become past and future. Instead, I feel like I am swimming at the mouth of a river, unable to comprehend where I am located in the stream, and unable to see how to get out the sea.

I’m repeatedly told to “plan for your future” but, at what point, in “the future,” will I know the planning is done? When I try to settle on a personal deadline, the time horizon in my mind moves and smears like dragging a hand through a still-wet stripe of thick oil paint. There will always be something yet to plan, and something yet to decide. Past and future disappear, replaced by a constantly vacillating, wounding present.

I walk past the shuttered nature conservatory, the empty coffee shop, the quiet, sunlit park, and take two trains to campus, where I discover that the school library has been closed to avoid the spread of disease. On my way back home, I wait on the platform and stand underneath the Japan Rail digital announcement panel. In oddly spaced, blinking green 8-bit letters, the panel reminds me to wash my hands, avoid crowds, and wear a mask. Later, I read online that “for the time being,” public facilities will remain closed. Two weeks later, my brother flees his college dorm and returns home, to a country that closes its land borders only days after his arrival. A sense of dread shoulders into my apartment and watches as I line the walls of my kitchen cabinet with canned red kidney beans, “just in case.” My father texts me to tell me he isn’t busy during the day anymore, which is his way of asking me to call to check up on him. I think of the fish in its struggle to reach the sea, its scales like gold coins, surfacing, belly-up, on the shores of the river delta. The future immediately twisted into nothing as the present eats itself.

Queen of the Edgelords

Aliens take off from a field circumscribed within cool blue mountains. Adam Adams and Jeremy Renner watch their departure, and their detached expressions, coupled with the vision of daybreak flooding the grass, results in a scene equal parts intimate and cinematic. In the background, the soundtrack’s violins churn expertly, and their sound is pure, precise, crystalline, but also, somehow, impossibly soft, like icicles that fracture the air before exploding into cascades of velvet on impact.

It’s a final scene that marries absolute visual and acoustic splendor with the inescapable, inscrutable sensation of grief. It reminds me of the multitudes of a word like “haunting,” which can suggest not just plain “scary,” but “unforgettable,” too. I should be enamored, and the biggest part of me wants to be; this scene, and Arrival itself, hit all the right notes. A larger-than-life epic with themes that traverse space-time, but that also acknowledge and defend the microcosms entombed in human plight, and human passion. (Interstellar, a film that I found grander in some ways, still failed in this essential regard.) And yet, though I can recognize that the scene performs exactly as intended, and pulls at the heartstrings with pinpoint accuracy, I can’t help but roll my eyes.

When Renner turns to Adams and tells her that extraterrestrials surprised him less than meeting her, I laugh unkindly at that predictable payload of emotion (“You know what surprised me the most? It wasn’t meeting them. It was meeting you.”) I imagine the screenwriter, the director, and the actor, pouring their energy into the line, and I respect the effort; but for me, a woman of evergreen jadedness, it somehow doesn’t land. I’m perversely proud of it; I regard my cynicism not as armor, but as the spear that shatters the emotional fraudulence of the world.

I look at my seventeen-year-old brother, Alex, expecting him be laughing too at the goofy expediency of it all–elegantly coiffed, impeccably dressed Hollywood artists confessing their love via perfectly delivered lines, all in a time of space aliens. But his eyes are glued to the screen. He is transfixed.

I watch him for a few moments, surprised both at his response to the scene and his apparent obliviousness to everything outside it. He is at an age known for various, occasionally contradictory traits: what I and others might summarize as “edginess.” Alex is reserved, but not uncommunicative; aloof, but not apathetic. At times, he can be dogmatic. His personality is known for periods of impenetrable silence, but also periods of blinding discursive passion. It is not always easy for him to apologize. His commitment to personal truth brushes shoulders occasionally with arrogance. He does not divulge his thoughts easily. He does not cede ground. He wields sarcasm expertly. He is at the center of a lush, private world.

I was recently seventeen, and I’ve known my brother his entire life. We are similar in that eerie, arcane way that siblings sometimes are. I presumed that these facts suggested at an inherited ability to intuit Alex’s inner nature. But today I finally understand that it was vanity on my part to believe that I understand Alex. I can’t predict his behavior, I can’t read his thoughts. My supposed intuition is just a shadow that cannot probe mystery, only project expectation. This myth–that an older sibling has a direct line into the heart of a younger sibling–has trailed me since childhood. We’re not four and eleven anymore. We’re no longer elementary school students sleepily watching the landscape from the bus together. In a flash, the veil is parted to reveal colossal castle in the sand. Now all that is left is to allow the warm, finely milled sand to fall through my slowly parting fingers.

Alex doesn’t find it cloyingly absurd that Arrival ends with an expression of love. Adolescence hasn’t embittered him. He doesn’t conceal his feelings with hard-edged cynicism. His heart does not require armor. He is capable of recognizing and honoring the vulnerable earnestness of human emotion without falling prey to the instinct to wound it. If there are any edgelords here, he isn’t one of them.

The Lost Paradise of the Eleusinian Mystery

I watch the night approach us through the sliding glass doors. Thinned into bloodied violet, it descends with the same preternatural inevitability as a vow of love. Inside my body, a similar sun, no less red, is setting.

There’s a tender (soft/sore) intimacy to the emergency room, in its small dimensions bathed in desert tones. Dun, milk-white, olive-yellow, carmine. Emotion has receded into my hands, but I don’t have any physical contact with the world; I feel as though I am interacting with shadows, or mirages. Only tiny images remain: the burst blood vessels in her eyes.

She is at the age now where Death comes with us everywhere: I watch him, through the rear view mirror, sweat jeweling over his brow, leaning against the palm trees. His smile is more apologetic, and comforting, than I would have anticipated. In the heat shimmer of early summer, the distance between us is like the space between me and God. Natural, and unnatural, in equal measure.

The closer she sways towards the edge the more fiercely I believe she will live forever. I won’t pretend to understand the logic of this. It is something I have long since chalked up to the useless beliefs of suicidal women and their failed daughters.