If the Wet Air Remembered Something

If the wet air remembered something, the dry lost it.  I felt it the first time around.  It made me feel I would never see you again, but you when your voice appeared I cringed.  Was that the feeling?  I couldn’t remember you when I was with you, but when you left, your memory never left me.  The shadow followed me on early mornings when I woke up and it overflowed me until the afternoon when I was ready for dusk to tuck me into night.  Goodnight. 

Dear Love:

                I have not visited for a long time now.  I have been hiding, afraid.  Afraid, but not to see you but to forget you, to hide with you.  The other feelings knocked and touched my hand, and they stayed at the door, close by and watching. 

                The canyons dropped low, and there was no water, only a rushing dry.

                The dry came through the winter.

                And in the rush, we felt no rest, rest. 

                Let me show you to lay your head down, rest.

If we were part of something, we didn’t think of it.  If we had known something, we walked by it.  I remember the sounds of cars and the edges of the street, the sidewalk, the color of the ground, but the sky I will always remember as grey.

If the wet air remembered something.

If the darkened clouds told me something, I would listen, but I carried on.  I rode by you and by the forested wood, and I saw the hedgerow and the horses breathing deep into the autumn air, where the leaves were the brightest yellow and orange that yellow and orange could be.  I smiled in the grey.

Deep down into the well was a memory that fed on the moss along the walls.  Little things that grew and clung, never seeing the sun.  I miss them all.

I carried my things close to me.  I heard the sounds of birds around me.  I heard your voice, laughing.  I’ll raise my drink to you, and I’ll remember your face on Bethnal Green Road.  I’ll remember your face in East Dulwich.  I’ll remember your face on Walworth and Old Street, on Whitechapel and Holborn.  So many faces, so many voices, and my memory hid in the well, fed on the moss along the walls. 

I bought a ticket.  I left my life.  I wanted to see the sun. 

Dear Friend:

                My heart slipped along the sides of the well, and I reached to you, and in the dark I gasped, “Will there be sun?”

                You replied, “Look above you.  The sun was always there.  You can’t see it, but it’s always there.”

                And I shook my head and said back, “If you were to lie to me, would I ever know?”

                And you said, “No, but would there be a difference?”

                It was not your fault but mine.

We felt the nightmares of inertia.  We did big things.  We wanted to be big things.  We left.  In the darkest places, in the darkest moments, we saw we weren’t just moving, but we were dancing.

I danced in the cold.

I danced in the rain.

I danced, heart bleeding, danced.

I laid down, my head pounding, the rain thudding against the window, which changed for the silent wet of every day, and I rose.  I walked to the door, and down the steps into the rose garden, and out the gate, and I stood in the rain, and I smelled the wet street with the wet sounds of the cars thudding nearby, waiting, the taxi cabs and walking people with umbrellas on the London mews.

You came to me in the damp air, the rain whispering, “forget, forget”, and I saw your face, and I felt all the longing the sordid memory of obligation, and I said, “You don’t belong here.  Go now.  This isn’t your time.  Your time has gone.”

You left but the shadow of a thought.  I returned to the sun, and the rain was washed to a past. 

If you came closer. 

If you came around here.

You would see the memory still lives in the moss, in the well, in the dark, and on rainy days, I think of you. 

Thames, dear, Thames. 

London, dear, London.

Dear Aldo, a Vignette

From the series, “Unedited, Love Stories”

The summer came unexpectedly in late May, brought by a series of downpours late in the evenings that woke Lila up with a shiver, coldly.  It began as a wet summer.  It was the wettest she would remember, and sitting inside her home, with the lights off, Lila still shivered while the summer passed by, hour after hour. 

Lila had been writing letters every day.  It began with a brief memory, maybe when the summer started or maybe before then. She marked the first day of her letter writing as the first day she remembered when the memory came to her, an out-of-place feeling which prompted her to say, “You don’t belong here.  This is now, and you were then.  Go back to then, and leave me alone.” 

The feeling was indirect, and Lila was shapely.  She touched and smelled.  She held onto hard things, defining the smoothness of their corners and the sharpness of their edges.  This was – a sitting cloud – it weighed, but it didn’t move.  Unable to hold her cloud, Lila began writing letters.

How long ago was it?  How long did it last?  The month held thirty days and the days held twenty-four hours, and each hour that passed in each month, Lila thought about the name, “Aldo”.  “Aldo,” she said to her desk.  Her desk looked back, a sitting cloud.  “Aldo left some time ago,” she murmured again and then closed her eyes.  Aldo’s face came to her in a shadow, and Lila crinkled her nose.  When her mind decided against giving Aldo a shape, Lila stood up and poured herself a glass of milk.

Aldo had a lively face, a face unlike the forgetfulness that lurked into Lila’s evenings, and Aldo had once said to Lila, “Why don’t we take a ride together?”  Just like that, a careless request with a shrug, to which Lila had smiled and replied, “Okay.  I just need to be home before dinner.”

Lila saw stars when she had sat hanging in the car, upside-down on the side of the road, the seat belt cutting deep into her skin right along the fat leaving a permanent mark on her belly that would always remind her why she hated stars.  She had felt Aldo next to her.  Poor Aldo.  Poor, poor Aldo.  He had creeped onto her, a big heap of leftovers.  She had sat for hours later, unable to scrub him off her.

“I’m having a dinner party tonight,” she had said to him the day before.  “My girlfriends are coming over, and I have to make a pie.  I can’t stay out for long.”  She had paused.  Aldo had looked at her and turned his eyes down to the grass. 

After a minute of grass watching, Aldo had replied, “We’ll be back in time.  I just need to show you something I found a few weeks ago.  You might like it.  We could take a short walk after I park the car at the visitor’s site.  It won’t be long.”  Aldo’s down-turned eyes had turned upward to smile at her.  His freckles spread along his nose and under his eye lids.  In a minute, she had replied by opening the door to his car and strapping herself in, stiff with excitement.  Twenty minutes later, she was seeing stars, and Aldo would be plastered across the window and onto her, all one million little pieces of him, like the million little stars she kept seeing.  

The night was  clear.  Lila walked out the door and smelled the left-over rain, little drops of it reflecting onto her, blurring her nightgown with the color of the air.  There was a softness in the touch, a slight warmth of the nervousness, the sweat of indecision and conviction.  Two weeks before The Day, Lila had grabbed Aldo’s hand and kissed him.  He stood still, and his eyes had widened at her sudden approach, but with her mouth firmly planted on his, she had felt his hands soften and tighten all at once.  Upside-down, she had reached to grab hold of his hand, and all she had felt was warm wet. 

It was humid out when Lila walked out her door.  There was warmness in the air, and the smell of the rain choked her as the stars lingered and poked themselves through the departing clouds.  She sat like a meditating hunched cloud, watching the stars: humid and wet, blood and nerves, kiss and hand.  There was no more sharpness and edge between the things, no discernible shape of the cloud, but the thing she could still see were the stars, just like the stars Lila saw with Aldo, dead alongside her with her eyes closed or opened. 

Lila abandoned the step on her house and went back indoors, closing the door firmly behind her.  She returned to her letter.  “Dear Aldo,” they had all begun with.   This one was no different.  Some letters were finished, some were left without ending.  Lila took care to put each one in an envelope, seal it tight with a stamp, and send it out without shape or form.  “Dear Aldo,” this one began like the others, “sitting cloud.  Heart, oh, heart.”  With those few words, Lila put her pen down.

She stepped to bed and closed her eyes with the window still open.  She heard silence and dark, but she could still see the stars.

The Woman in the Mirror

First published in Cigale Literary Magazine, Summer 2012

Her scarf lay along the desk which contained three books and held a large, oval mirror. The days passed and various things would place themselves in front of her mirror: a vase of flowers, her day’s left-over work, a laptop, an occasional sweater, and now and then, on mornings when she could afford the minutes, she’d sit in front of her mirror and check the reflection that stared back at her. Sometimes the reflection blinked, sometimes it smiled, sometimes it frowned, but most the time, it looked back at her with a stern resignation of indifference. 

One morning, she sat in front of her mirror brushing her hair before the day began. Suddenly, she caught sight of something moving very quickly, a sight that disturbed the image of familiarity in the mirror, softly, undeniably, as if the glass suddenly quivered, and she lost focus of the images nearest her. She looked closer into the mirror. Nothing. She turned around and searched her room. Her gaze was returned by her bed, which stood neatly made and serious, as if shrugging and saying, “It wasn’t us. There’s nothing over here.”

The next morning, as she sat at her usual throne, the disturbance appeared once more. As before, it was a sudden flicker, a momentary movement, as if the entire distance and image of the light and the glass and the objects of the reflection shook, disappeared and reappeared again, like waves lapping on the shore. She rubbed her eyes and pressed her face to the mirror, so close that the tip of her nose touched the hard surface and her breath warmed the cold glass. When the condensation from her breathing disappeared, she caught the shadow of something dark moving behind her. She could hear her breathing –which slowed and then hastened again– and her heart beats matched the panic in her breath. Was there something in her room she had not noticed before? She looked back in the mirror. Nothing. She turned around. Again, nothing. Everything placed in order as before. Her ears heard static, and she realized it was nothing but the blood flowing from her fluttered heart to her terrified brain. She put on her coat and ran out of her room, shutting the door loudly behind her. She did not turn around.

That night, she returned to her house and quietly walked up the stairs and looked at her bedroom door. She wanted to knock, as if to ask, “Whatever is in there, you, you who keeps appearing in my mirror! Leave this room. I need some sleep tonight, and I deserve to stay in my own bed, don’t you think?” Instead, she placed her head near the door to listen for sounds. The silence of the other side was only interrupted by the steady beating of the pulse in her own ears, pressed and wedged against the wood. Slowly, she opened the door and peered in. A dark bed, desk, and mirror greeted her. She turned on her light. Everything was as it had been before. Nothing was unusual. 

Before bed, she sat in front of her mirror again, brushing her air. It was then that the image came to her directly. It stared at her, violently made a face of horror, placed its hand over its mouth as if to scream, and nothing came out. The image was clear, and out of terror of the foreign thing, she picked the mirror up and slammed it against the hardwood floor of her room. The thick glass fell with a scream and broke into seven distinct pieces, lying neatly on her floor, the pieces next to one another. She slowly inched herself up, her hands holding the wall behind her and looked down. This time, the image in the mirror was real. It was undeniable. She put her hand to her mouth. The image put its hand to its mouth. She touched her nose. The image touched its nose. She smiled. The image smiled back. And as she gazed at it again with an eye of resignation, the image of herself gazed back at its form with the same resignation, identity to identity, self to self.

Water in a Bowl

From the ongoing works, “Untitled, Love Stories”

“You might be my soul mate, but I’m looking for someone here on earth.” Her words remained motionless.  Even after the expressions began to fade, he recalled touching the water in the bowl, look at her while she spoke, his fingers brushing against the taut surface of the water, trembling. 

The glass sat hunched on the table. 

What was divine was the idea – the thought that entered him in the night and left him during the days, from his hands, the actualization of a piece of something he could not determine the origin but knew right then that he needed to find its form.  It was lost.  It was lost in time and in memory, the folded layers of it, prying into the present, hoping for creation, the process of finding what is lost, building it, and giving it a name, which is, in fact, just recreation.  Over and over.  Water in a bowl. 

Her words reached him in those startling moments earliest in the day.  It was then that he could put an image to her face again.  Her expressions escaped him, and startled that he had forgotten her so quickly, he searched for the allowances that forgetfulness gave him: a soft smile, a deep longing, a tear, “someone here on earth” (For the optimists, the greatest achievement has been to keep heaven beyond earth, to put it outside and away, so as to say, “This is not all of it.  Have hope.  Live with your head burrowed in the sand and your heart facing the skies.  Carry on.”  For the other type of optimist, it was the myth which tethered and chained the spirit to a rock that sank beneath the river of inaction, anxiety, and most dangerously of all, ambivalence.  To those others, they wanted to shout, “Be free!  There is nothing but chaos!”). 

He looked at the water in the bowl.  It was motionless.  He sighed on it and watched the surface tease, relax and then tremor again, looking up at the moon, then at the stars, then at the sun, and finally at the grey clouds which turned into night.  De profundis clamavi. 

That night he dreamed that he was falling through the ceiling of his room, and as the walls swallowed him, he grabbed onto the tapestries that clung to his windows, light things he hadn’t noticed before.  And as he grabbed onto them, the tapestries wrapped themselves around him, and he fell, slowly falling through the walls, while the tapestries began to dance on him, touching his hands, feet and neck, brushing his collapsed torso and sliding along his body (a rock fell in the pile of ashes, and as the rock hit the ash, the ash kicked up into a dance, rising.  The ash always rises; the rock always falls), until suddenly, as he was falling, her image rose above him entangled in the tapestries.  He clasped at her.

That morning, he woke with the feeling that suddenly, he had lost a thing infinitely loving, infinitely touching, and never once a thing he could call his own.

Light Dark

Light Dark

Draft 1 May 11, 2012
Thanks to Charlotte, Natalie and dad for the translation help.

Lux, a light without shadow, without

the shaping of

something, Light, creeping into

this window and along the drapes

shapes, draping, lighting the edges, soft

leicht, fluttering so much those edges begin to lift themselves.

Light and upward, qīng qīng dè.

A moving inside a movement, the songs which are sung silently,

a brightness, la canciό es ligera and soft

drifted into the room, and stumbled upon her sleeping face.

An angel, światły, drifting into a silent motion of

timeless and timed, images drifting in and out, while the

dreams tangoed with the licht. 

Lux, a light without umbre, and umbre,

a thing without form, a weightlessness made from

weight, clinging onto body, holding edges,

kissing it, forming the arms of cień, embracing –

but light, only light spreading into the space is nothing but form,

without movement, a movement without shape,

and the shadow brings movement into the movement.

Yīnyíng dancing with the licht,

A thing which is another,

A thing which cannot be without the other,

A movement that happens in stillness,

Like all movement, just in empty stillness,

Escapes into tenebrae, into the dreams, the spaces

that happen in the sleeping.

Another glass of wine, sweet darling,

Take me to the dreams, sweet sunshine,

Circled by the arms of shadows,

And the kisses of the light. 

Revisiting Old Places

Originally Posted on Look Mum No Hands RT Blog: http://lookmumraceteam.wordpress.com/
By Pan Pan, Photos by Bill Kurtz

I like revisiting old places.  Part of it stems from a childhood fear I had of losing memories.  When I was young, I used to think of all the memories I would lose through forgetfulness, one little moment after another, slipping away with each year.

It was a long time ago that I was on the beaches of Connecticut, near Milford, the summer cold and wet.  It was a long time ago, then, that I was collecting sea shells out on that beach with my friend, putting the little yellow and white pieces in an old plastic bag and taking them home with me to be relocated into my bathroom as decoration.  I wrote in my diary after the cold beach day that afternoon, “Today, I collected sea shells on the beach.”
Two days later, I looked at that date.  Two days have passed.
A week later, the same.
Now, fourteen years later, I still remember the day I went to Milford and the beach and walked along the wet sand when the sun was hiding behind clouds while I found sea shells.

What is it about old places that stir new memories, memories that were lodged, forgotten, hidden?  I am sometimes scared of old time, the things that were meant to be forgotten relived and revived.

* * * * *

For a long time after, I was scared of passing time.  I was scared of the directionality of it, the irreversibility.  But as I slowly come to understand time more, the more years I log on in this wonderful little life, the more I realize that time is an old friend.  Yes, it’s with time that painful episodes of my life can be forgotten, released, forgiven.  It’s with time that things which were unclear come into focus.  And so those lost memories which I desperately tried to salvage in every possible way, I took a breath, I let go.

* * * * *

I returned to my hometown in Connecticut after London before planning my next move back to London and the subsequent nebulous steps.  Before returning to this small, suburban town, I had lived in two of the world’s largest and most developed cities – inhaled the exhaust and smoke from the dirtied streets, stayed up at night fighting the throbbing beats of the taxi cabs waiting on the streets, listened to plenty night activities commencing outside my window while I tried to sleep in preparation for a morning ride as the sun came up (the only silent time during the days in the city).

I left Connecticut being told that I was to make something of myself.  But it was after leaving the ivory towers of education that I slowly began a different type of education, an education that required more silence than speaking, that was more inward than outward, that reversed the very values I had worked on for over twenty years.  It was, as if – I would like to say – my entire internal axis were slowly tilting to something different.  And in this spirit of irony, it is in returning to my small town in Cheshire, Connecticut that I solidify these beliefs, which took four countries and three large cities to reveal.  It’s with this that I invoke T.S. Eliot’s words (roughly) that I’ve “returned to where I started and recognized the place for the first time”.

* * * * *

I’d like to share a few of my favorite lessons from my short return to home:
Lesson Number 1: Ride your bike with old and new friends along known roads.
Lesson Number 2: Eat your vegetables, and thank your mom.
Lesson Number 3: Reread your old diary, and try not to hate your old self too much, especially when you write things like, “My life is over.  I got a 95% on the exam and not 100%, and I didn’t win my mile race in track.”
Lesson Number 4: Look at old photos of old heartbreaks, and point, and then laugh.  Laugh very hard.  Harder.  Then say a prayer to whatever religion you worship, “Thank you [insert deity] for saving me from that [choose one (or two): dimwit/numchuck/jdflaksdjfa/horror]”.
Lesson Number 5: Look at your old bookshelf and wonder why it was ever useful to take a class entitled, “Man and Nature in Ming Dynasty Poetry”.  Alternatively, wonder why the class, “Europe in the Age of Total War 1914-1945” shows up on your transcript while you have no memory of it.  Then look through your old photos of first semester senior year and realize that a few nights a week that semester, you felt it was appropriate to go to a local night club called, “Toads Place”.
Lesson Number 6: Remember your old aspirations and dreams (“I’m going to be a theoretical physicist and discover the 7^th dimension!”), and smile, realizing that the best things in your life were in front of you all along.  Then go and have some of mom and dad’s Edy’s extra creamy cookie ice cream in the freezer.
Lesson Number 7: Recognize fully (and make anthropological and psychological notes as well as New Year’s Resolutions and self-improvement techniques) on how you relapse into your fifteen year-old self within a matter of weeks.  Look through your old closet and wonder why you ever bothered to try that hard because the older you get, the more you realize, “You just gotta do you, baby”.

* * * * *

Reprise, Lesson Number 1: Ride your bike with old and new friends along known roads.
Note the changes.  Some roads have been repaved and some forests cleared, and in the place of elms, oaks and pines, are new homes.  They’re fresh and neat.  And while I have memories of what the old farms looked like, or that golf course, I realize my memory fades and tricks me.  The road is longer, the hill is shorter.  The winds blew in different directions, and they still do so.

I began cycling in a wonderful community in New Haven, and it was this community that embraced me when I came back after being away for over three years.  I began riding with them again, some friends I had known for years (Matthew, Anna, Erica, David K., Yale Cycling) and some friends who were new (Bill, Dominique, David S., Augustine).  Was it the same?  Of course not.  I showed up on the first group ride of my life in an old water polo jacket and sneakers, my shoe laces getting caught on the toe-cage pedals sometime around mile thirty on the fifty-five mile ride.  In my mind, there were six distinct, large “climbs” on the group ride, and I had barely made it over the last three (someone’s hand was probably pushing my saddle up).  When I came back this year, I was wearing a different kit (“What is ‘mum’?” was a question that I frequently got), and I realized that the “climbs” suddenly disappeared, that a hilly ride suddenly became very flat.

But my old friends were the same, and we remembered the same jokes.  And I was reminded of stories that I had forgotten, memory after memory, laugh after laugh.

* * * * *

New Year’s Eve, I was approached by New Haven’s Neptune and persuaded by a group of my close cycling friends (whose photos are below) to do the “greatest” thing they could think of for New Year’s: jump into the Atlantic Ocean after a morning’s bike ride in the dead of winter in the north east of North America for an event called, “The Polar Bear Plunge”.  Compared to previous New Years (which included hazy memories of bottles of wine and champagne being consumed – that’s plural, “bottles” – and one spectacular memory of running around and bopping along and jumping up and down on the 34^th floor of my roommate’s office building for a New Year’s Eve party in New York City, which could not have ended well, but thank GOD for the food at the party which probably helped curb my three-day-hang-over into a two-day-hang-over, lying in bed and moaning, “Oh my god, it hurts and feels so sick and I swear if this headache goes away I will never ever ever do this to my body again or touch alcohol or ever stay up until seven in the morning oh my god, I think I’m going to vomit…again?!”), this was something new.

But there’s something strangely alluring about the thought of the absolute insane.  As if it takes something you would never really consider doing on a normal day to really be able to shake yourself of all those things that bind you.  In other words, I wanted to let go.

So after the early morning’s ride through the area I had first learned how to get on a bike, I rode to Lighthouse Point in New Haven and lined up with a few hundred other people who wanted to jump into the Atlantic Ocean in the dead of winter in the northeast of North America (though each for his or her own reasons).  My friends lined up with me.  It’s a funny thing about doing crazy things: when you’re with a few hundred other insane people doing the same thing, the act suddenly seems less obtrusive, as if obviously it made so much sense to jump into the Atlantic Ocean in the dead of winter in the northeast of North America, look, that hairy bald guy holding a beer next to me is doing it too!  Standing there on the beach with my towel, I craved a glass of whiskey.

Luckily, my friends were with me, and those who came on the ride without an extra swim suit stood by the rest of us and held our towels (and our sanity).  And as New Haven’s Neptune blew the siren, we all plunged into the water, like humans returning to some prehistoric self (look whales, we’re coming back!).

I will not try to pretend the water was not freezing.  I will not try to pretend that I gleefully ran in further, splashing the salt water around me.  I will not try to pretend I didn’t swear loudly as I stepped onto rocks and felt the ice water hitting my lungs, or that I didn’t immediately turn to my friend, scream, grab her hand and run back.  Yes, I was cold.  Yes, I ran back immediately and needed some help going on land again.  Yes, I swore like I had a vocabulary consisting of four words they teach you not to say in grade school.  But yes, I had the best New Year’s I had ever had, and more importantly, yes, I let go.

* * * * *

It was a long time ago that I was on the beaches of Connecticut, near Milford, the summer cold and wet.  It was a long time ago, then, that I was collecting sea shells out on that beach with my friend, putting the little yellow and white pieces in an old plastic bag and taking them home with me to be relocated into my bathroom as decoration.  It was this New Year’s that I ran into the same ocean, along beaches nearby.  That was exactly one month, fourteen days ago.  In another month, it will be exactly two months, fourteen days.  Time will go by.  Time will disappear.  Time will reappear.  But sad, sad time, I’ll have to let you go.

The Hyacinth Girl: from T.S. Eliot's, "The Waste Land"

From the ongoing works, "Unedited, Love Stories".

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;  35

They called me the hyacinth girl.” 

 —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden, 

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not 

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither 

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,  40

Looking into the heart of light, the silence. 

Öd’ und leer das Meer.

-The Waste Land, The Burial of the Dead, T.S. Eliot

It was late.  Even as I write this – it is late – the late when the edges of the night intertwine with the beginnings of the morning; silent coldness.  I remember that garden.  And every morning, I sit here in my room, hearing the breathing, all too familiar now, a mechanistic thing lying on her side, only to wake in two hours and begin the day with, “I’ll put coffee on, but you really do need to take out the trash.”

It is only during these hours in solitude that I can remember the flowers and the leaves from the garden, the wet grass from the night’s goodbye and the soft smell of melting, which is when you came to me.  You stood there, and I handed you the flowers – the blue hyacinths – you took them from me, and as we walked along the soft grounds, you whispered, “Should we go look at the fountain?”  We walked to the fountains, your hair still wet, and me, glancing at you from the corners of my eyes, pretending that I was leading you but really just listening to your slow footsteps behind me.  And we would sit near that fountain, on overgrown benches, lost behind last year’s leaves and this year’s moss, and you held those flowers close to you and said, “I think these will look nice in my room.”

You looked at me with your wet hair and your eyes, waiting, waiting for me.  I was silent.  I could not speak.  It was the silence that filled me, inflating, a fear, I knew nothing.  I had nothing.  My words emptied, and I searched somewhere in the memories, somewhere inside me, and I could not find them.  In short, I was afraid.  I was ashamed. As I looked into you – heart of light – I had nothing but silence.    

Thirty years later, and I am an old man with unstirred desires and a handful of old regrets, what’s left after thirty years of slow understanding, a prize for my ambitions.  I do not recognize the woman asleep next to me, and my memory fails me even as I try to retrace the way you looked at me, your eyes staring and waiting, and my words, lost.  Were you really there, waiting for me?  Could I have held you, had you, been with you, or is that, too, an old memory stirring wasted, empty thoughts of a desperate man, regretful man.  I do not know.  I do not know.  Wisdom plays chess with selective memory.

But you had stood there, your arms full, the flowers I had given you cradled like a child, and you had looked at me.  In that sliver of time, which moves in one direction, the moments became irretrievable, like one moment lost after another, one word unsaid after another.  The most terrifying thing of all – love – to say it, to actualize it, is to create a thing that can be lost by the pure existence of the thing itself; which is to say, we cannot lose what we do not have.  And I looked at you, looked into you – heart of light – and I was silent.  Old man with old regrets.  Sliver of time after another.  Where have you gone, my hyacinth girl? 

I lie awake, my eyes on the ceiling, listening to the thumping breathing beside me (who will wake up and say, “Well, it’s another day.  What should we have for dinner later?”).  Wasted, deceitful memories, tiresome things, stirring the dead desires of the past of old men. 

When we looked at the fountains, you had brushed my arm with your arm, and you whispered, “Is that a blackbird there?  Drinking that pool of water?”  And you laughed, and in your laugh, you said to me, “Forgive yourself, my dear, forgive yourself.  Time only moves in one direction.”  I look at you, now in my memory, and retrace the steps you took behind me, holding the flowers in the mossy woods near the fountain, sitting on the bench next to me, laughing and whispering, “Is that a blackbird there…”. 

To Say I Love You

From ongoing works: Unedited, Love Stories

To say I love you. 

The stillness in place of movement

is still in its placement and its

placement alone.  To say I love you. 

Again. 

The words flutter, etch, shake

fly and move.  Still

moving. 

Words, bounds on this thing that grows, filling

the cavity, inflating, reaching, seeing the edge, looking at the walls,

to say, “I love you”.  Shake those whispers from me,

bound it with a memory, wrap it in a song, and send it to me again,

packaged, tied up, and say, “I love you.”

The first order is a placement.  The second,

a movement, and the third, a movement

of a movement. 

The stillness, that’s made a movement, the love

which is made a past, the past, which is a second order

present, the future which is the third,

a movement of a movement.

To say I love you.

The Soldier's Mother

From the Ongoing Work: Unedited, Love Stories

How can I say this, but, expression explains where rationality struggles, like a watercolor, spreads into my memory and smells like petals on a clear bowl, clear bowl on an empty table, clean.  “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”  The root of cowardice is not from fear; it is, in fact, the contrary; apathy and forgetfulness breed cowards.  And with finite emotions comes an infinite set of combinations and permutations of actions, the manifold of the core substance, trapped.  The artist expresses.  No, this was not very good at all.

“I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

* * * * *

She sighed and looked out her window, wondering when the cars would come today.  They came yesterday, one by one, and they offered her gifts and their tears.  As they embraced, she let them cry, sit with her, drink coffee (which she had burnt when she sat looking out her window, waiting for them), and she watched them as they left, one by one, just as they had come. 

The first thing she had done when she heard the news was throw away all the onions, beef, carrots, and potatoes.  She was going to make his favorite stew, but somehow, hearing the news, she couldn’t bear the sight of them in her kitchen.  Ordinary things, they were.  They reminded her of the smell, and the smell reminded her of him, of him running down the stairs, and chasing fireflies outside her house in the yard, of showing her what he’d caught in a jar, lighting up her kitchen.  But now the ordinary things sickened her, so she did the only thing she could, and in one sweep, she threw them into her garbage and threw the garbage out onto her porch.  Then she sat at her table and looked out her window at the bright sun lighting her hummingbird wallpaper for a long time.  She did not cry.

* * * * *

A man skinned alive will cry.  You’ll hear nothing like it.  A man cries; the bloody stump that cries.

He felt himself leaking, heard the sound before he could realize what had happened, the ripping of the air.  He panicked, screamed first before he felt it.  Then it came.  A stake in his mind, right between his eyes, the something ripping another very soft thing, soft and warm, from inside him.  He was leaking.  And all around him, he felt the pressing hands of a pain he could not understand, and so he screamed, and it was a scream he did not recognize.  He kept thinking, “Who’s screaming?  Make the screaming stop!  Stop!”  He screamed – a desperate sound – while he held himself together, his insides leaking out, and he felt the warm, tender things as they left him.  He was shredded, torn, his blood painting the ground around him.  They upset him.  Those, who were already dead, their cold bodies that smelled of old iron, old blood, the sulfur in the air mixed with old iron.  The smell of decay and sulfur, the smell which tells you, “Yes, this is war, my friend, you smell the decay of rotting meat – which may be your own rot – and you smell the sulfur which hurries the rotting!”  And when he closed his mouth, his screams tiring, he tasted metal, which tasted like blood.

He called for her.  He screamed the only comprehensible words he could find in his blindness, “Mom!  Where’s…my mom… Mom…”  As he held his insides together with his bloodied, wet hands, falling and crouched on the bodies of the decaying, jealous that they were dead, he found his thoughts running to her. 

He longed that the nightmare would end with her soft touch on his sweat-filled forehead and whisper, “Darling, wake up now, you were just dreaming.  Mama’s going to put you to bed now. Hush darling.”  So he screamed louder for her, in case his nightmare was deep.  But the soft warmth covered his hands and his body, and he realized the smell of rot was his own rot, and he realized the sounds around him had ceased, that the skies were quiet, and that he was the only one screaming.  And so he imagined her, as he screamed singing, “Hush little darling…Don’t say a word.  Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird…and if that mockingbird don’t sing, mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring.” 

“You!  Hypocrite reader!” 

Blood in your conscience, “I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”  Do you forget?  Or are you afraid that his insides are your insides, that you hold yourself together, Mister and Misses, decaying, bloodied stump skinned alive? 

Hush little darling.  Don’t say a word.  Mama’s gonna buy you a mocking bird.

* * * * *

She remembered looking at him, wrapped up in a blanket, a child, a child to be protected and held.  She had put him in her bed every night, sang to him, woken him during his nightmares, touched him to remind him she was there.  Now she sat in her kitchen, waiting for them to come, to tell her, “How brave he is!  Your son!  The soldier.  You must have been so proud.”  And all the while, she sat looking at her window, her child, her child.

Halloween, Huiling and a Freak Snowstorm

While I was at the beach in China, Cheshire Connecticut made it through hurricane Irene with minimal damage this past year.  The State had prepared for the worst of it.  Families like mine had gathered bathtubs full of water, my mother spent a few days baking goods (which included about 50 hua jiuan, approximately 100 bao zi, 3 kg of some kind of salted beef), they bought extra batteries from Costco and boarded up the windows, and I was receiving updates that neared the scale of about twenty international calls from the US per day.

While I was driving down to Connecticut from Potsdam New York (one hour shy of Ottawa), I realized that a freak snow storm had hit the northeast, leaving about 3 million people without power (and the unlucky well-water users like our home without water).  I came home to Connecticut, six hours south of Canada, to about a foot of snow, chaotically fallen trees and telephone lines, and no electricity.  It felt like the dead of winter.  It was barely even November.

* * * * *

Growing up as a first generation Chinese-American child, I inherited a list of memories that signify an immigrant childhood.  I waited for Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and was usually disappointed in the mornings when my mom presented me an unwrapped gift, usually some kind of winter clothing wear and not the awesome new Barbie doll or hotwheels toy (or whatever other thing was in style during the 90s).   I wore about three layers of long underwear underneath my jeans to school.  Each day, my mom packed me enough food to feed a small family going on vacation, and my hair was always tied up with a ridiculous number of bows and hair ties until I reached the age of six, which was when my mom cut my hair into the infamous bob (with bangs), which I wore until the age of eight.  If you want to see what I looked like, just google “asian kid hair up”, and you’ll probably get a good idea for it. 

Anyway, to leave my digression, we celebrated almost no holidays except for Halloween.  For whatever reason, my mother found Halloween to be some exceptional event, and I would be dressed up in a costume that allowed me to wear about six layers of clothing underneath, since god forbid I would get cold trick-or-treating.  This usually involved a costume that involved some kind of a mask.  “Good!  Even better.  Your face will be covered, and you can stay warm that way,” my mother would say.   [note to reader: a good cultural explanation for this is that even though China has a similar climate to the US, Chinese people are extremely – and I mean extremely – abhorrent to cold weather.  My aunt once called both my uncles to remind them that I was not allowed to drink warm or cold water during my stay in China, for fear that I would get sick.]

My hindsight explanation for my mother’s love of Halloween is the following: given that she was a graduate student living on a stipend, Halloween was the one holiday that meant I could get free stuff (and who cares if candy gives you cavities, excess sugar, too much saturated fat?), and she could watch in happiness over my excitement at organizing my hard-earned candy at the end of the night (back in my AAAAAA days, I used to organize them by brand, type, size, and preference.  I have, since then, made leaps and bounds to rid myself of some of this admittingly obsessive compulsive behavior.  It’s taken a lot of hard work, but I’ve made progress.  I am now only a type AA personality.).  As for my mom, well she is probably an economist’s perfect example of the assumption that more is always better, and I think part of her felt happy to know that I was celebrating something that other kids did in a culture so different than the one we left. 

So we’d leave the house when it was just barely dark, or when it was socially acceptable to begin trick-or-treating, and I always went alone.  My mother, being who she is, always had a strategy and route planned: we would pick the densest homes, and she’d make sure I took the shortest routes: hypotenuses across lawns, cutting and zig-zagging through streets depending on the frequencies of the houses.  She would have me persistently ring door-bells of unlit homes just in case, and if a home ever left a big bowl of candy out that said, “Help yourself”, I’d always take one and turn to my mom who would say, “Well, you may as well just grab a few more.”

Genealogically speaking, I believe hording does run in the family.  My grandfather used to have a tendency to hide photography and dentistry equipment that he’d buy or pick up from places, and I was always given the task of cleaning out his room to make sure he didn’t stash too much useless stuff under the bed and in the closets.  I attest that my mother’s Halloween frenzy was a direct trait that carried down from his line. 

“One more street,” she’d say.  This meant that after the usual three hours of trick-or-treating, I was exhausted and probably begging for her to let me stop.

“But I have school tomorrow,” I’d plead back to her. 

“I think they still have their lights on.  One more.” And we’d drive up to another street corner, and I’d lug my bag of candy with me and ring the door bell, always slightly embarrassed that it was about 10:00pm, and I was still out.  And then afterward, I would beg her to go home, and she’d persuade me to go down to another street until one by one, the little lights from the homes disappeared into the dark of night.

* * * * *

I think I stopped trick-or-treating by the age of twelve or so, and during high school, spent my evenings handing out candy and probably doing my homework and being angsty or moody.  In college, I did what the rest of my peers did at Yale, which meant running and thrashing from dorm to dorm in what we would call, “liquor treating”, and we’d always end up at the yearly Orchestra concert in Woolsey hall in a drunken stupor of sorts.  I’m not sure I’m too proud of those Halloween years, although I am proud to say that I’ve never dressed up in a fantastically “slut-tastic” outfit (read: the one time in the year when it’s OK and preferred to be a minimalist in clothing).  One year, I remember being an alcoholic drink (rum and coke?) and another year one of the Seven Deadly Sins by dressing up as gluttony in an inflatable sumo-outfit (read: male magnet.  Ladies, you really got it all wrong.  The way to go is to inflate yourself to the size of a small vehicle and run around down the busy streets of New Haven, knocking into people.  You will be sure to be noticed.).  After college Halloween night, we’d all get up early in the morning and frantically do our reading or problem sets to off-set the hang-over guilt.  I remember locking myself up in one of the weenie bins of CCL with a bottle of orange juice (sorry Yale library) and a few sleeves of crackers.

* * * * *

As I was home for this year’s Halloween, I watched my little sister with some nostalgia and some nervousness over the memory of how serious we all took Halloween during my youth.  This year, however, was marked by about two feet of snow and no power in the town of Cheshire.  When you’re from a town like Cheshire, it’s possible for all the worried little parents to gather together and discourage a dark Halloween for the sake of the children.  It is then possible to set a unified time for a “post-poned” Halloween (two weeks later), that all the neighborhoods would agree upon. 

Now, given the storm, we had lost power and water in our home, which made daily life a living nightmare.  So, luckily, my stepdad took Sophia and me to his work place (thank you B--- pharmaceutical company!), where we hid in a corner in a cafeteria, trying not to be noticed by normal people who were working, and in the after-hours, we’d sneak into the gym and shower like fugitives.  On Halloween night, I got a call from my mother as she was driving home to check on the power situation, “Pan, I think Halloween is postponed in Cheshire.  If that’s true, I will bring Sophia’s costume to Wallingford, and we’ll go there.  If it’s in Cheshire, I’ll pick you two up and you can both go.”

“Mom, I’m too old to go trick-or-treating.”

“Ok, then take Sophia.”

“Mom, there’s two feet of snow and it’s about two below zero.”

“Her costume is big.  I made her into a banana this year.  She has a lot of clothes underneath.  Just wear gloves.  Do you want me to bring you another pair of pants to wear under yours now?”  I knew arguing with her on this was futile.  So we set off in Wallingford that night, my mother driving the minivan, and me walking with Sophia down the dark streets covered with snow. 

There were a few who braved Halloween 2011 through the cold and the wet.  My sister probably got overheated given the number of layers my mom made her wear, and as Sophia chugged along on the sidewalk in her banana costume, I surprised myself by shouting, “Sophia!  Hurry up, you can finish this street in about ten minutes, and that means we can move onto the next one and get more houses before we have to go to dinner!”