This is my letter to the World
That never wrote to Me—
The simple News that Nature told—
With tender Majesty.
Her Message is committed
To Hands I cannot see—
For love of Her—Sweet—countrymen—
Judge tenderly—of Me
— Emily Dickinson
On a warm September evening, I walked over a bridge with my mother and father into Harvard Square. A pall of blue sunk into the white of an eye hidden on the horizon. Gold had shot through the cupola. The sky pregnant with cursive wellsprings of rain lowered upon a black crest lining the John F. Kennedy Park. Red brick walls once dappled with yellow light seemed to harden, turn damp. Between stubbles of ivy, in the blushing confluence of glare and dust, warmth had fled the shadows. Cars slowed at the foot of the bridge. Past the London Planes, a bicyclist sliced through a cluster of joggers still waiting for the silver light of the walking man to appear on the little black box across the street. My mother hit her arm against my thigh in an effort to startle me into the role of a pedestrian as we neared the crosswalk. Though, I was already walking, and with unnecessary surprise, I said, “What are you hitting me for?”
She jolted back as if I had maimed her, then slapped my father’s behind. He laughed.
“I’m not hitting you,” she said. “I spank your father all the time. He doesn’t mind.”
“Do you mind?”
“Oh, you can’t mind.”
“You can do what you wish, but not in public.”
“It’s a kind of talent. She has not learned how to behave in public.”
My mother drew in a sharp breath. Being a stronger woman than I had ever considered myself to be, she quickened her pace. My father slowed.
Had I not always stood between my parents without a mind of my own? I had always, according to my mother, disobeyed her wishes, and fatigued by my claim to reality, I began to believe my nature was only a slender subversion of the household god in her mind. I was never more aware of being singular, estranged from my dependence with a keyhole in my chest widening from the sudden expiration of sense. You remember too much, my mother said. I often remembered her saying that. How much more I wanted to remember I expressed through the omission of what I wanted to say. For a long time I wanted to say she never knew me. I feared her remembering of me would only make me more lonely.
My father wore a royal blue T-shirt and gray khaki shorts; my mother wore a bright orange cotton shirt, white jeans, beige-framed sunglasses, her hair tied in a loose bun bobbing up and down. Between her little speeches to herself she often pursed her lips. Her words had never yet fled her whisper.
“The lights will turn red,” she said with happiness, “the moment we reach the next crosswalk.”
My foot touched the curb and the silver light of the walking man appeared again.
“You are always right,” I said.
The losses of my innocence had made me believe in my innocence more. I had become a great liar to be a good daughter.
In a current of red bricks along the sidewalk some jutted out like loosening molars. My mother led the way as we slid single file through a flow of students strolling out of the dining hall. Young women were in linen dresses embroidered with muted emerald and sapphire flowers, or blocks of rose red satin, a wrap of shining mauve, the cut of midnight. Their counterparts wore white button-up shirts and dress pants. Others, sporting different plans for the evening, swung their backpacks over one shoulder, in jeans, shirts from summer camps, fleece pullovers tied at the waist. I balanced my foot on one chipped brick, then dipped onto the road to avoid a parking meter. Through a grid of glass to my left I saw, under a warm light, blots of chattering faces, unfinished plates, the long table spick and span. A girl took her glasses off, and with her ring finger, dabbed the inner corner of her eye just as she caught me looking. She started twisting the ring as I blinked and let my eyes move as if they had always intended to stay in motion. It occurred to me my mother could never look into that girl’s eyes the moment I received them glancing back at me.
Past Mount Auburn Street, DeWolfe Street curved up a hill into Bow Street. St. Paul’s campanile stood over us, a cropped forearm against the washed out sky. We turned right onto Arrow Street.
“Did Dad say I love you first, or did you?” I asked. My mother laughed. With a frown she threw her arm outwards at the growing line of students outside a café.
“Of course, he said I love you first. If he didn’t say I love you first I would have left him long ago.”
She crossed her arms as she migrated towards the middle of the road. Her strut turned into a waddle. I turned around and saw my father some ten paces behind us.
“Of course, of course.”
Like the stamen inside a flower
The steeple stands in lovely blue
And the day unfolds around its needle;
Exodus of blue. The sky was almost gray, fraying at the edges of night.
Many more times, in recent years, I had walked this route alone, forgetting myself through the starve of my gaze. I had justified my own hunger through remembering faces as young as my own. Perhaps it was because I was very young that I thought I needed to justify my hunger at all. There were many other aspects of becoming an individual that warranted the strains of justification. It was feigned interest, or a rehearsed care, that led me to consider my hunger as the source of some absolute flaw that made history repeat itself. I could not tell the difference. The eyes of students were always beautiful to me. The happiness and determination in their eyes returned me to my desire for becoming a mother, which gave futurity to the love I harbored towards my friends. Yet, when I read a downcast spirit in some passing eyes, a sudden affection for the unknown emerged from a closed off space within me; I felt more safe with my apprehensions, and when I noticed how I felt stronger, a hatred for myself deflected into a skepticism over the kindness of others. My doubts were, for a moment, fiction, and I was their Trojan horse penetrating reality. They seemed more like a hearth. I felt more beautiful carrying them. A few years ago I would have taken any student’s eyes as blades, hoping my flesh might gain a more honest vision through the gash of a gaze. In close proximity to models of power, even the pure quiet of my reverence could denature into a ruthless comparison. If I did not make the comparison, the radius of my peripheral vision would shrink. I feared I might be asphyxiated by bliss. How wrong I was all day! All the world was a stage, and all the men and women were merely players. Were we not taught to play pretend to forget that we would always have to play? When we played pretend as children we did not lie. We could at least answer to the nature of our condition; we could say, “Let’s play pretend.” I could not defer the ache that came with knowing the plurality of genuine love under this guise of an innocuous preparation for the real world, as if the model were not itself a source of reality.
In the middle of college I lost the ability to read and write, or rather, I refused to write—“I can’t write.” I was reading almost every waking hour. Phrases swelled like blisters on the inner skin of my dreams. They floated upon a veil stuffed into the well of my mind’s eye. They were scabs puckering for a kiss from a ghost who refused to love me. I could not remember any of them when I woke. I could no longer partake in conversation. All the banter around me felt like walls growing into a dome over my head. I was convinced language had abandoned me, and I wanted revenge. I thought I might have aphasia and went to a neurologist to do an exam shortly after I handed in all my paperwork for my leave of absence. An old man with sullen white skin and tousled white hair sat down on the blue leather stool before me, his arms crossed. My fatigue robbed me of the drama such a sanitized room might inflame. A part of me hoped for him to say I would likely be dead in a few months.
“You’re perfectly fine,” he said. I stared at him, then glanced at the pen in his hand. He looked bored. “You should be relieved? Go and enjoy your life.”
The flock of swallows that circles the steeple.
Flies there each day through the same blue air
That carries their cries from me to you;
Almost every day since graduating from college and returning home I had gone for a walk. When, in the evenings, I accompanied my parents on their usual route along the Charles River, I sometimes imagined I was walking with my son and daughter. They had no names. When the absence of their names weighed too heavily upon me, I imagined my father when he was a son, and my mother when she was a daughter. Then, I forgave them. When one of them spoke, I returned to being their daughter. In my silence I asked for them to forgive me too.
“You and I both want the other to be different,” my mother said. “But you refuse to change for me, and I refuse to change for you. You refuse to understand me and I refuse to understand you.”
My father was born with disfigured nails and irritated skin. He said it was because his mother didn’t want him and had taken medicine while she was pregnant. He was her fourth birth. He remembered haggling for fruit with his mother at a market when he was eleven years old. The fruit vendor gave his hands one glance and said, “What a life you’ve got, you ugly child!” The ugly child became a handsome man. The last time we visited China, I watched my grandmother stare at a clock to practice telling the time. The whites of her eyes were turning yellow. She trembled for the function of her mind. My father wrapped his thumb and index finger around her swelling ankle. Her legs looked like the rudiments of a harp carved from varicose clay.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“You don’t need to lie. If you’re in pain, you need to tell us.”
“I’m fine,” she said. Her eyes trailed off to the clock again. “Ten-thirty.”
Six-ten-eleven. Six-seven-ten-eleven.
A few days after we returned to America, his older sister called to notify us that my grandmother refused to eat lunch.
Ten-thirty-one.
“She said to the nurse her youngest son visited for a few days, and she was so happy, and then he was gone. He had abandoned his mother for America.”
Ten-thirty-two.
“I told her you would come back soon.”
Ten-thirty-three.
We know how high the sun is now
As long as the roof of the steeple glows,
The roof that’s covered with sheets of tin;
My mother was also the youngest daughter of two in her family. Because she received better grades from school than her sister, her mother would hide more strips of chicken in her bowl beneath the vegetables and rice. When her sister discovered where the fourth wing or the final cut of a breast had gone, it taught her something about herself she could never unlearn.
“She felt a great sense of injustice, and she was right,” my mother said. “I didn’t know what my mother was doing. I ate what I was given.”
The world was handed to you, and all you knew was how to lose it.
The glowing red sign HONG KONG Chinese Food left a pink rash on the mink coat of a woman who was smoking outside the restaurant. Beside her stood a man in a jean jacket with a yellow ochre beanie hat, slouched with his hands in his corduroy pockets, his foot pressed up against the wall. She leaned into the air before him, laughing, as he slipped his hat off revealing a crew cut. He smiled at his shoes and gently pulled at his thumbnail with his teeth. A coffer of Spanish opened and closed between them. I had walked Massachusetts Avenue through swarms of students and tourists. Chess players crowded outside the Smith Center. The afterlives of their stares upon visible and invisible grids were scorched with joy. The homeless crouched on plastic crates in front of the CVS pharmacy, their heads lowered, clothes dirtied, skin tired from sun. A part of my happiness tied itself to returning a glimpse of communion with the idleness in a stranger’s opened eyes. My hunger, your hunger; my naive look upon time; you, expressing time. My anonymity was maternal; my youth objectified my silence. A woman in a gray pencil skirt and a black blouse emerged from the Bank of America into a secret arrow of busyness caught in the act of shooting past briars of more sleeping men. Pushing a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she dipped her head, tapping her high heels together.
I had the world and the world was not.
I had walked in revelry and defeat, held hands, nearly kissed, been praised, rejected, left out, left in, abandoned the conversation, looked for and after an impassable sincerity in another. I had been ignored, yelled at. I had rubbed the white petal of a Hubei Anemone planted by the bus stop on JFK street. A pool of water had washed over my feet when the bus eventually drove by. An old friend had embraced me. I had rested my head on her shoulder.
Up there in the wind, where the wind is not, I had, I had, I had.
Years later, I hid the hardening fog of my soul in the same broad daylight, the same muteness of evening. I worked at a bookstore on Church Street. My mother said I was a fool to pursue my dreams. I thought my dreams were rather simple. Told I was perfectly fine, I still let a man look me in the eye saying he wanted to help me save my life. I let him do what he wanted. I let him speak for me, tread on my love for the world. I smiled, said thanks. I forgot I had dreams because I could not stop being a fool for them.
“You must forgive your family. We have forgotten everything,” my mother said.
Up there in the wind, where the wind is not.
But to forget everything before I had learned to act for myself was to cease to remember who I was. I felt robbed of the beginning I wanted and the beginning I had. I tried to stop remembering who I was, but I could not forget; I believed I had no voice. All the words I had loved had been loving elsewhere inside a stranger’s house for all the years I had asked for love. I tried to become a stranger.
Honor your mother and father.
You have everything. Why are you unhappy?
I am very happy.
Where are you going?
I am leaving.
Why? I need to go. Why? I am going for a walk.
I’ll be home in a few hours. I know you left the house in the middle of the night. You didn’t return until morning. I know you made the bed look like you had slept in it.
Where did you go? I know you. I raised you. I know who you are.
Did you not want me to become independent? Of course I want you to be independent.
But you did not want me to become myself.
I want you to be happy.
Why would you give birth to me if you did not want me to be free?
Why are you this way? I don’t understand.
I am madly in love with words and I fear they will never love me.
I don’t think my daughter has ever loved me.
I think you love me but you never liked me, and that turns every memory of love I have ever had into a knife. Why can’t you be a good daughter?
All the daughters I know take their mothers out for dinner with the money they’ve earned. They write letters of love and thanks. I give my daughter everything and she cries.
All my daughter does is leave.
Why did I give birth to such a daughter? I love you.
Why would you speak evil in this house?
I love you more than anything in the world.
You are my world.
Why do you try to silence the only part of me that I love?
Up there in the wind, where the wind is not
Turning the vane of the weathercock
The weathercock silently crows in the wind.
Remember, you always have this home to return to. No matter what happens.
Rain never came. Wind drew tears with the shadows of leaves. The dark bosom of the evening was the same darkness I saw within myself when I was stranded in the present tense years ago. I had nowhere to go then, I remembered, even though I knew the way home. When I returned, the house was the same as I had left it.
We are the only people in the world who will never try to hurt you.
On the bridge, my mother slipped her hand into mine. “Why did you leave?” she asked.
Up there in the wind, where the wind is not.
I followed our three shadows along the parapet of the bridge.
We are sorry if we have.
The rhythm of our gaits strung a field of shadows together. In each field we cradled wrinkles of light over the lowering blue of the river.
Years ago, years again. I am, I am, I am.
Bibliography
“In Lovely Blue,” by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by George Kalogeris, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/52408/in-lovely-blue.
“This is my letter to the World,” by Emily Dickinson, https://poets.org/poem/my-letter-world.