to my mother whose love language is acts of service
I too struggle to say I love you a hook that catches the back of my throat marrs my esophagus cursed three-letter phrase congealing into a viscous cesspool I too prefer flower-embellished cards handwritten notes presents that have spent the past few months blooming in the cragged edges of my heart I too know how saying it feels like boiling water poured over my skin like I’m trapped under a net in a glass display to be gawked at pointed at photographed How to respond to words that flake like metallic paint under the scrutiny of time That I think are meant for the projection of me that I am watching play from afar How to say it when I feel like I’m selling something that is not even mine to begin with
*
Love is a foreign language more tonally complex than Cantonese still I trip over the six tones the pitch contours axe a stress when there’s supposed to be a lilt Love was written in the folds of your acts in perfect stacks of fitted sheets in a basket of clothes still warm from the dryer in your hands that have become calloused and thick from carrying steaming soup to the dinner table I learned the language of love from you Forgive me for my first-generation fumbles for flinching at an unexpected touch for adopting your mother tongue in a country that speaks a different language
*
But sometimes I recognize myself in that projection that inverted image and saying it soothes instead of splinters Sometimes it is like catching a dream that I thought I had forgotten upon waking the mirage of an oasis flickering just within reach Sometimes it takes hearing it to know that it is true That three words can feel warmer than the tea eggs you let soak overnight in soy sauce and spices
*
Which is to say yes to sliced apples because I hate the core yes to refrigerating the Brita even though you hate cold water yes to washing all the dishes picking up socks under the sofa driving two hours to watch me play soccer for thirty minutes but also yes to fishing out the eight letter phrase that has rusted from disuse
revelation
Bloody bloody the end will come. Your two hands limp on the grocery cart, feet tapping to the beep of the barcode scanner, and the earth will explode/sky will collapse/you will spontaneously combust/commit a mass suicide à la Jonestown. They will say Second Coming or Atlas’ muscles atrophied or Maitreya achieved complete enlightenment or global pandemic; they will say they saw it coming, bull to bear, shortage of face masks, melting ice caps, nationalism, socialism; they will say they never saw it coming, thief in the night, bear to bull, democracy, worldwide peace. Never mind—you didn’t expect it. Your hands, limp. Your feet, tapping. Come we’ll end the bloody bloody.
* * *
In Chinese Checkers, your goal is to have all your spheres be the first to cross to the opposite hexagram, which is the complementary color of whatever you start out with. Is the end then, not just an inverse of the beginning? Pick your color. Begin. Whichever way you jump, however long it takes you to get there, everyone will reach the end.
* * *
Is faith sitting in a chair and believing it will not collapse? Does a chair breaking under you one time subsequently render you faithless in all chairs?
Faith in a system that is expected to have recessions once every eight or so years?
Faith, which Carson had, in motor vehicle laws. This is the faith she practiced daily, bulldozing onto the street, a caring, cautionary friend sometimes jerking her back, often one friend per arm, hair once too in a moment of near-death. But Carson, faith still intact, would smile, breezily, easily, she liked to think, and say: If they run me over, I can finally pay off last month’s rent or I’m not too attached to this Earth anyway or I’m not worried, they’re the ones looking at jail time. The closer she was to being run over, the more explanations she’d rattle off like they were her lifejackets.
Of course it was all posturing. She did not really want to die, not before the great love of her life; not before her heart was broken by said love so she could sit mummified in her bathroom bawling into her bottle of Bacardi her faithful college brand inexpensive and effective, so adamant was she in this belief that she must give herself up to someone only for them to thoroughly ruin her; not before she found out why man toiled under the sun, really what was she doing in her mid-twenties posing as a project manager what did that even mean, vanity of vanities everything had been done if nothing was new did anything she contribute mean anything what was the point of being birthed if the earth were to explode anyway, she felt irreversibly wretched that she had expanded her good mother’s vagina given her stretch marks permanent belly fat and her compensation was that she received the most average of average child and wasn’t that her worst fear, to be mediocre; not before she could write something good really good she wrote everything after midnight ashamed to look at the detritus she was actively contributing to the world there was enough pollution already sometimes she felt it was okay maybe even good but it would never be really really great and what was the point if she was just okay or just good, remembered sinking into authorial depression after reading Ulysses because what could you write after that; not before she had children which she craved like it was fast food ever since she played House in the first grade but so fearful was she of the vagina loosening skin stretching gaining pounds the pain the pain the change, they always pretend it’s not that bad but in the third grade her cousin showed her a birthing video she’s never forgotten it since the horrible bloody crowning the mother screaming the vagina being cut, in college had to watch another birthing video this time in the name of 16 mm avant-garde film she actually clutched her inner thighs in anticipatory pain Window Water Baby Moving even the nine-month gestation period horrified her the impossibly swollen belly taut skin primed to burst anyone that told her it wasn’t that bad was lying through their teeth besides she had a low pain tolerance, but oh she wanted kids, she wanted to read to them and play with them and watch them grow up and they were so cute with their chubby cheeks and fat thighs though when they bawled she wanted to slap them, perhaps also a small part of her wanting them so badly was because if she was thoroughly and contemptuously mediocre which she knew she would be there was no avoiding it now she could live viscerally through her children perhaps they would be geniuses Shirley Temples delightful distractions from what she imagined her bleak life would become twenty year reunions dreaded suburbia PTA meetings; not before she reclaimed her faith she was a reluctant apostate prodigal son wanted to come home but was waiting for divine intervention Damascus Road, professor bet her that she’d never renounce God sophomoric arrogance had lost her a hundred dollars adjusted for inflation thankfully no interest Saul Saul why are you forsaking me it seemed like she cried to herself in the shower more and more now thinking of everything she had lost Benjamin Franklin and all, couldn’t tell whether it was worse to burn in hell or really have the end be the end. What was it, the end? What would it be like? She used to be so sure. Peter and the Pearly Gates. Infinity. To think of that. To go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and If it scared her now to think of an end, it frightened her to think of no end because what would that mean, to never have an ending?
Of course she never told her friends this. Of course she also truly believed her jokes regarding her disdain for life.
Faith, which we were talking about, enabled Carson to repeat the same action she had since she was a child. The Pavlovian reaction to seeing a crosswalk. Why did Carson cross the road? To get to the other side. Heaven or hell? Her eyes went wide as a notification on her phone alerted her that the Dow had dropped five hundred points and had been dropping for a week straight.
Today unfortunately, her new faith failed her as a car happened to run her over. The driver, not reckless but worried about the economy, had also happened to look down at his phone for a few seconds, not spare in hindsight, slack-jawed at the tanking stock market, worried for his mother’s retirement fund, worried for his own retirement fund and looked up in time to see a body hit the car and his first thoughts were:
1. my girlfriend has that same tan peacoat
2. I think I just ran someone over
3. oh, shit
She had been wearing that camel coat all week trying to hide the baby bump from him, he thought, and she was going to tell him tonight, she had texted him to come home early because she had something important to tell him; he’d bought her favorite bottle of wine, was looking forward to some very good sex tonight; now there’d be no sex but still a baby; same salary, new mouth to feed, probable jail time; manslaughter was how many years? That woman, my god, what the fuck was she doing walking a green, not manslaughter but probable suicide. Holy shit, some people should not have the license to walk. If the light is green and it is your right-of-way, but you see a pedestrian cross the road, should you:
A. Roll down the window and tell them to hurry up
B. Speed up and try to pass them because it’s your right-of-way
C. Yield to the pedestrian
The cars closest to them came to a jerky halt. Some people on the sidewalk screamed, and the man in the car felt faint, like he was suffering from a heat stroke, and closed his eyes in accepting despair. He didn’t hear the crunching bones, the shattering glass or Carson’s skull knocking hard against the cement, but he told the court later that he did hear the profanities, mostly his own, cutting the humid summer afternoon as he stepped out of his car.
For Carson, she heard only screeching, but she was unable to tell the court, or anybody else, for that is how her end came: bloody and bloody.
Carson’s eyes darted from phone to car to weary, not-yet shocked driver, and realized this is what she had feared since she came wailing out of her mother’s womb, no before that, since she was a blind fetus swathed in darkness, no before that, since she was just an egg, still clinging to the lining of the womb: she had seen the end then. Mediocre.
* * *
Let’s start over. Carson is not dead, or rather, she is not dead yet. She is not dead in the sense that she has just been struck by a car and cracked her head open on the pavement. She is dead in the sense that she feels trapped in her own suffocating exoskeleton of mediocrity. She is not dead in the sense that I, the author, can disregard the entire last scene if I so wish to or decide that the accident is not fatal or have the world’s best trauma surgeon work on her. She is dead in the sense I wrote a few paragraphs before that she has kicked the bucket.
Carson is not dead. The world’s best trauma surgeon worked on her.
What, then, next? If she is not yet dead, I have not kept death at bay, only given her an opportunity to alter the color pattern of the hexagonal sea she is crossing. Sternhalma is a short game. A player’s path is dependent on remaining players’ paths, which is to say, your will is limited by others. She chose freely to walk into a busy street, and someone else chose to run her over. Surely she did not will herself to die.
Carson is not dead, but she will suffer from a noticeable limp until she becomes ash. Strangers will gape publicly at the red gash running down her right leg; friends will never ask about it, thinking they are being sensitive; lovers will gently kiss it, thinking they are healing her.
* * *
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
How much.
How much who?
How much blood can come out of a head?
You mean how much what.
* * *
No end without a beginning. Begin with blood. End with violence. Does the beginning exist only for an end? What does infinity mean, with no end and no beginning, entwined in a forever loop?
Car crash Carson lay in a pool of her own blood, not yet gelatinous. Bathe in blood, Báthory. Robe of white, dipped in blood. She remembered raising the wine to her lips for the first time, its taste surprisingly not tart wine or copper blood but like Welch’s from the local supermarket.
This is my blood, poured out for you.