ecdysis;
one must wonder if a monster loves its creator.
爸, 说实话, what did you feel, when you watched the ultrasound on that too-small screen? that moment you learned your firstborn would be a daughter, was i destined to disappoint, already? summer baby, in the scorching heat of a desert not yet your home. a man at the cusp of becoming a father; a daughter at the cusp of becoming a marionette on a crimson string.
» if you could do it all over again, would you? knowing what you do now, i mean. would you go back in time and do it all over again?
little snake, i’ll tell you all this now. perhaps it’d spare you the pain.
no one will teach you how to bear the weight of being the first child. how to believe that you’re enough. you’ll bottle it up instead, turn it within. you’ll become a monster to yourself, tear the anger from your flesh so you’ll never be like them. you’ll watch coldly as it rattles the immovable bars of its cage to this day, festering in the absence of daylight. you’ll hide like all prey do, burrowing deep, gnawing off your own limbs to escape. you’ll bleed out in prayer; pour all your faith in the idea of a savior.
these things — these things you’re far too young to know. these things that are already preordained. protector—that is what you become; eldest daughter of a younger sister and an only son. your being is something they will never understand. the selflessness you’re bestowed is both a blessing and a curse. what happens is you disappear, and it will take you lifetimes to learn to shed your skin.
but the silver lining is that you do. you do learn, someday. because for him, you must.
i used to live in a lot of regrets. all the what-ifs and what-could-have-beens. but — genuinely, i don’t know if i’d still end up here today, or if this could have happened any other way. coin toss — the hand’s already been dealt, and i’ve learned to find my way to the other side. i don’t know who i might’ve become otherwise, and it feels like i’ve finally found who i was searching for within myself. i wouldn’t want to lose everything i know today.
is that selfish of me to say?
autumn baby, a stroke of luck; oh, to have been blessed at last with a son. i’m too young to know the ends i’d go to protect you yet. for now, we’re still just children. my hands are as child-soft as yours, small and delicate around an even smaller curl.
(i hold you in the cradle of my interwoven arms, and we’re still just children. you speak your first word — 妈, the same as my own, and we’re still just children. you come home from school one day with your front tooth chipped clean off — it was an accident during PE class, you say, you tripped when someone pushed you over, and we’re still just children, but the rage that consumes me is so blinding, so incandescent, too large and ugly and monstrous for my scrawny teenage body it scares me; and we’re still just children but something has shifted within my weary bones where they chafe beneath my flesh, no longer child-soft and innocent, no longer unblemished by yesterday, no longer a possibility of what i might do because of you, for you, but a promise, settling heavy into my nascent being)
» what about him, though? it sounds like you’ve made peace with your own becoming. or at least, you’ve come to terms with it, and with where you are today. but what about him?
my fingertips and the curve of my throat, now unmarred. the abandoned ghosts of my piety have now taken up residence on yours. i fear you’re doomed to follow my footsteps — is it instinct, or is it inevitable?
(you have our mother’s eyes. i wonder what father sees when he looks at you. if it is penance or a salve)
do you remember that time we went hiking when we were kids? i lost my balance on the loose gravel while i was carrying you, and we both cried, then — you, from the turbulence and shock; me, from the pain. i still have the scar, visible on my left knee.
someone had crushed the moon underfoot yesterday. you’re up in flagstaff today, and tomorrow, you’ll be on that stage for the first time, the same stage i stood on for the first time when i was your age, a stage you won’t step foot on again until you’re seventeen.
perhaps you’re doomed to follow some of my footsteps, but you’ve already surpassed me, in some ways. i wonder if you know that, yet. i wonder when you will.
(sighs)
you know what the worst part of being an older sister is, especially with an age gap like ours? another part that no one really tells you, that you don’t really realize when you’re still a kid yourself, that hits you out of nowhere when you’re somewhere one foot into ‘adulthood’ and the rest of your life. this one fucked me up. my biggest fear is that i’m becoming my parents and i won’t be able to stop it. there’s a fine line between a love that’s healthy and a love that’s not. no one is born with the ability to hurt another human without conscience, especially one they care about, and yet we all somehow do it all the same.
that’s the worst part of it all — knowing they loved me and still raised me in a way that made me question it every single day. that they, too, were made into the people that they were. they they were — are — human too. that i’m just as capable of inflicting that hurt.
that’s the part that scares me the most — that i might be smothering him already by trying to protect him from the world. maybe he already hates me for it, and i don’t even know. maybe my own children will too. maybe it’s inevitable.
but — fuck, even if it’s instinct, even if it’s inevitable, even if the script has already been written and i’m still just that marionette again, following its whims — what’s the alternative? is it delusional of me to think that i can do better? that i can be more than just a string of repeated mistakes?
why all this music, if we’re not meant to dance? until we’re already always doomed. because we’re already, always damned.
ps.
it is so complicated to write about family. it’s difficult for me, still, to reconcile this image and reality of my parents with the one that still occupies the majority of my waking memory. it’s been years since i felt acutely the resentment and hurt and frustration i did as a child, but it makes it no simpler to handle the aftermath. if anything, adding this nuance, adding color, makes it impossibly harder to. does it make me a bad daughter for saying these things? i often feel a lot of guilt for how subjective my memory is, for how i can only retell my lived side of the story.
how old were you when you realized your parents were, are, just human too, and too young for the choices they made?
but this is as best as i can recount it; it would be dishonest any other way. to love is to know you are capable of inflicting pain, of being hurt, and trusting them anyway.
as always, with love.
notes:
‘gnawing off your own limbs to escape’ is a nod to dune. rephrased in the movie, but original quote
说实话: literally translates to ‘say the truth’, but colloquially used as ‘to be honest’. here using the former.
ecdysis: when a reptile sheds its skin
‘if we’re not supposed to dance, why all this music?’ from to be alive by gregory orr. i think of this poem alot.
read a bunch of Ted Chiang short stories this week.
from ‘story of your life’
