“Tai Hua Ru Mi Xiao…”

“…Ye Xue Mu Dan Kai”

Someone broke my sentences; something no one had done before. I reckoned the precise description was that he actively joined my utterance as if we were making an effort to sing in chorus. It was a poem from some far-off dynasty. I pumped out this nonentity when the teacher asked about the properties of blossom Tai Hua. It was an oddly named poem that I found in a parchment poem collection lying rancidly in the attic in my childhood. I never thought anyone else would share this poem with me. In fact, I nearly forgot the poem myself. But he joined me, murmuring the lines anchoring me. I paused to clear my mind. I paused to see who was the person. I turned my head, and the chorus instantly stopped as if he joined my minor key unconsciously and when he turned sober he stopped. He had a look that was simultaneously horrified and wistfully. We were both brave enough not to stop looking.

Now, ask anyone in the room at that moment: did they see anything? Something thick in the air made it shimmering and fragrant. Some possibilities buried in four shifting eyes.

I swallowed down and stumbled to finish my discourse.

We met again in the library. I came across his way to Ilya Kaminsky. This uncommon entanglement of souls forced us to sit down.

He said:

The first time I saw you, words failed me. I stammered over a simple hi. Sometimes, when you spoke in literature classes, striving to find meaning for a signifier, I knew words failed you. Things we loved most dearly were the things we fell before we knew. We didn’t take the full responsibility to explain, but we own the right to love. Like the time when I joined your discourse, that tension in the air made me speechless. I tried so many times to capture that in sentences, to freeze that moment into my diary, but I failed my words. All I left of you were doodles on the page, twisted and unresolved.

I said:

I often feel like there’s a thorn pricking my throat. The words unsaid stuck underneath my tongue and I just had nowhere to drop them. The other day, I sat politely in my literature class, listening to all the girls bragging about how they loved Bob Dylan, eyes flitting over the open Wikipedia webpage. They recited the entries, butt rubbing their seats, scrambling to win the pretty blue eyes of the teacher. I found myself most speechless and enraged by this kind of scene, where your words were stolen by computers and computer people; they left you nothing to speak. Words always fail us, and sometimes people do. There’s nothing you can do about it. All you can do is sit there, drowning in your speech. For once, when I spoke with my voice low about the tension between expressionism and subjectivity loss, your eyes captured me. My tongue stuttered, but you gave me my voice. Because we learned to talk with electromagnetic waves emitted by eyes, being innocent and mad enough to think two of us could imitate the way people physically talk. Ni Hao. Hi. I entered you, slid into your narrative like a cunning snake. You willingly took me in. And I paced.

With an old man pacing leisurely behind me, step by step, strokes heavy on the ground, I felt no way to escape. I wanted to rush into my hotel room and enter my self-isolation again. Earlier, he joined me in the elevator. His physique stood tall in front of me, senile and clumsy. He was chewing loudly on his greasy breakfast meal, frothing at the mouth and the remnants of his food dispersing in the enclosed space. I couldn’t help but look at his hands. The parchment skin collapsed limply over the bones, grooves all over the place. It made me want to talk about the palms: papa’s big arms with rough texture. They squeezed my flesh so hard that immediately I felt my body departing, fingers laying on my skin twisting my soul. This was not a retention, but a kind of forcing stay. And there were those palms too soft. Their caresses were mists in dawns, too light and fine for me to actually feel. Then there’s the skin of cuticles and calluses that shrouded over my purity. The scars of daytime fatigue all of a sudden caught me again. Goosebumps. I squirmed to escape from such a hand. The firm hands of yours were unlike anything else. I madly claimed I never learned the definition of warm before I was touched by those. They were big enough to enfold my cheeks but never my face. I could count all the fibers of textures on your hands. Your palms had scars to which I had never questioned why: I kissed them divinely. Your hands covered me, like the lake in early spring around my hometown. Warm, properly cool, and refreshing; soft and smooth like melting summer ice cream. I would like to drown in that vanilla flavor. How’s love not a death?

My literature teacher said that fair writing is zeugma, European syntax, and contextual misplacement. I yawned and yawned: cerulean flows of my language rotted into factory wastes, leaking through my fingers, empty. I started to struggle: about how to alienate you, how to position my words to be paradoxically misplaced. This is your novelty. I maintained. The sense of poetry then dissolves in literary experimentations. Where’s the significance of shrill conflicting imagery clusters anyway?

Come on. You lent me a hand. I want to show you something.

We submerged down into Shanghai’s metro system. You clenched my hand; we leaped across the subway security gates, spinning and racing through the empty halls. I looked up, dazzling lights flickering on the chandelier like summer butterflies. Everything that night was drenched in soft white filters. I was breathless. We stepped on the subway. Line two. Line ten. I was drowsy on your shoulder. Red, green, white. I counted lights passing our existence. You squeezed my hand then the train instantly stopped.

We broke through the surface. It was late in the night, and the sky was dark and crystal clear, with a kind of air that was wet even without the rain. You rented a bike and carried me on. We galloped down the midnight streets. I leaned forward, sat on my knees with my hands circling your waist. I looked up, wondering at the streetlights trembling on the footbridge, one after the another, flung so far behind us. I shouted, tossing those words I weighed into the complete void. We must’ve been drunk. I wanted to cry.

You stopped at the base of a half-done skyscraper, so out of place to the vacant land around it like it’s been thrown to the ground by aliens up from limbo. The building was merely layers of layers of cement slabs, no windows, no rooms, and no walls, sustained only by four load-bearing pillars at the corners.

I feel so small down here. I said.

You didn’t answer. You smiled. You took my hand and led me inside the guardrails.

Before you took me up that undone skyscraper, I never knew your family or your father’s billionaire, until you told me it was your papa’s project, forgone after his death. I was pretty sure that the building’s doomed to crumble and die like your father, too, so I imagined: that all we had left was our souls, and that such a gentle force would not be enough to collapse. You sensed my gloominess in the dark and grasped my terror into your hand. We reached the 17th floor.

Here.

In silence you were sounding.

The very center of the bare concrete slab, a globe of glow piercing through the night. Its purity with transparency was otherworldly. A halo washed to our feet, a tidal wave come and go. You sat down around the light, staring at my thrilling body. You laughed and told me this was some invention you stole at the science fair where someone put it in the trashbin with a tag “worst invention ever”. You put it here after your father’s death which earlier had led you to this place. It’s not a place where you feel like home. You said. You’re a refugee here, an outlander. I studied you. I tumbled down. You cuddled me in. The gaping hole in your collarbone was closed by my cheeks. We talked. How beautiful it was to know you. Upon the earth and the night. You were everlasting. You wouldn’t leave for the one pillow’s softness was calling. You were more than lights, and now my bones and marrows are boiled. We were beyond religious. And we were sober like newborns.

(THE ACTRESS and THE ACTOR are sitting together shoulder to shoulder on one concrete slab of an unfinished skyscraper with their legs hanging in the open air. They watch all the lights adorning the city night.) 

THE ACTRESS

(in ecstasy, eyes shimmering)

This place is so different from where I lived. I’d love you for taking me up here. 

THE ACTOR

Where do you live exactly? 

(THE ACTOR turns his head to look at her in a teasing expression.)

(THE ACTRESS is still enchanted by the night, looking vividly) 

THE ACTRESS

Well, I live in a high-tech corporate campus, I think. There are no trees, no trembling lights, no nights, nothing but emotionless walking machines and walls of steel. Do you know in philosophy there’s a concept for people without consciousness called zombies? 

THE ACTOR

Come on, Ms. know-it-all (snorting). Don’t break the self-explanatory night with metaphysics trivia. (suddenly turns his head to the audience) And you have lived 17 years in the most developed area of Shanghai where people would sell their souls to buy even a bathroom there. 

THE ACTRESS

I know you won’t really understand me until you’ve lived on those streets (soliloquizing, reaching for THE ACTOR’s hands). I felt like I was stuck there, in a water cell, barely able to breathe.

(THE ACTOR accepts her open hands.)

THE ACTRESS

(Suddenly) Why do I feel this sleepy? 

(A drunk, drugged look appears on THE ACTRESS’s face. Her eyes are half-closing.) 

(THE ACTOR’s holding back an overbearing expression. His face is tight, carefully composed.)

THE ACTOR

Hold on, the night is still young. 

(THE ACTRESS falls asleep before hearing his speech.) 

THE ACTOR

(sees her falling asleep, speaks with voice light but least tender – almost pitying)

Listen to yourself. You are surrounded by stuck-up professors and rich engineers. You supposedly have all the opportunities in the world. Yet you never sought for it. How silly of you.

I am writing a book. I said, trying to sound like thoughtless but it came out rather deliberate.

Well, to be honest, I’m not surprised. It’s just the stuff you would do. What’s it about? He said in a relaxing way. I sensed he lifted his head to look at me.

Well, it’s kind of about us. At least, it’s meeting you that made me want to write. You kind of inspired me.

I heard he was forcing back a laugh. Still, I didn’t look up. I could afford more excitement, though. I continued to speak.

It’s a story about how two teenagers found each other by sharing a fanatic obsession with Dr. Seuss. I mean they grow up reading Dr. Seuss. I stopped, unsure what more to say.

So you’re inferring I myself read Dr. Seuss as a child? His tone was inscrutable. I didn’t know why he was asking the question. I looked up.

Maybe. I don’t know.

He laughed. Not in a genuine way, but somewhat playful and bantering.

What? I asked.

Nothing. It’s just always fun to think about the gap between us. You grew up reading Dr. Seuss and other world-famous cartoon books selected meticulously by your parents, while I grew up reading every book I could get my hand on, you know, those tabloids and subpar books in my father’s study.

It’s not like that. Why do you always get this sensitive when it comes to our identities? I defended and bowed my head again. But he wouldn’t stop talking.

You remember that poem? That poem we shared? I was forced to memorize it by my teacher, yet you read it for pleasure. That’s probably the difference between the son of a parvenu and the daughter of a scholar.

A voice, distinctly male, abruptly invaded the stillness. It possessed a deep, magnetic timbre that sent ripples through the air, disturbing my very breath. I shivered involuntarily, aware of the grating quality of this sound. Yet, he persisted, unfaltering in his recitation. The very words I had once revered, upon which my existence depended, now spewed from his mouth in a nauseating manner. I wanted him to stop. But he paid no heed, continuing to brazenly violate my sacred sanctuary.

Is this how you think of me? A girl who benefits from legacies? I left these words unspoken, decomposing in my saliva.

There’s a lake I’ve always been imaging in which I threw in all the words inside me, roaring and howling; and the lake swelled up.

One poem finished, dead cicadas lying between my lines.

Then, suddenly you’re out of my sight. A paradoxical crossword

puzzle would remain forever unsolved. The critics rushed in,

thick and fast, chewing my gossip like licorice candies

while drawing red crosses on my lines. Is this a form

of excessive self-giving? No one can ever reveal our story.

And no one bothered to try. In the end, the dedication

on my front page grew to ochre, burying under the broken ground.

I should have accepted it all.

Dear Diary,

I tried to pressure everything into the deepest part of me and lock it with the key he gave me, but I failed. Every night I let the tears pour back up inside me, I just couldn’t take it anymore. I started to feel a mental wire forming inside me. I couldn’t get it out, for it was wrapped deeply into my heart. If I forced it out, my flesh would come within it, ripped out. And the fragments of my heart, soaking with blood, dripping and bleeding, would be offered to everyone. I volunteered to be placed.

My bruises are still new.

And my cuts: they are new.

I am just tired of over and over again writing explicitly down my agony, delivering it to the public, and desperately pleasing everyone to read this piece, understand this piece, and oh god love this piece as if it is the greatest work of all time! Last night, I stood in front of this mirror, half-dressed with a thin veil layer of my pajama, but I felt the worst uncovered, stark naked. Misty steam kept washing my body even after the bath. I stared at myself for four minutes straight, till I no longer recognized my own: my facial features drifted away from me, rearranging. My eyes became asymmetrical, weirdly tilted, and distorted. Do you know I cannot see the light in my eyes anymore? The burning fire inside me that used to supply every muscle movement had been put out by my never-ending tears. I saw the Demoness in the mirror grinning eerily at me as if she had won the war. Midnight ghost, I was haunted, but what was left of me was too exhausted for a scream. I dashed out of the bathroom, no tears. I just sat in the dormitory, in the grand laughter of my friends over some school gossip, and thought of nothing.

I just sat there, holding a big fake smile, listening, while knowing my soul sinking and suffocating, dead like an over-singing songbird.

The idea of somewhere else here in Shanghai throwing a funeral gave me flimsy comfort, even though it was not for me – but what in this world was for me anyway? Love’s not, writing’s not, living’s not, and apparently, boys are not as well. It was too silly of me to once believe one could give up all of the tributes to come for me. Now I didn’t trust any human being (call it the virtue of a true poet). In the school cafeteria, I watched all the people walking past me as they performed precise muscle movements to achieve the task of walking, and I couldn’t convince myself they were real people. Every human movement seemed to me so emotionless, so kinetic without the simplest empathy. The world has gone lean beyond recognition for me, like a shaky dollhouse. Run, mortals, now that all the demons within us have grown into behemoths. Look, they were tottering through the city to put down the surrounding pliant walls. Then you will know the world is merely an illusion, and you were just a tool used by me to achieve a higher form of symbolism. Then you will know about all the underlying truths buried under my lies. We’ll see.

I walked over to Tai Hua, and with a grimace, I gathered them up and ground them to a pulp in my tender, warm palm.