I woke up this morning fuzzier than usual.
It's easier to remember in my sleep but the memories are now tied with hopefulness--your hopefulness. Your jacket was cold on the outside as I hugged you, and I remember your body warm as I slipped my hand in and tried to squeeze. I remember you tried to kiss me goodbye and I moved from it as I sobbed. I didn't want to miss that kiss but still I moved.
The journey alone has been quiet. You text me or email me or my own brain will write your words for me...
Words were labels that he had never paticularly enjoyed. Words were lazy, letting you lapse into not thinking about them. Once you had the label for it, you could move on, not bother thinking about the object itself.
"Weird" was a label. It was a sentence. It was a write-off. A decision that he wasn't worth worrying about, not worth bothering with. They tried to pretend it wasn't, or at least some of them did - at least the cruel ones were honest. They didn't pretend they wanted to understand him. As far as they were concerned they did; they...
Autumn, 1923
“Would, I be fine?” I inquire softly to Māmā and Bà Bà.
“Don’t worry, just believe in yourself and ignore nasty comments.” My Māmā’s tone was silky and kind-hearted. She patted me softly on the back and kiss my forehead lightly to reassure me for all the pressure I have.
As I entered Shāmiàn island primary school with my two brothers and sister, I glanced at my Māmā and Bà Bà once more, waving ceaseless at them. So many emotions emerged from my mind; frightened, happy, determined and shocked. Nine hours of school and nine hours, not seeing...
His dive, performed in front of the small, half-drunk dinner party, was perfect in his mind. He'd had a few martinis at dinner, his wife looking at him strangely over her chardonnay. But he was on a roll that night. And Joyce had come with that husband of hers, Jerry, and had shot him her own looks as he went on about this and that. Sometimes the words came spilling out in a beautiful procession. Tonight, he was on.
Then the whole group wandered out to the backyard after he had told them he was going to perform the dive...
Potatoes.
Kept in the cellar in a woven sack. My pillow for the last three weeks since Grandpa decided I was too bad to live with the rest of them.
Not that I did anything wrong by normal people's standards.
Grandpa was funny in the head. Grandma was scared of him so went along with his punishments for us kids, and took a beating herself too.
Life was hard for her. Grandpa had a way that could make himself look like a regular person when he met other folks. No-one knew what was really going on in our home.
The...
Powerful legs, legs charged by the spirit of youth, the longing to break free and simply run full pelt meaninglessly. These legs, this energy took her gambolling madly down to the bottom of Grandpa's garden to the summerhouse. Back at the town house, up his room was death, despair, disease and unbearable suffocating sadness and stifling stillness. Here outside was green; fresh wet green, distant roaring traffic - movement, life energy, freedom. Her lungs were full of cleaner cooler air and her hair pulled straight out behind her. Fresh air hair. She reached the summerhouse door and ran in.
'He's...
Through the veil she was almost as pretty as I'd wished she would have been the first time we met for real, in real life, in person on the street. The love of my life.
I remembered that in certain photographs she had this quality, like an angel or maybe just someone who thought they were one, so strung out they could touch the sky. She wasn't that pretty, no pixie dust queen, just another girl who liked to make faces. But I think I love her.
You hope that, and I hoped that, the love of my life--because that's...
It was quiet down there. With only 2 days to go, the travelers unwrapped their last portions - bits of cheese, the last remnants of the dried ham, a couple of flagons of water to wash it all down - and proceeded to feast. This was the home stretch; already, they could see greenery creeping onto the pitch-black walls, illuminated by the faint cracks developing in the rough rock.
It felt like their memories, too, were being rearranged. Some had already started to forget how they got there; the winding caves leading to their nook were receding into the darkness...
The paradox was that while we had been sitting in a cafe in Paris, waiting for the kick, our future selves had reprogrammed the jukebox to play nothing but St. Etienne. So we sat and we drank our tea and slowly, little by little, we became our own dream. The future died there amongst the earl grey and gilt picture frames, and with it, so did she.
She wasn't more than 10 when the meteor struck Beijing, the meteor we should have been there to stop. Huddled in a doorway, she died wrapped in red silk and fire. She was...
In 1921, he flew from the Great Rift Valley. No one believed him, of course. They knew a man could not simply spread his wings and fly. Because a man had no wings, and that was really the point of it. But he insisted he had done it. “Just because no one saw me,” he said, stretching his arms up to the sky, “Does not mean it didn’t happen.”
No one was convinced.
“I flew,” he continued, “From one side of the rift to the other. Over the canyon. I soared above the ground and floated in the sky.” He...