Dear Mom,
Do you remember this picture? I do. I remember a lot about those days, when we were a family. Yesterday, I recreated this exact image with my daughter. Tess turned five on Tuesday. She's so excited to start school next month. I'm only scared that other kids will ask her about her family. I don't want to tell her that most of her family didn't want her. I don't want to tell her that Grandma and Grandpa wanted her to disappear.
I have no idea if this letter will make you love my daughter but I want you...
Heaven; such a harmonious place.
With luscious trees and elevated mountains.
A lighthouse standing tall in the distance;
An lingering canoe floating in the shimmering lake.
Billowy clouds soaring across the sky.
A car driving down the road.
God is in presence;
We are in heaven.
Somewhere across the field, there were worlds unexplored, lives never lived. Somewhere over that field there was a dream, there was a magical land in which -
She knew she romanticising it. She knew that fairy tales were just that, she knew that living happily ever after was not a reality. She knew that across the field there was little more than...more fields.
But they were unexplored fields, they were new fields, and the unknown was better than this. This sepia-toned world, this dull, boring land that held no adventure, no prospects, no hope.
Across the field there was another...
I don't want to hurt you.
I want to hurt. At least then I'll feel something. I can't go back to being numb like that again. I felt so, so dead.
Does that mean you feel alive now?
Like you wouldn't believe. Just being with you wakes me up.
Oh, really?
Please don't leave me. I can't go back.
I can't stay.
If you leave, I'll die again!
"I'm sorry." I dropped everything I was holding, and sat on the ground. Why did everything I love, fall through the spaces between my fingers like it was nothing. My kitchen floor felt cool, and I scratched my fingers across the tile, my stomach was beginning to feel sick. This had all moved too quickly, so I got up and sprinted to the bathroom. I thought I would vomit immediately, but it wasn't until I flashed back to every word people had said about where he had been, that made me release everything in my stomach. I didn't want to...
After my first day on medicine clinic, my head was spinning like a top. I couldn't believe how disorganized the modern American hospital could actually be. If anyone had told me, "dear, when you finally become a doctor, your colleagues will constantly be trying to kill your patients, and you'll have your hands full trying to stop them from practicing medicine," I would have just laughed nervously and moved on.
Yet, here I was.
Nothing could have prepared me for the carnage I was witnessing, and not just in terms of my coworkers being lazy, stupid, and sometimes downright malevolent....
Gradually, the ankle will become the hip, the hip will become the shoulder, because the parts become the whole.
The whole joins to other wholes becoming greater wholes.
Gradually, everything will unconnect, unbecome because of something somebody wrote down in his notebook. As then, gradually, we will reconnect and rebecome.
Gradually, you will realize everything is in your mind and nothing that happens ever happens
I lay siege to it. This was war and a fast and furious assault seemed the surest course. There was a front to push forward, barriers to overcome, landmines to be defused. I was young and relentless and eager; I couldn't lose. After every foray I watched the scaffolding rise again, higher and higher and each time I tore it down, waiting for the walls to fall. Eventually I tired of the advance and retreat. New orders came. I couldn't win this battle and there were other wars to fight.
Years later I returned to that once fragile country. A...
I awoke to the sound of waves, big waves slamming against the walls of the... house? No, boat. It was definitely a boat. I struggled to get up, as if I had been sleeping for one thousand years, and when I did, I met my room mate. He didn't say much, just a slight nod in my direction, as he made his bed. When he turned around, I grimaced at the large hole in his back. Only then did I realize that I had a cut on my head. More like a gash really, I was so gruesome. That's when...
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. Two potted cucumbers stood to the left of the doorway, vines climbing twined round trellises up the stucco, the few cucumbers skinny in the middle from lack of rain, though it rained now in gusts and sputters, droplets momentarily darkening her gown.
Once, in Beijing, a young girl in a red gown huddled in a doorway. There was scant shade from the clear noonday sun in the inset door. Two cats lay lazily in the sun. She idly stroked one, the calico, under the chin.
Once,...