Un bref instant de splendeur

The time, at forty-six, when you had a sudden desire to color. “Let’s go
to Walmart,” you said one morning. “I need coloring books.” For months,
you filled the space between your arms with all the shades you couldn’t
pronounce. Magenta, vermilion, marigold, pewter, juniper, cinnamon. Each
day, for hours, you slumped over landscapes of farms, pastures, Paris, two
horses on a windswept plain, the face of a girl with black hair and skin you
left blank, left white. You hung them all over the house, which started to
resemble an elementary school classroom. When I asked you, “Why
coloring, why now?” you put down the sapphire pencil and stared,
dreamlike, at a half-finished garden. “I just go away in it for a while,” you
said, “but I feel everything. Like I’m still here, in this room.”
The time you threw the box of Legos at my head. The hardwood dotted
with blood.
“Have you ever made a scene,” you said, filling in a Thomas Kinkade
house, “and then put yourself inside it? Have you ever watched yourself
from behind, going further and deeper into that landscape, away from you?”
How could I tell you that what you were describing was writing? How
could I say that we, after all, are so close, the shadows of our hands, on two
different pages, merging?
“I’m sorry,” you said, bandaging the cut on my forehead. “Grab your
coat. I’ll get you McDonald’s.” Head throbbing, I dipped chicken nuggets
in ketchup as you watched. “You have to get bigger and stronger, okay?”

That time when I was five or six and, playing a prank, leapt out at you
from behind the hallway door, shouting, “Boom!” You screamed, face raked
and twisted, then burst into sobs, clutched your chest as you leaned against
the door, gasping. I stood bewildered, my toy army helmet tilted on my
head. I was an American boy parroting what I saw on TV. I didn’t know
that the war was still inside you, that there was a war to begin with, that
once it enters you it never leaves—but merely echoes, a sound forming the
face of your own son. Boom.
That time, in third grade, with the help of Mrs. Callahan, my ESL
teacher, I read the first book that I loved, a children’s book called Thunder
Cake, by Patricia Polacco. In the story, when a girl and her grandmother
spot a storm brewing on the green horizon, instead of shuttering the
windows or nailing boards on the doors, they set out to bake a cake. I was
unmoored by this act, its precarious yet bold refusal of common sense. As
Mrs. Callahan stood behind me, her mouth at my ear, I was pulled deeper
into the current of language. The story unfurled, its storm rolled in as she
spoke, then rolled in once more as I repeated the words. To bake a cake in
the eye of a storm; to feed yourself sugar on the cusp of danger.

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with
"because". But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free.
Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter
and its prey.

Let me begin again.

Dear Ma,
I am writing to reach you—even if each word I put down is one word
further from where you are. I am writing to go back to the time, at the rest
stop in Virginia, when you stared, horror-struck, at the taxidermy buck hung
over the soda machine by the restrooms, its antlers shadowing your face. In
the car, you kept shaking your head. “I don’t understand why they would do
that. Can’t they see it’s a corpse? A corpse should go away, not get stuck
forever like that.”
I think now of that buck, how you stared into its black glass eyes and
saw your reflection, your whole body, warped in that lifeless mirror. How it
was not the grotesque mounting of a decapitated animal that shook you—
but that the taxidermy embodied a death that won’t finish, a death that
keeps dying as we walk past it to relieve ourselves.
I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with
because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence—I was trying to break free.
Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter
and its prey.

"Yes, you're both happy", I answered, knowing nothing. "You're both happy, Ma. Yes", I said again. Because gunshots, lies and oxtails, or whatever you want to call your god, should say "yes" over and over, in cycles, in spirals, with no other reasons but to hear itself exist. Because love, at its best, repeats itself. Shouldn't it?

The truth is we can survive our lives, but not our skin. But you know this already.

Sometimes, being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you've been ruined.

None of us spoke as we checked out, our words suddenly wrong everywhere, even in our mouths. (...)
What if the mother tongue is stunted? What if the tongue is not only the symbol of a void but a void itself, what if the tongue is cut out? (...)
Our mother tongue then, is no mother at all, but an orphan. Our Vietnamese a time capsule, a mark of where your education ended, ashed. Ma, to speak in our mother tongue is to speak only partially in Vietnamese, but entirely in war.

Tu me manques davantage que je ne me souviens de toi.

Ils disent que rien ne dure toujours mais ils ont seulement peur que ça dure plus longtemps qu’ils ne sont capables de l’aimer.