Pick up your calls, I think you'd be glad to know that

By Michelle Li

(For the lady walking in the park, while seemingly crying on the phone)

…I’ll be coming home for a while. Way back home, to my childhood room under whatever leftover stars in the night sky there are, spat out by whatever god there is. Ma, this new land is hardly enough to fit myself in, so I’m going home in the autumn; I figured you’d be glad. I need to sit down, need to rest my eyes for a moment, and I miss your cooking. I miss it most in the evenings, miss how I licked the sauces clean off the spoon after the lamb went into the oven, how I sat perched on a stool and watched you mince garlic, julienne potatoes for spring rolls. The other morning, I woke up at five, went into the kitchen for a glass of water, and sat down in the refrigerator light. Outside, I could hear the gentle fall of rain, the thick drops cascading, pelting, like plums split open on rooftops, and fell asleep to the sound. When I woke again, the morning air had stalled and the sun was high. And that was my favorite part: the sudden light. For weeks, I wanted that light. I killed time by watering the lawn at night and going to work and taking the kids downtown to a fancy sushi restaurant. The hours were golden. To keep life moving is to be a part of it. Yes ma, your grandchildren are fine. Yes ma, work is fine. Yes ma, when he signed the papers and then packed his bags, I watched him leave. I did not keep hoping. I knew that when he left, he had left for good*. I had thought I would eventually gain some odd sort of strength from the certainty of my loss, to think that when the string between the both of us, taut, elongated with tension and tug, had finally slit open, I had had the courage to watch it shear off the skin underneath his shirt. I thought that I wanted sympathy, to be able to throw myself at someone’s feet and cry unabashedly, but the old neighbor brought over apple pie and told me my hair had grown long and pretty, and I could do nothing but say thank you. I thought I wanted to smash one of our china plates, and so I did. You were right when you said I shouldn’t have married a man with a quick temper, eager to love, eager to laugh. I could have sworn that this pain would kill me—but it chose to keep me alive, dragged me through the yard, minced off the blackened ends of days, and forced my chin up, as if telling me: you are still alive, you are still alive. The birds look at me and laugh with him. Sometimes, I feel like planting myself in the dirt, a yawning sprout burgeoning from the soft soil. But ma, do you know who will love me now—someone other than you? No ma, I don’t mean that you’re not important to me, but I want love beyond obligation. Yes, ma, I’m still here. I’m calling you from the parking lot now, can’t you hear the jangling of the keys? Ma, I bought myself a new pair of shoes, bright red under the salted Texas sun. I’m headed nowhere, really. And I don’t know how to tell you this, but I haven’t been happy for the longest time. I’m flying home to the coast, where the days are longer, and the light is quieter; next to the trembling poplar and the lyme grasses by the wayside, the sea will turn glossy, blue into burnt red, the sun a cooked orange, and I’ll stretch myself into the heading of a new season. I used to think that if I sat down somewhere quiet, I could figure myself out**. What I would give to touch another spine, another hand. Ma, I don’t know how to live on anymore, how to let the world soften me with its touching. From up close we must look clumsy, like baby deer trying out their first steps. All I’m trying to say is, how did you manage to pass through so many days? I can’t do anything for myself anymore. I threw my sweatshirt into the washing machine a week ago and still don't have the energy to take out the laundry. I sat through work without eating lunch, wilted like the plant version of myself. I fevered for the longest time, until I coughed up my childhood into the toilet. I bought a cake and ate it by stabbing the center open, licking the frosting off the edge of the fork. It was the sweetest thing I had tasted, ma. Maybe it’s the fact I’ve been asleep for too long, didn’t know pain until I actually sat alone in the morning, barefoot, the skin on my ankles cold and damp. I thought of us drinking at some run-down bar in San Francisco, feeding each other milk candy from china bowls, playing Monopoly until five in the morning, planting poplar trees by the park down south, treading in the pallid ocean waters and it brought me sadness. Ma, I remember how it all happened and then how it unfolded itself, and now I am left alone under the sun-dusk sky. There are children playing here, and the light is skimming through the benches, the swings sprayed by a golden hue. Ma, everything passes without a goodbye. Ma, I’ll go home and pack my bags, leave the gardens untended. Ma, what do I do if I want him back? Ma, how much weakness can a body hold? Ma, the only thing I can do is count the miles and squeezed spaces between the bodies of the people I love. Ma, I wish you would pick up your calls, there are things I’m dying to tell you— 
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Look, the downtrodden light on the rooftops***. Oh, small sweetness. Oh, light. So long I had spent looking for love, so long I had needed it.

* From ​Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong’s writing
** From Grace Marie Liu’s poetry
*** ​"Downtrodden light” is a phrase by poet Ivi Hua

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​Michelle Li has been nationally recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing, Bennington Young Writers Awards, and Apprentice Writer. She is an alumna of the Kenyon Review Young Writer's Workshop and her work is forthcoming or published in Aster Lit, wildscape. literary, and Third Wednesday. She edits for The Dawn Review and is executive editor of Hominum Journal. She plays violin and piano, loves Rachmaninoff and blackberries.