Middle

Written on 24/03/2017 for Fiction Writing Course, City University of Hong Kong
Word Limit: 2000
Graded: A+

Elisa was awoken by a loud noise of something shattering against the marble tiles. She got up and went into the kitchen from which the sound came, hoping it wasn’t the new set of wine glasses (on sale) she bought a week ago from Francfranc. In the corner right next to the sink, she found her cat curled up, pupils dilated with its fur standing on its back. She turned her head to look for the aftermath of the cat’s startle at the siren of an ambulance outside her house. Thank God, she sighed with a slight sense of relief. It was just the mug that Gregory gave her last year on her 41st birthday. She lifted the blinds and red lights projected onto the walls in her living room. It was parked in front of Mr. Donald’s house. Elisa cleaned up the mess on the floor and poured herself a cup of warm water into a mug she had taken out from the cupboard. The ghost of the lights tinted the cup crimson. Elisa wrapped her hands around the source of warmth, trying to cover the disturbing red that burnt her eyes even though she knew it would still go on the back of her hands. Instead, she only managed to conceal what was printed on the mug. International Child Service. And a picture of a beacon. “It’s alright. Mr. Donald has been very sick,” she tried to calm her cat down by stroking its head. She went back to bed with the blinds up while the siren of the ambulance faded in the background. Elisa watched as the red lights that filled up her house turn from brick red to the red in a flame that’s about to burn out. She remembered. She remembered perfectly the hue of each shade of red, every one of them vivid and violent, bearing with it a different story.

The alarm went off before Elisa could even get some quality sleep. Ugh, Elisa resented. She got changed while the bacon was sizzling in the pan, and shuffled to the shelf to check for voice messages on the telephone, then back into the kitchen to put cat food into the metallic bowl on the floor. She did everything within 60 seconds like it was a ritual. You have. One. Voice mail. From. Greg. “Morning gorgeous, I’ll be done with the meeting before 12 today, let’s meet for lunch? Craving sushi from that Japanese place across the fishing shop. Call me back, love you.” Elisa emptied the plate of the tiny bit of burnt scrambled egg into the bin and put everything else into the sink. She left the house.

“Morning boss,” Glenn greeted Elisa at the reception, “is it too early for the news of Nessa’s return to the centre?” He handed her a folder and a cup of Starbucks’ coffee. Hot, black, grande – Elisa’s I’ll-have-the-usual. “What’s it about this time?” She pushed the door into her office while Glenn was behind her, updating her on the situation. “Foster parents are moving to Australia,” Glenn held the door while he was talking to her, ready to go back to his desk. Elisa put down her bag and the cup of coffee, then opened the folder Glenn just gave her, “Send her in. Let me talk to her,” Elisa’s eyes were fixed on the folder the entire time. “Thanks, by the way,” she finally looked up at Glenn and flashed him a smile out of politeness.

There were three knocks on the door, even though it was made entirely of glass. Entering was a teenage girl with a studded belt and a pair of cherry-red Dr. Martens. “I swear it’s not me this time,” she held up both her hands as if she was forced into surrender. “I know. Have a seat,” Elisa said in a collected voice, “I’m just trying to tell you what’s gonna happen next.” Five foster homes, twice in the juvenile, Nessa’s name was the only thing the kids talked about ever since she came here. “So,” Elisa cleared her throat, “I’ll just fast-forward past the bullshit. Your new foster parents are bringing you to Canada.” Elisa never for once patronized teenagers. She’d been there. This couple had been waiting in line to be foster parents for years, they believed that in a good environment, anyone could raise good kids. “But I can take care of myself,” Nessa objected. “Well, sadly, that’s not what the law believes. Unless you're 18, you can’t do whatever you please. For now, you’re still a flightless bird,” Elisa said. “Funny how you associate me with a flightless bird when the only thing I’ve ever been was a bird without legs,” Nessa remarked. For a second, Elisa didn’t know what to say. Her mind was instantly dragged back to the memory of 10 years earlier when Nessa first arrived at the centre. She was 7, her hair still honey blonde, crying over an injured bird she found in the garden. Elisa was still an agent back then. “Leave it alone to die, you can’t stop nature,” a 17-year-old said to all the kids surrounding the bird. “No, we don’t abandon anyone,” Elisa said to that teenager in a loud voice so that others could hear her, too. Elisa took the bird home that night and invited Nessa over so as to give the poor little girl the assurance she needed. We don’t abandon anyone, Elisa repeated to herself. The legless bird died three days later.

She closed the folder and looked at Nessa, “If there’s nothing else, you can go back to your room and unpack your bags. Meanwhile we’ll deal with the legal documents before you get to live in the new home.” Nessa was dismissed and sent back to her dormitory room.

The phone rang and Elisa suddenly remembered she forgot to return Gregory’s call. “Hey, when should I pick you up?” Gregory asked. “Hey, sorry babe, I forgot to tell you I have a meeting till 1. We can grab lunch tomorrow, yeah?” Elisa suggested. “Sure,” Gregory said in a monotone. “I’m so, so, so, sorry,” she wondered how people did it so easily. “It’s cool,” he tried to hide the disappointment in his voice. “See you tonight babe,” she waited for him to say something. Gregory hung up. Elisa thought of the bird. We don’t abandon anyone. She thought of her helpless effort in providing care for whatever she had taken in. Perhaps this was why she was a child service agent, not a foster parent.

The emergency bell rang, Ugh, she rolled her eyes, and went to the canteen. Two boys were yelling at each other while others were holding them down. One’s nose was bleeding and the other’s cheek scraped. A small area of the floor was filled with red droplets. They weren’t red, to be exact, they looked a few shades paler. It was almost like blood-orange. It was still vibrant and violent. It was so violent that she had to look away like how her eyes were blinded by the sunlight reflected on the red paint that afternoon on Golden Gate Bridge. It was a distant past and she could only recall the event in fragments. Elisa was 5. Her mother was driving along Golden Gate Bridge with her at the back. Elisa read in the news 2 decades later that her mother was driving towards Marin County. That afternoon was so hot that even with the air-con turned on at maximum, the interiors could still make a first-degree burn on the human skin. And the leather seats were tinted scarlet by the reflection of the bridge. The colors kept changing but they stayed in the range of the shades of red. Her mother spoke in such a low voice that Elisa believed it was more to herself than to Elisa. Mother was weeping, Elisa faintly remembered, she kept repeating, “I can’t do this anymore.” She pulled over in the middle of the bridge, under the boiling sun, opened all the windows, and went out of the car and hauled her weary body to the edge of the fence. Elisa remembered that shade of red. Elisa remembered perfectly because it stayed constant for over 5 hours before someone came to bring her to the police station where the color still stained her eyes.

 The disciplinary team sorted out the fight and escorted the boys back to their rooms for counselling. Before they left, one kid turned to Elisa and said, “I’m not gonna stay here forever, you know.” And he was right. Everyone was on a journey, and Elisa was in the middle of it. She’s a middle-aged woman living a middle-class life being left in the middle of a bridge, stuck between the decisions of leaving a man she had no time for, but was ideal enough to settle down with. She was not sad, but she certainly wasn’t happy. Happy is not happy unless juxtaposed with sorrow. She was in the middle of that complex.

Elisa was packing for the weekend. Nessa refused to go to Canada unless accompanied by Elisa. Nessa wanted her to be there when she first stepped foot into a foreign country. Elisa thought of the cat. She thought of Gregory and everything she was going to leave behind here. It was only a short trip, she would be coming back soon, but she hadn’t travelled out of the country since graduation. She also thought of the memories of Nessa living with her before the authority found out that Nessa had tried to run away from foster home and kill herself. She took good care of Nessa, but not good enough to make her feel loved.

They boarded the plane, along with the foster parents. Nessa picked the window seat while Elisa sat beside her. The parents were in the front. The couple held hands during the take-off and constantly turned around to check on Nessa. The plane was several thousand miles above the ground. Elisa looked at the scars on Nessa’s wrist and pondered over her rebellious and self-destructive years. Whatever Nessa had been through, it must’ve hurt. It must’ve hurt like San Francisco. “Do you ever wonder what your parents are like?” Nessa turned to Elisa and asked. “It is nothing but a memory, and so there is no reason to linger over it now,” Elisa replied with a motherly smile. Elisa reached out her hand to hold Nessa’s. This was the first time Elisa found comfort in transit. She was in-between places and time zones, but she was going somewhere. They looked out the window and the sun was setting –

It was red. The entire plane was red.

It was perfect.

Our Hiding Place

I could listen to this all day
The ship horn howling with its pack
If I laid very still on the asphalt
I could feel the whole world tremble
The water looked like porcelain
when I tilted my head sideways,
undisturbed and slightly below eye-level
I pressed my knuckles on the rough bed
like how sculptors dug their thumbs
to make space for their creations’ eye sockets
And felt the coarse remains of the cements
like blind people felt their beloved’s faces with their fingertips
Every part of it has been touched by me
Every part has my imprints on it

This is an abandoned town
only the stray dogs remember
and only the ramshackle furniture knows
how anything could be orphaned overnight
Perhaps everything has a story that could break our heart
and perhaps a place could have more feelings than me
But the person who used to own it
isn’t here to love it
and must have plenty of places to go
but no places to be

I wondered, if one would want to wander here,
if one would want to get lost here with me,
one would be another extinguished soul,
a soul that was always burning
I thought maybe if I stayed put in one place long enough,
he would find me,
just like what I was taught to do
when I lost my mother in a crowded place
But I never really thought about what to do
when the both of us were lost
and standing in the same place,

waiting

                                  separately.

I’ve made this place for you to love
and for us to feel connected even by distance
I've grown to believe that
we shall not seek
and we shall not wait –
Soulmates will eventually meet
because they have the same hiding place.

2013

仙蹤 (上)

我們膝對膝說著喃喃細語

兩人思想用的辭彙是顛倒的南北極

你以為自己還擁有的甚麼

都只是似曾相識

你可曾試過用靈魂解讀

我掏心挖肺寫的情詩

那些綿延不斷的台詞

演繹了我最勇敢的時刻

我們的強迫症

是留戀早已痊癒的灼傷

希望疼痛不會離去

因為這是我們僅有的甜蜜

你說你曾經很愛我

我回答我也很愛你

我的語言沒有過去式

這個文明的缺陷也是一種浪漫

儘管在我身邊很安全

你總會跑到雙人床的沿崖

我呼喚著親愛的

因為我們的愛還沒有名字

那天水晶燈在下雨

站在正下方

頭髮是乾的

卻沾濕了雙眼

一杯馬丁尼的開場白

在把它乾了前

已決定了我們的結局

所以也不必再追問

或許命運是一個害羞的小女孩

只懂得暗示

又或許這只是鐵樵夫

找回自己心臟那短短的一幕

我們猜不透卻又很快樂

原來有一種有緣無份

是兩個已斷絕來往的人

面對面說再見

 

Alice In Wonderland

It must've been the roses.
A splash of scarlet
The color of my insides –
the parts you said you would love, too
even though you couldn't see them
But it was only a façade
The gardeners' remission
for the monochrome yard

It must've been the tears.
The saline driblets
that turned into a pool
and before I could
regret crying too much
I was already drowning
in my own blue –
transparent when I opened
my eyes underneath it
Bright but lonely
when nothingness engulfed me

It must've been the drinks.
The bottled-up potions
that bottled up our spilling emotions
A single sip and I was a diminution
of everything I have become,
in a world of vast illusion –
this world I couldn't seem to contain
while leaving a room for you
I remembered drawing a new Atlas
for this Wonderland of ours
Only to see it disappear with the Rabbit
among the evergreen grass

It must've been the games.
The sickening contests
that we bullied each other with
in the names of love and loss
There was no right or wrong
No winners or losers
Only the Knave a poet
And the Queen and King of no hearts
A croquet match without rules
A cat floating in mid-air without a body
The uncanniness that tickled my fantasy
The false hope that lured me
down the rabbit hole

It must've been you.
The White Hare with a pocket watch
Running here and there
Chasing an invisible thing
as if no one else could be as mad
Until I fell into dark hollowness
and forgot the touch of everything real
And by the time I wake up from this dream
I will have become a different person
I will have learnt to love everything
that reality thinks is wrong with me

The funeral of emotions

Goldfish

They say that the memory span of a goldfish only lasts about three seconds. Of course, this is just an ancient myth with an untraceable origin. In fact, the goldfish can remember things up to 5 months. But a goldfish's lifespan is around 30 years. If the meaning of life could be found only in the captivity of memory, that is to say, the goldfish has lived life about 72 times: (30*12)/5 = 72. I think about this a lot. Unlike in the movie Groundhog Day, the goldfish isn't Phil who remembers everything from living the same day over and over and over again for an estimated ten thousand years; it is Rita, the unaware girl who begins to live, every day, from a certain point in her life. The only difference is that the goldfish keeps aging.

I had a goldfish when I was little. Well, to be exact, it wasn't my goldfish. I wasn't in charge of taking care of it. My mother cleaned its tank once in a while, fed it, tapped on the glass and gave it attention. It had a name. Translated to English, it roughly meant Golden Bowl. I wasn't raised in a very superstitious family, we don't believe in Feng Shui or anything, but when it comes to naming pets, Chinese people like to relate them to wealth – it's more of a habit. I wasn't fond of any domestic animals apart from cats and dogs. You can't touch a goldfish. You don't know what it's feeling. Besides, we weren't professional fish breeders or aquatic experts, any fish that had been kept in our house wouldn't live up to even half of their expected lifespan. Golden Bowl wasn't exactly a pet to me.

We never forget anything really, unless there's a memory loss. Learning is the process of creating memory, and as we are learning, our behaviors are changing simultaneously. To me, forgetting and being unable to retrieve a memory are different things. The former means that it ceases existing, while the other implies that the memory is still there, but it's too far back in your head that you can't immediately recall the experience. The memory span of humans lasts about a lifetime; even so, most of us try to make it last more than a lifetime, because we'd like to believe that life is purely made of memories, and that memory, is life. We build monuments and museums, we write books, biographies, diaries, blogs just to prove to ourselves that we are not as pathetic as the other things that have history, too.

Golden Bowl was brought home along with a few other goldfish. One died the day after, because it couldn't adapt to the new environment. The others died one by one in the following three or four years. They all turned upside down and died. Some people say that this is because there isn't sufficient oxygen in the water. So basically, they drowned to death. Yes, goldfish can drown too. So every time a fish started tilting to its side like it couldn't balance its own body, we knew that it was on the verge of dying. Golden Bowl did that a few times. We thought it couldn't make it. But it did. It kept surviving day after day. It tried very hard to force its stomach under without turning upside down. My mom helped, too. She put some seaweed into the tank and gave it more oxygen. That was when I started to take care of the fish like a pet. I didn't want it to die. I knew this one was a fighter.

Memories make us who we are. They are the basis of our identity. But if a piece of memory was never spoken of, did it really happen? If someone did not know of that small moment I’d experienced, who was I to him? There are thousands of conversations I’ve let slip – the moments that I’ll never speak of. Sometimes there is no point in telling anyone. There is no point in verbalizing a moment that is so vivid, that contains all the other senses that words can never replace. Our experiences are too profound, too multiplex in forms to be expressed with sounds aspirated through the gaps between our teeth. Meanings are lost when a moment is being spoken; it ceases to be what it was in my head. Communication distorts our meanings, our personal experiences. And I think that the best parts of us should be well-hidden. I keep a collection of these moments in my heart. I preserve it because it is unique, because it is so much greater than what I can encode. I keep it untouched and I keep it from the world simply because it is nothing but mine to own. I dig holes in the back of my mind and bury its ghost – the ghost that humans call “memories”, and I shall be the only one who knows where to find it. When it acts up inside my head attempting to haunt my thoughts, I’ll even try to hunt it down and kill it; that’s how much it matters to me. But like I said, we never forget anything. We can't just erase it. The best we can do is to shove it aside and hope it doesn't sneak around when we least expect it to.


Can you imagine if humans were like goldfish? Every time when we reach the last day of the 5th month, we instantly forget what happened 5 months before. And everything will just start building up again from the beginning - the awareness of the existence of our own and of others gone forever and reappear. What can I learn from in five months’ time? What's it like if I only had five months to acknowledge the world around me? What would I do if I knew that five months later we would be someone completely different? My “6 months” come and go irregularly, mostly by choice. Of course, I still remember what happened before my 6th month came; I’m not a goldfish. It only means that I leave behind all the things that I’ve learnt every now and then and try to see the world with new eyes.

One day I came home from school in the afternoon, the tank was empty. Up until today I'd still like to think that it struggled and fought with all it had. It just died like how the others did. It turned upside down with its stomach facing the ceiling. And my mother flushed it down the toilet. I'd existed in its life for roughly 12 times and yet it had only been in mine once. But this memory is still lingering in my head and I'd like to ponder over it once in a while when my heart gets broken over and over again, as a reminder that I am constantly creating myself, if not erasing.

 

Mind Tricks

That night was so cold that if you could feel your face, it would've stung. The car was parked right behind you but you had no intention of getting back inside. Your ears were probably the only heaters of your body that were switched on. They matched your bloodshot eyes like a perfect outfit, and they were the kind of red that made roses look lifeless. You turned to look at her but you could only see half of her face. The wind struck again and her hair veiled even more of it. The sea looked like diesel and the reflection of it in her eyes made her pupils seem even darker. But she wasn't looking at the sea. She was zoning out, as if whatever that's in her mind was projected onto the scenery in front of her. She was not troubled. She was thinking. And the thought does not include you. But you weren't too troubled either. It felt good looking at her looking at something else, taking in the scent and color of her hair that you could not name. She passed you the crooked joint, from which you took a few puffs. And you were vacuumed into the story of the boy whom you once heard from your mother –

It was a warm afternoon in Summer and he was standing in the damp sand, water washing off the back of his feet. And next minute he was sucked into a whirlpool. When he was pulled out from the ocean, he was already filled with the gold that took him in.

You thought she called your name in a low whisper but it was just the splashing waves hitting against the rocks underneath your dangling feet. The picture in your mind of the story that your mother told you was gone in an instant – all the whirling sunlight, the shining dust that lost hold of the boy's feet, the glitter on the surface of the sea. Everything became pitch-black. The ocean looked like diesel again; its edges a jagged blunt blade, persistent and cold like memories. The story was brief, but you imagined the boy float to the surface and you imagined hearing his muffled scream under the shimmering water.

Sometimes we could use up all our luck to meet someone, so that we wouldn't have much of it left to make them stay. It was her turn to smoke. You passed her the joint but she was too wallowed in her own world to take hold of it. But you just kept your posture of holding it next to her. You didn't feel the need to call her. You didn't want to touch her either because she felt a lot like heartache. There were 2 billion songs written about it, and you thought they sounded very much like the muffled screaming of the boy. There's a voice in your head and that was what it was telling you.

Another gust of wind hit the shore, and her eyes came back into focus. She took hold of the joint and smiled politely, dismissing the short period of distraction. She was lost in contemplation and it was a thought that was not of you, and would not let you in unless you learnt to love enough.

Cold War

Melted into the couch with my hair and arm dangling off the edges, the only movement I can acknowledge is my chest rising and setting along the tempo of slow breathing. From a distance, birds are hooting in a courtship ritual for wild romance, car engines roar to accelerations, water tabs are running in the flat 2 or 3 storeys below and my ears tell me about how the airplanes that are not even in sight are gliding across the sky. Up close, the windows on my balcony door reflect flickering golden beams from a hundred million miles away. Thin blankets are hanging on the cloth lines to dry and the scent of laundry diffuses into my nose and yet the clouds and even the leaves of the plant next to the balcony door are oblivious to the soft wind. I close my eyes and my world is filled with crimson. The sun always has a way of making her presence conspicuous. There's life happening but it's not within my reach. Everything near me is in a still painting, and yet I have no intention of connecting to the outlying zone in motion.

The last dose of Summer always captivates me the most. It is as if this is a wrap-up and the world is telling you it's time to forget about it all and enter another stage. We revisit to unvisit. We go back to put down the pieces where they're supposed be. Indifference has outgrown me in the past few months because I took myself out of a linage. I've been nothing else but detached with my inner world and connected to the external world. And now the final bits of Summer come to remind me that soon I'll have to reconnect with myself. I'd come back from the journey of figuring out who I really am and it was both rewarding and terrifying. I've been picking up the fragments, as if I was the third-party, of each moment I spent in life from my very own museum and re-arranging them to see if I could make something new out of them. The kid playing piano downstairs is getting louder and the beams on the glass are growing dimmer. This moment is fading away. If it was a person I would have left scratch marks on him. I was the type who would never let go without putting up a fight. But I feel like I'm perhaps too old for that at my age now. There's still so many inarticulate feelings I should've radiated in a particular time and setting and now it's coming to an end. There are so many things I have fixed but somehow still broken when I put them back in the right spot in my museum.

When Winter comes, everything becomes a charade. A perfect pretense, a fabricated version of Summer. Excessive layers of stitches have us cloaked from the external world. Our pulses muffled under warmness and everything that moves seems a little less sensible. Even the air is frozen, and everything in it just stagnates. Our internal realities are reduced and condensed into miniature, extending the distance between souls, making communication almost impossible for a divided nation.

It's funny how we classify people that have different preferences of seasons into different categories. We do exhibit one persona in Summer and another in Winter. It's only in recent months that I've started to understand the art of mastering different characters during different times. Summer is full of movements, and maybe that's why they're our distractions from paying attention to ourselves. Even heartbreaks seem less noticeable when we're too caught up in that moment to feel sorry for ourselves. But in Winter even the lights are frozen, they don't move. That's when we notice how the papercut from Summer got a slice too deep and that the pain is going to grow worse.

I'm a Summer person. Winter makes me uncomfortable because I'm sick of tapping into my own consciousness. And the décors everywhere are just awfully staged with a touch of paleness. Intimacy becomes distant but distance is worse. I remember a few years ago I called up this boy when some of my insignificant wounds started to grow wider. Being around people made me feel less like I was alone in an igloo. We lived pretty close to each other. It was late at night and we were smoking in his balcony. We were so quiet the only thing that could be heard was our steady pulses in our veins underneath several layers of clothes. In Winter I don't speak. I struggle with words to say. And he understood that, too. After a cigarette, we went back into his house where the temperature was slightly warmer. I tip-toed into his room barefoot and the marble floor stung me with coldness regardless. A moment later we were under warm covers and he was so close to me that his teeth were the size of piano keys. "You gotta learn to fill the distance with people that are less important than him," he said. I didn't know what to say, because I understood. Sometimes I think that the degree of our understanding of the external world is negatively related to our ability of expressing our internal world.

He walked me home and the whole time he kept talking while I nodded whenever he made small pauses. He wore his heart on his sleeve but both of us had our hands in our pockets.

Winter is a battle between two worlds.