The Hundred Secret Senses

by Amy Tan

I learned to make things not matter, to put a seal on my hopes and place them on a high shelf, out of reach. And by telling myself that there was nothing inside those hopes anyway, I avoided the wounds of deep disappointment. The pain was no worse than the quick sting of a booster shot. And yet thinking about this makes me ache again. How is it that as a child I knew I should have been loved more? Is everyone born with a bottomless emotional reservoir?

When there is great suffering, he said, everyone struggles the same. But when there is peace, no one wants to be the same. The rich no longer share. The less rich envy and steal.

I felt stuck in the bottom of a wishing well. I was desperate to shout what I wanted, but I didn’t know what that was. I knew only what it wasn’t.

‘Life’s always a big fucking compromise,’ he said. He sounded like a stranger. ‘You don’t always get what you want, no matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how good you are. That’s a myth. We’re all hanging in the best we can.’ He exhaled a cynical laugh.

Why do we love the mothers of our lives even if they were lousy caretakers? Are we born with blank hearts, waiting to be imprinted with any imitation of love?

We were two people starved for abundant love but too tired to say so, leg-ironed together until time passed us by and we left this world, two vague hopes without dreams, just another random combination of sperm and egg, male and female, once here now gone.

Now that our marriage is over, I know what love is. It’s a trick on the brain, the adrenal glands releasing endorphins. It floods the cells that transmit worry and better sense, drowns them with biochemical bliss. You can know all these things about love, yet it remains irresistible, as beguiling as the floating arms of long sleep.

I now believe truth lies not in logic but in hope, both past and future. I believe hope can surprise you.

What’s a family name if not a claim to being connected in the future to someone from the past?

I think Kwan intended to show me the world is not a place but the vastness of the soul. And the soul is nothing more than love, limitless, endless, all that moves us toward knowing what is true. I once thought love was supposed to be nothing but bliss. I now know it is also worry and grief, hope and trust. And believing in ghosts – that’s believing that love never dies. If people we love die, then they are lost only to our ordinary senses. If we remember, we can find them anytime with our hundred secret senses.