A Song to Drown Rivers

by Ann Liang

I had always enjoyed the sound of my solitude, the quiet of my own breathing. Often, when I was around other people and felt their gazes on me, I had the strange, encroaching sense that my face and body did not belong to me. As if I had been designed purely for the pleasure of their viewing.

When it came down to it, the choice was this: a kingdom, or my happiness. And how many people under Heaven were really fortunate enough to know happiness? Happiness was a side dish, like the sweet, sticky rice cakes Mother made during the festivals, or the glutinous balls stuffed with rich sesame paste. But revenge—that was the salt of life. Necessary. Essential.

“Let me think about it some more,” I told him, though the answer had already come to me. The answer had always been there, as if scrawled across the scripts of history. I was only deluding myself now, pushing back against time.

What was it that people said about mothers having a sixth sense? Sometimes she seemed to see my heart even before I did.

But even if I could not rid myself of the pain, I could live with it. One could live with almost anything, so long as they had something to live for.

If my beauty was of the destructive kind, his was a beauty that pressed exquisitely close to sorrow; something as cold and untouchable as the stars scattered overhead.

I had always hated leaving things unfinished. But it was more than that: I needed to prove to someone, if only myself, that I could do this. That I was equipped not just with the pretty features I had been born into.

In a world where everyone will demand something from you, it requires a certain degree of selfishness to be happy, you know.”

“We are most tempted by what we cannot have. Men will dream of the mountains they have yet to scale, the rivers they have yet to set sail upon, the plains they have yet to conquer. They are told from birth everything belongs to them, and so when something does not, they view it as a personal challenge.” I thought about it longer. “But also, from a distance, everything looks more beautiful; we are better able to conjure our own fantasies about them. Sometimes the fragrance of a feast is better than the taste itself.”

When men say they want a lover, what they often mean is they want a mirror; they wish to see themselves reflected back at them in the best light.