Immaculate Conception

by Ling Ling Huang

It was the first day of four years of classes, and everyone wanted to prove they had nothing to learn.

Or maybe I was just so insecure that anyone with a strong sense of identity could destabilize me.

This was the first lesson Mathilde taught me: artists create works of art; geniuses curate an emotional response.

People are wrong about imitation, anyway. It isn’t flattery but an attempt at closeness.

Mathilde and I were exchanging parts of ourselves, our very identities a collaborative work.

The moss of resentment that slowly crept over my love for her evaporated when I remembered how frail and sad she had been during the first year of our friendship.

Salacious? Yes. Indicative of severe mental trauma? Yes. But was it really art?”

What an unbelievable scam it is to get everything you’ve been told to want.

The sound is deafening, a subway whooshing toward us the moment before impact.

Now being denied the right to mother my own children, I am relieved to have Mathilde as a vessel for the immense love I have to offer, the love I am afraid will suffocate me if I can’t find anyone to receive it.

“Don’t hold originality up on some pedestal, Enka. Who does originality actually serve? Not the public. The public needs to be shocked and reminded of their own feelings, which everything else in the world seeks to numb. Whatever the purpose of art is, it isn’t to be original for originality’s sake.”

It was some monster I had watched from inside my body.