The Storm We Made

by Vanessa Chan

Maybe they have forgotten us, Jujube thought, these Western fronts, places with names that rolled strangely on her tongue, places she could find on atlases but couldn’t visualize. Maybe people like her, Jasmin, and Abel did not matter—here in a tiny tropical corner in the East, being brutalized by people who looked almost exactly like them.

The truth of it, she thought, was that men lose interest when the veil falls off and they learn the normalcy of a woman—that she urinates and bleeds and cries and snores like everyone else. But women grow fonder when a man feels within reach. Women do not worship gods; they yearn for broken toys they can mold and imprint on. It was so stupid, and she hated herself for it. Yet perhaps this was what a woman’s idealism is: not the reach for a utopia—everyone had lived long enough to know perfection was beyond reach—but the need to transform one thing into something better.

Though all love was humiliation, in a way, Cecily supposed. All love was someone breaking their soul into smaller pieces and offering the broken pieces of themselves as a puzzle to someone else—help me put myself back together.

Jujube wondered about the ways in which girls and women performed for men by always knowing what it was men wanted and how it was they wished to be comforted, always engaged in the ongoing calculus of figuring out what sides of themselves they should show to a man and which parts of their grief were too unbearable for him.