When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

by Chen Chen

My mother was in the hospital & no one wanted to be her friend. Everyone wanted to be soft cooing sympathies. Very reasonable pigeons. No one had the time & our solution to it was to buy shinier watches. We were enamored with what our wrists could declare.

quality

the China of my first three years is largely make-believe, my vast invented country,

Why did I never consider how different spring could smell, feel, elsewhere? First light, last scent, lost country. First & deepest severance that should have prepared me for all others.

TALENTED HUMAN BEINGS Every day I am asked to care about white people, especially if they’ve been kidnapped overseas or are experiencing marital problems in New England, on screens large & small. I am told American lives are in danger, American libidos.

& yet it’s true, I watched you, & I’m sorry for staring as I did, it’s just that you somehow managed to look at once elegant & weary, I mean each of you sitting so still with your legs tucked beneath your body, & then your sleepy eyes. I mean, the four of you were like a quartet of elderly duchesses. (I’m sorry, later I looked you up on the zoo website & found out you were all males.) I’m sorry, I meant for this to be an ode, a love letter, & it is, I swear, but the ways you’d been treated—I knew I couldn’t, on top of all that, lie to you. I didn’t intend to meet you & you yourselves were probably hoping for better. But isn’t this how it happens? Aren’t all great love stories, at their core, great mistakes?

But isn’t it true, you are not always why I am happy. & I promise it is true, you are almost never why, why I am sad. You are just in the same room with me & my unsweet, uncharming, completely uninteresting sadness.

I’m envious of the redwood who never has to say I am & who will outlive me.

who’s steeped in the most thoughtful of French thought, like a plum in sweet wine, & who thus tells us how we must bow before the Other or else risk our own dehumanization.

Still winter. Snowing, still. Can it even be called action, this patience in the form of gravity overdressed in gray? Days like this, the right silence can be an action, an axe, right through the frozen sea, as Kafka calls for. A necessary smashing, opening.

Think of silence as a violence, when silence means being made a frozen sea. Think of speaking as a violence, when speaking is a house that dresses your life in the tidiest wallpaper. It

makes your grief

sit down, this house. It makes you chairs when you need justice. It keeps your rage room temperature. I’ve been thinking about h...

The reader’s face is a child’s rapt face. The book is her latest soul, disguised as a more or less acceptable concrete object. The child is happy. The afternoon, a novel.

I am too much statuary in not enough city. I am a collection of collectors.

My weakness is hoarding phrases I’ve overheard / didn’t want to read. Now! even softer & more absorbent! Our finest, the supermarket brand says, like from one family to another. I am a family of collectors.

so greedily spent I forgot to fear abandonment & abandoned myself beautifully to sleep,

Earlier today, outside the cabin, the sudden deer were a supreme headache of beauty. Don’t they know I am trying to be alone & at peace? In theory I am alone & really I am hidden, which is a fine temporary substitute for peace, except I still have email,

Why can’t you see me? Why can’t I stop needing you to see me? For someone who looks like you to look at me, even as the coffee accident is happening to my second favorite shirt?

But every kind of someone needs someone else to insist with. I need. If not the you I have memorized & recited & mistaken for the universe—another you.

I wish I could feel your warmth, as easily as I feel his. But I don’t. I feel fear. I hear fear telling me I’m a body, that’s all. & the boy I love is a body. & bodies die. No other world, no return to this world in another form. (Annihilation.) It isn’t that I didn’t think these were the facts before. It’s that now, he’s here. I have to try harder. Believe the facts could be at least a little wrong. Please, something. Some magic, real as this ripe life with him.

My job is to trick adults into knowing they have hearts.

Trying to get over what my writer friend said, All you write about is being gay or Chinese. Wish I had thought to say to him, All you write about is being white or an asshole. Wish I had said, No, I already write about everything— & everything is salt, noise, struggle, hair, carrying, kisses, leaving, myth, popcorn, mothers, bad habits, questions.

Sometimes, parents & children become the most common strangers.