More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It’s not real unless we find a note. That was the thought that kept running through my brain.
I didn’t cry. That was not my mother. My mother is free in the sky. She doesn’t have the burden of a human body, is not made up of a single dot of gray. My mother is a bird.
The mother-shaped hole became a cutout of the blackest black. Something I could only see around. If I tried to look directly at it, I saw emptiness.
If only I could rewind, go back in time and ask my mother every question about every tiny thing. How crucial those little fragments are now; how great their absence. I should have saved them up, gathered them like drops of water in a desert. I’d always counted on having an oasis.
“Hunxie,” she repeats, and proceeds to explain the term. Eventually, I gather that it means biracial. And then I recognize the parts, like finally seeing shapes in the clouds: Hun. Mixed. Xie. Blood. Back at home, sometimes people say I look exotic or foreign. Sometimes they even mean it as a compliment. I guess they don’t hear how that makes it sound like I’m some animal on display at the zoo.
“We’re not lost,” Axel said finally. “We’re just headed somewhere different.”
We try so hard to make these little time capsules. Memories strung up just so, like holiday lights, casting the perfect glow in the perfect tones. But that picking and choosing what to look at, what to put on display—that’s not the true nature of remembering. Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again. A moment of humiliation, or devastation, or absolute rage, to be rewound and replayed, spinning a thread that wraps around the brain, knotting itself into something of a noose. It won’t exactly kill you, but
...more
We thought she was better. What can you do when all you see behind closed eyes are the flashes of your mother, your mother, your mother, miserable, alive, beautiful, sick, warm, smiling, dead? But not dead. Not exactly. My mother is a bird.
Once upon a time we were the standard colors of a rainbow, cheery and certain of ourselves. At some point, we all began to stumble into the in-betweens, the murky colors made dark and complicated by resentment and quiet anger. At some point, my mother slid so off track she sank into hues of gray, a world drawn only in shadows.
She was the color of home.
“It’s okay to be afraid. But not okay if be afraid means you do nothing. You must not do nothing. That’s not life worth living.”
Believing is a type of magic. It can make something true. Long before doctors put a label on her condition and offered slips of paper bearing the multisyllabic names of pharmaceuticals. Long before my father started leaving on his work trips. Long before everything: She was already hurting.
‘Once you figure out what matters, you’ll figure out how to be brave.’
