Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

A mother’s job is to enfold, not to unfold.

What if life could be saved by clichés? What if life must be lived by clichés? Somewhere tomorrow and somewhere yesterday—never somewhere today but cliché-land.

Who can say to love doesn’t also mean to disappoint and to deceive? I said. Those who disappoint or deceive don’t always do so from love, he said. That, my child, doesn’t help a parent. If the job description of parenting, I thought, had come with the requirement to disappoint and to deceive, how many of us would have set out with guiltless hope in the first place?

How would I know it meant nothing, I thought, when something and nothing seem to be walking hand in hand now, identical twins dressed in each other’s outfits.

To love is to trespass. To live, too, he said. How can anyone not see it that way?

Sometimes what you make up is realer than the real, I thought. The dictionary would disagree with your statement, he said. I looked up the word. Real, coming from res, fact, thing, and realis, relating to things. What you make up is always unreality, he said. Relating to nothings. Okay, I said.

The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can.

Had I been your age and had I been your friend I would have been bright and sharp with you. And I truly wish we had been friends. I love you so much but I can only love you as your mother. Sometimes a mother becomes the worst enemy because she can’t be the best friend.

And don’t you see I want my life to be something more than long, I sang.

Pippin

There are plenty of bad writers, I said. What’s so terrible about being one of them?

Lol

Why don’t people start a conversation by saying, Who are you today? Nikolai said. How anyone is matters less than who he is, don’t you think?

A parent’s folly, I thought, is to want to give a child what she does not have.

To live you have to propagate delusions, Nikolai said. One is not enough. A few are not. How many are enough? Are you asking me? You’re the one living.

Why such dislike of adjectives? I oppose anything judgmental, I said, and adjectives are opinionated words. Happy, sad. Long, short. Live, dead. Young, old. Even the simplest adjective claims such entitlement to judge. Not to mention they come with those abusive forms of the comparative and the superlative.

are we giving them names and granting them meaning because days are indifferent, and we try to wrangle a little love out of them as we tend to do with uncaring people?

One can stop being a parent or a child, a friend or an enemy, one can stop being alive, but one’s self does not stop being itself. Even death cannot change that. Death takes so many things away from us, but not that. Death is not invincible.

self is timeless, I said. Tenseless. But it’s flawed. Tell me one person whose self is not flawed.

Perfect. Imperfect. A pair of adjectives that come over and again, in all seasons, day in and day out, taunting us, judging us, isolating us, turning our isolation into illness.

Losing a child, I said, has nothing to do with how much time a parent has already had.

We grownups quickly feel at a loss for words when what words we have can’t do half of what we want them to do.

I like phrases of all kinds. I’m not as judgmental about words as I am about people.

Stupid, from Latin stupidus, be numbed, be astonished. So? So in a way the word is abused. It’s deprived of its more feeling root, I said. Something happens, and it stuns us, it numbs us, it dulls us. There is much more sense and feeling involved in stupidity.

Perfection is like a single snowflake, I said. It melts. A perfectionist melts too, Mommy.

Time points only in one direction. A mind goes in many directions.