Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

Nothing inexplicable for me—only I didn’t want to explain: A mother’s job is to enfold, not to unfold.

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us. Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days?

Days: the easiest possession, requiring only automatic participation. The days he had refused would come, one at a time. Neither my allies nor my enemies, they would wait, every daybreak, with their boundless patience and indifference, seeing if they could turn me into a friend or an enemy to myself. Never apologize, I said, for what you have let go.

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.

I had long ago banished a few words from my dictionary: never, always, forever, words that equate one day to another, one moment to another. Time is capricious. To say never or always or forever is a childish way to reason with caprice.

How do you compare sadness that takes over like an erupted volcano to sadness that stays inside one, still as a stillborn baby? People talk about grief coming and going like waves, but I am not a breakwater, I am not a boat, I am not a statue left on a rocky shore, tested for its endurance.

I picked up books and put them down after a page or two, finding little to sustain me. I was writing, though, making up stories to talk with Nikolai. (Where else can we meet but in stories now?)

Does a person commit suicide because he doesn’t want to live, or doesn’t know how to live?

Are some days more special than others, or 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.

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. Is there a more accomplished adjective than perfect? Perfect is free from comparison, perfect rejects superlative. We can always be good, do better, try our best, but how perfect can we be before we can love ourselves and let others love us? And who, my dear child, has taken the word lovable out of your dictionary and mine, and replaced it with perfect?

I wish you had made me an enemy, I said, rather than yourself. Mothers, I thought, would be perfect for that role. You can’t be that for me, Mommy, Nikolai said. I’ve found a perfect enemy in myself.

The unspeakable is a wound that stays open always, always, and forever.

There might not be any baby born if a parent were able to think ahead about everything, I said. Yet I wondered if that was true. Had I not for years been preparing myself for losing him, pre-living the pain, even? Why did you have children, he asked, if you knew this might happen? Even the least optimistic person wants to have some hope. Wouldn’t that be wishful thinking, the hope you talk about? Possibly. If you understand it as wishful thinking, why are you still sad then? Why, I said. Because preparing is not experiencing. Pre-living is not living. I will be sad today and tomorrow, a week from now, a year from now. I will be sad forever. I

Sometimes, I said, only sometimes, I do think you have a point in questioning why parents give children lives. Why do they in any case? Blind hope, I said, or wishful thinking.

but poems and stories are trying to speak what can’t be spoken. You always say words fall short, he said. Words fall short, yes, but sometimes their shadows can reach the unspeakable. Words don’t have shadows, Mommy. They live on the page, in a two-dimensional world. Still, we look for some depth in words when we can’t find it in the three-dimensional world, no?