Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

That doesn’t change how sad I am, I said. But you wouldn’t want people to feel

sad all the time if you were me. I was almost you once, and that’s why I have allowed myself to make up this world to talk with you.

Sadness one can live with, but sadness is a helpless garrison against the blindness of tragedy. A mother and a child cannot be contemporaries at any given age, and for that reason my sixteen-year-old self could not befriend yours. Each refusing to be saved, we could not save each other when young. Older—and you were still young—I was the White Qu...

It occurred to me, when I remembered his words now, that I had never paid attention to the noise. I had known I was not sensitive to colors, but to sounds also? How have I lived so blindly and deafly? I said. Perhaps he had gained knowledge to explain that to me.

Willpower was among his qualities I would remember. When he was in fifth grade, he had had trouble sleeping. Later he told me, when we were arguing, that whatever we had suggested had been of little help. I went to bed at nine and willed my body to stay still and my brain to stop thinking, he had said. That was how I solved my insomnia and that will always be the way I solve my problems. I can’t rely on anyone but my own willpower.

quibbling.

intrepidity.

And not knowing must be close to what people call a wound. Along with wound are words like healing and scars. They are all bad analogies, the foundation of wishful thinking. Can one live, I thought, with a conclusion so fatally inconclusive?

Since when have you begun to talk about nature? Nikolai asked. And all those small things. Where else can one turn to but nature if one needs endless details to sustain oneself, I thought. Nature is not small, I said.

You weren’t that interested in it. I knew he had a point. The land I had traveled: The more intangible it is, the less hindered one feels, and the more invisible. Still, I said, I’ve paid attention.

I thought about it. Just the day before I had seen a flock of birds take off from an open field to an overcast northern sky. Had I seen the scene before? Multiple times. I even had a photo, a silver gelatin print, given to me by a photographer. I had her book, too, with the same image on the cover, a flock of starlings transfixed in flight. I had seen them all, the birds, the sky, the field, the clouds, the utility poles, but I had not made any effort looking. Seeing is by intuition. It doesn’t take as much time as looking, I said. How preposterous. I’m only stating a fact about myself. You can’t understand poetry if you don’t know how to look, he said.

The world never tires of dimming the bright and blunting the sharp, I said. It’s good to avoid suffering when one can. So you play a dumb version of yourself, he said. Are you suffering any less? Suffering, I thought, was a word that no longer held a definition in my dictionary.

prosaic,

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.

equivocators?

I suppose most people don’t want to admit failure so they keep taking more credits from more tomorrows and get into deeper debt.

quixotic.

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.

Self-defeating as your mind is self-defeating, he said. Tenacious as my mind is tenacious. Such immodesty, I said. My mind is not a closed room. Mine has more windows, he said. What is outside your windows? All the good things you can’t see. Like what? A garden of superlative adjectives. A path paved with lively adverbs. Poems without themes. Songs without names. There are ways to live not as a noun, or inside a noun, or among other nouns.

inundated

inelastic

Puissant, eupeptic,

These days my mind often wandered to trees. Is parenting not staking? We turn our torsos into determined wooden sticks, our arms into durable straps, and our hearts into gentle wraps around the young bark. We hold on to the saplings, vowing not to hurt them, hoping for their growth, but children are not trees. Sometimes they want to go their own ways—walking, running, flying—without feeling tethered. Children don’t always put down their roots.

perennial

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 thought you said you took forever out of your dictionary. Once upon a time, I said. You put it back for me. A dictionary is not complete without the word forever, is it? Nikolai said. All words are indispensable, don’t you agree?

Words provided to me—loss, grief, sorrow, bereavement, trauma—never seemed to be able to speak precisely of what was plaguing me. One can and must live with loss and grief and sorrow and bereavement. Together they frame this life, as solid as the ceiling and the floor and the walls and the doors. But there is something else, like a bird that flies away at the first sign of one’s attention, or a cricket chirping in the dark, never settling close enough for one to tell from which corner the song comes.

largesse

paucity.

Because people who know you and people who know me meet us where we are. People who don’t know you and people who don’t know me are only facts. Flawed or limited, whichever adjective you prefer. Just as we are flawed facts for them. Exactly, I said. Do facts meet then? In fairy tales, I said, but not in this life. Or in any life, Nikolai said.

Benumbed,

perspicacity?

It would be the end of a child’s life had his parents known everything going on in his head, Nikolai said.

apotheosis

The book, or what I had imagined it, was to be in part an autobiography of a rag doll that belonged to a little girl whose suffragette mother had been taken away to prison, and in part about the most impossible reader of the autobiography, a teenage girl living in the age of Snapchat and Instagram. You could still write it, like your friend could play to the empty room. No reason to write it ever again, I thought, if I had put it off year after year as though there were infinite time. I thought you always prided yourself as a non-procrastinator, he said.

I read him a quote from Marianne Moore. “If nothing charms us or sustains us (and we are getting food and fresh air) it is for us to say, ‘If not now, later,’ and not mope.” Often I had gone back to the quote, saying to myself, If not now, later.

I never mope, Nikolai said, if you haven’t noticed. Of course I have, I said. His joy and his suffering, neither in minor key, precluded moping. Yet what if, I thought, moping is a bridge to reach Moore’s later? There is no later, he said. For some people it’s now and now and now and now.

non sequitur,

When I turned ten, I said, I made a resolution to memorize more poems than anyone in my life would have read. I kept the habit until I was in my twenties. Now we’re in parallel conversations, he said. What I’m trying to explain is this: Some people live by images, some by sounds. It’s words for me. Words said to me. Words not meant for me but picked up by me in any case. Words in their written form. Words that make sense and words that make nonsense.

Then you can make up whatever you want. One never makes up things in fiction, I said. One has to live there as one has to live here. Here is where you are, not where I am. I am in fiction, he said. I am fiction now. Then where you are is there, which is also where I live.