Where Reasons End

by Yiyun Li

Sadness one can live with, but sadness is a helpless garrison against the blindness of tragedy.

The distance at the moment of loss could be calculated: 189,200 fathoms.

The line between self-deception and willpower is often blurred,

The line between willpower and arrogance is blurred, too,

It’s lazy-minded of you to say you don’t believe in something that you don’t understand.

Nothing can be called a big deal now, I thought. If every moment is the curtain call to the previous moment, yes, we can throw up our hands and say, What’s the big deal? Where is the climax of this play? But big deals and climaxes only form a vacuum cleaner of time. It’s the small deals and the nothing deals that shatter time into ragged pieces. Days, strewn with expected and unexpected moments, did not offer a shortcut by saying, What’s the big deal?

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? These questions were not profound but they led to my halfheartedness about birthdays and major holidays. The others—anniversaries, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, a parade of holidays on the Chinese lunar calendar—were just that: days where we live.

Wishing you were somehow here again, wishing you were somehow near.

Help me say goodbye, as though the departed had the wisdom, the courage, the inclination to lend a hand to us. Who helps them say goodbye? Not us, the living, limited by our living selves.

So many songs, like so many people. They come and go, or are never encountered. There must be a time in one’s youth when real life seems to be in a thousand songs yet to be discovered, or another thousand songs destined to slip out of reach, not heeding one’s wish to make them permanent. Does the shift come to all—or to some of us only—that the few songs that do stay, by fortune or by fate, are more prodigious than the whole world can offer?

I don’t mind that life is not perfect. I do mind that I cannot perfect myself in an imperfect life.

Trust me, he said. Every time someone says, Trust me, I want to ask, Why should I?

How words waste space,

Between somewhere and nowhere—on some days that place feels more abysmal than on other days.