A Map for the Missing

by Belinda Huijuan Tang

He looked across the table at her face, searching for some hope that he could latch on to and steal for himself. She seemed so certain as she reassured him—but she was always so certain, he realized.

He couldn’t make sense of care as a thing that had to be compared and doled out in portions between those he loved.

Of all the words she could have used, lonely was a strange choice. The idea of loneliness implied a need for others.

Even my village—the changes aren’t as big there yet, but I had this feeling when I was back there, that everything was on the cusp of being different forever. Like I might accidentally look away and then when I turn back, everything will be gone.

Even in America, she’d flung open the door of her life so widely that he was only able to squeeze himself around its sharp edges.

Sometimes, it was harder to hear people when they were so close.

Her curiosity had made him curious, too. He wanted, despite himself, to know how he looked through her eyes.

That was all it took, a moment enough to lodge in your mind and replay itself over and over, affecting your days forever after.

He was quiet as they ate dinner, saddened at the thought of all the individual dots, obscured by uniforms, forced into places that they hadn’t decided for themselves.

He wondered what he would be like the next time he saw this place. Was it possible to live a life, moving from place to place, yourself unfiltered?

It was amazing, he’d thought back then, that an unchanging property of an object wasn’t only what was there, but also what wasn’t. It meant that if you could define what was absent, create a map for the missing, that was also a way of knowing a thing.

He’d held her memory in amber, a tool for his use, to believe there was a part of the world that hadn’t moved on.

The things she held in the basket of her life, the ones she needed to ferry from here to there, were more than just her own.

He was aware of this, and yet couldn’t say any more. He knew there had to be some uncaging, a release of his heart to allow it to exist in the space outside of his chest. How easy that had been when there hadn’t yet been a closing there.

There was a distance between their lives that meant she would never have what he did. What she felt wasn’t desire for him, but rather a yearning for his very life.