Cold Enough for Snow

by Jessica Au

Maybe it’s good, I said, to stop sometimes and reflect upon the things that have happened, maybe thinking about sadness can actually end up making you happy.

I wondered how I could feel so at home in a place that was not mine.

But, witnessing her daughter, it was like remembering the details of a dream she once had, that perhaps, at some point in her life, there had been things worth screaming and crying over, some deeper truth, or even horror, that everyone around you perpetually denied, which only made you angrier and angrier.

That I could let life happen to me in a sense, and that perhaps this was the deeper truth all along, that we controlled nothing and no one, though really I didn’t know that either.

How had they managed to read and watch so much in only the first few weeks of the semester? The girl knew so much without seeming to try, and she seemed complete, defined in some way that I wasn’t.

Back then, I had wanted every moment to count for something; I had become addicted to the tearing of my thoughts, that rent in the fabric of the atmosphere. If nothing seemed to be working toward this effect, I grew impatient, bored. Much later, I realized how insufferable this was: the need to make every moment pointed, to read meaning into everything.

I said that I too sometimes did not understand what I saw in galleries, or read in books. Though I understood the pressure of feeling like you had to have a view or opinion, especially one that you could articulate clearly, which usually only came with a certain education. This, I said, allowed you to speak of history and context, and was in many ways like a foreign language. For a long time, I had believed in this language, and I had done my best to become fluent in it. But I said that sometimes, increasingly often in fact, I was beginning to feel like this kind of response too was false, a performance, and not the one I had been looking for.

The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak.

I had often wondered, hearing this, how my mother must have felt then. She would have been young enough for this to be her first real contact with romance, and old enough to be intrigued by it. Did she notice, for example, while perched on her brother’s bike, or climbing the equipment in the playground, what it was like to have two people suddenly so concentrated on one another? How, even as they paid for her sweets, or bought her a ticket to the movies, their attention was rarely fully on the task at hand. How their jokes were meant to make only the other laugh, how happy they were? Did she watch all of this, I wondered, thinking, or dreaming, about what might lie ahead in her own future?

she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting. When she was growing up, she said that she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others. Nowadays, she said, people were hungry to know everything, thinking that they could understand it all, as if enlightenment were just around the corner. But, she said, in fact there was no control, and understanding would not lessen any pain. The best we could do in this life was to pass through it, like smoke through the branches, suffering, until we either reached a state of nothingness, or else suffered elsewhere.

I had the vague thought I had been taught somehow that the best thing was still to be desired, even if you did not desire, even if you did not much like the person who desired you. Where I had learned this, I did not yet know.

I remembered thinking, as we ate, how such happiness could come from such simple things.

These stories, I sensed, were ones that had been told many times, passed around and shaped by the whole family, smoothened and refined with each telling.

I felt that nothing I had ever done had been alive in this way, but it seemed that I did not even know enough to ask the right questions.

Through the sheets of rain, the landscape looked almost like a screen painting that we had seen in one of the old houses. It had been made up of several panels, and yet the artist had used the brush only minimally, making a few careful lines on the paper. Some were strong and definite, while others bled and faded, giving the impression of vapor. And yet, when you looked, you saw something: mountains, dissolution, form and color running forever downward.

My lecturer had said to us once that parents were their children’s fate, not only in the way of the tragedies, but in many other smaller, yet no less powerful ways as well. I knew that if I had a daughter, she would live partly because of the way I had lived, and her memories would be my memories, and she would have no choice in that matter.

I had one vague, exhausted thought that perhaps it was all right not to understand all things, but simply to see and hold them.

I said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. It was the only way that one could go back and change the past, to make things not as they were, but as we wished they had been, or rather as we saw it. I said, for this reason, it was better for her not to trust anything she read.