Cold Enough for Snow

by Jessica Au

The rain was gentle, and consistent. It left a fine layer of water on the ground, which was not asphalt, but a series of small, square tiles, if you cared enough to notice.

Earlier in the year, I had asked her to come with me on a trip to Japan. We did not live in the same city anymore, and had never really been away together as adults, but I was beginning to feel that it was important, for reasons I could not yet name.

And perhaps I felt that this would put us on equal footing in some way, to both be made strangers.

For some reason, I remembered disliking it as a child. Perhaps because I thought it looked unnatural, or lonely, this very detailed, tiny tree, almost like an illustration, growing alone when it looked as if it should have been in a forest.

Out there, there were big blocks of land, freeways. You could walk and walk and not see anyone, despite all the houses around you.

Plants grew on the steep walls of the canal, trailing downwards, and the water gave a shaking, delicate impression of the world above.

This was one of the experiences I liked most about Japan, and, like so many things, it was halfway between a cliché and the truth.

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, such that it only made you angrier and angrier.

I had never particularly wanted children, but somehow I felt the possibility of it now, as lovely and elusive as a poem.

Another part of me wondered if it was okay either way, not to know, not be sure. 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.

Each time, it was like I was travelling at the speed of light, as if I had spent all my life living in one dimension, only for its very fabric to tear open and a whole other universe to be revealed.

Every time I finished a text, I felt like I was done, but then the same thing would happen again and again, a tearing open of my thoughts, a falling into a vast, unknown space, where the air rushed and all my senses were overwhelmed.

She made no attempt to hide her grief, which must have been her father’s grief also, and this surprised me, that she would not try and mask it somehow, that she was not ashamed of the drama, as my family would have been, but inhabited it with rage and sadness, as if it were the cloak of some great animal that she had just slain.

Conversation was like a kind of judo, an exercise in constant movement.

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