Cold Enough for Snow

by Jessica Au

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.

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.

You could walk and walk and not see anyone, despite all the houses around you.

we would always be aware of each other and never too far away.

Wasn’t it incredible, I wanted to say, that once there were people who were able to look at the world – leaves, trees, rivers, grass – and see its patterns, and, even more incredible, that they were able to find the essence of those patterns, and put them to cloth? But I found I could not.

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.

It was strange at once to be so familiar and yet so separated. I wondered how I could feel so at home in a place that was not mine.

her daughter had seen something in it, something that connected to a feeling deep inside her, that she was not yet old enough to express.

neither of us could remember why she had broken it, only our devastation once the act had been done.

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 wondered if my mother had ever asked these questions, if she’d ever had the luxury of them.

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.

The lecturer had spoken about knowledge as an elixir and I said to my mother that this was something I believed in too.

I wanted badly to please her, to win her approval.

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 towards this effect, I grew impatient, bored. Much later, I realised how insufferable this was: the need to make every moment pointed, to read meaning into everything.

Though I understood the pressure of feeling like you had to have a view or opinion, especially one that you could articulate clearly,

It was all right, I said, to simply say if that was so. The main thing was to be open, to listen, to know when and when not to speak.

Had she been homesick? Had she been awed by the streets, the brick and weatherboard houses, so different to her own home? Had she been worn out not by the big changes, but, as is often the case, by countless smaller ones

the bi discs that were used in ancient funerals, during a time when it was believed that jade would stall the decomposition of the body beneath the earth.

she said that she believed that we were all essentially nothing, just series of sensations and desires, none of it lasting.

she had never thought of herself in isolation, but rather as inextricably linked to others.

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.

Her face had changed since the times I had seen her last.

seeing only the same image of her as I had throughout my childhood, which was strangely fixed, only to have this broken again some days later.

And I felt myself in an instant, the world opening up as if through a great funnel, going from my feet to the leaves to the sky above.

I put them in my bag and left them there, so that they travelled with me for a while wherever I went. After about a week, I returned them without having watched any. My boyfriend asked if I had liked the movies and, not knowing what to say, but seeing the expression on his face, I lied and said yes.

I saw many customers over the course of each shift, and each time I was able to be completely present with them, before forgetting them with equal completeness once they had left.

I was conscious of how important it was to enjoy this meal, or at least to seem to enjoy it. I thought that if I tried hard enough my effort would become real happiness, and then I would finally be able to stop having these thoughts.

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.

I felt that he had taken something, something that touched on the privacy of my happiness at the pool, or the brink of what I had felt looking at the painting.

Laurie, I knew, was both happy and unhappy to be back in the place he had left as a teenager, and for some reason I felt like I was seeing something private, as if he were suddenly a boy again, and I was looking at a part of him that he had long ago abandoned.

cars passed me with what seemed like gentle caution, as if I were an animal they did not want to startle.

I thought of my mother, and how some day, in the future, I would go with my sister to her flat, the one I had never seen, with the single task of sorting through a lifetime of possessions, packing everything away.

I would agree but, in the end, I knew I would keep nothing, whether out of too much, or too little sentiment, I did not know.

I thought again about how no one knew how deep the lake really was, and how I could not stop thinking about this.

the water rushing around his body, his face, his skull, but being oddly calm, thinking only that he should wait, wait and see what would happen next.

There would be other rapids that they would have to pass through, and what had happened had not changed that.

It seemed almost not to have been made by hand at all. Rather, it was more like a rock that one might glimpse in the near distance: shaped just so by the wind or by rain or by time, such that its shallow angles and shadows represented a face in some inexplicable way, and so was all the more surprising and beautiful, because it was both an accident, and a symbol.

Whenever I’d asked her what she’d like to visit in Japan, she’d often said she would be happy with anything. The only question she’d asked once was whether, in winter, it was cold enough for snow, which she had never seen.

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, 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.

My mother looked at me and smiled, as if she was simply happy that we were in each other’s company, and to have no need for words.

to feel fluency running through me, to know someone and to have them know me.

in many of the old paintings, one could discover what was called a pentimento, an earlier layer of something that the artist had chosen to paint over.

I said that in this way too, writing was just like painting. It was only in this 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.

Later, looking back at the image, I could see that we were both not quite ready for the camera: weary, surprised and somehow very alike.

The door made a frame of her against the outside, and she sat as a statue might have sat, with her hands folded peacefully in her lap and her knees and feet together, so that there was no part of her body that was not touching, and so that she could have been made out of a single stone. She had too the quality of a sculpture, and was breathing deeply, as if finally content.