At around five in the morning, while the banked clouds in the east were still brewing the dawn, I had already lit the incense in my hand. Four sticks, once unrelated, each with a fate of its own, met in this moment and burned together, their thin smoke twining and lingering in the cold, inseparable. And in time they will carry the hopes of all living things, dissipate, and return to dust.
The Tiangong censer [the great incense burner for the Lord of Heaven] cradled its silent ash and coldly watched my hesitation. I knew I had grown a little mute of late, a little more irresolute, with even a pinch of unease mixed in, an unease like a shallow cut on a fingertip: small as it was, its faint ache kept reminding me it was there whenever I was distracted enough to forget.
Reaching out, I planted the first streak of red in the ash, and murmured to it that parting is the inevitable end.
All at once I found my sudden transference absurd, and with it even Shenshu and Yulü [the two door gods], armored and bearing halberds on either side to subdue evil and drive off demons, looked a little comical in their majesty. But the moment I crossed the threshold, a wondrous solemnity seeped through me, letting everything flighty and scattered sink into the depths. Stripped of the thin haze that usually curled and hung in every breath, all things appeared real and clear—pressing straight against the eye. The soot that settled on the red pillars year after year climbed upward ring by ring like vines, until it disappeared into the tops of the beams where light had not reached in years, and there came to rest; as heavy as the hoping was, so deep had it accumulated. The guangming lamps [small lamps lit for a year of blessing] sitting on both sides joined one by one into a wall, each lamp a story, a plea, a prayer, hoping for peace.
I wavered and lingered, and at last resolved to step into His shelter.
Gods above, look upon my weakness.
We are souls lost on a wasteland. They say a long night is always followed by day, but now the night is so dark we cannot see each other's dawn; we drift among jagged sins, searching for the shadows we left behind. A way home there is, yet until we gather up our own fragments, we can only imprison ourselves on that wasteland, at the mercy of the gale of regret that wears us down or the storm of remorse that assails us.
Climbing the narrow stairs to the second floor, I had never thought deeply about how high one must climb, how much strength one must spend, whether to murmur or to cry out, before He could hear… But as long as I speak earnestly, surely this longing can be carried to Him?
Yet however earnest I am, she will never hear me. Not because she does not listen, but because I have not spoken.
Before the sky was fully light, she had her hands on the wheel, driving me to school. Though I always had plenty to talk about, friends, school, my mood, even the weather, we said nothing the whole way. Long used to this silence that had once felt so unnatural to me, I merely drowsed in my drowsiness, hazed in my haze.
What broke the silence was one sentence from her, without warning: "I… the panic is coming back." I started, and all sleep left me at once. She bit her lower lip; her hands, clutching the wheel, had gone bluish white from gripping too hard, and her eyes, fixed on the road ahead, trembled.
"Say something to distract me…" She forced the words out and, with one shaking hand, wound down the window. But all that remained in my mind were great sheets of blank white. I mumbled, I stammered; my gift for talk was swallowed by the surging traffic, drowned.
The only thing I remembered was how she had once described it: "So frightened, like I'm about to die."
What should I do now? The medicine, did you bring it? Or should we pull over and rest for a bit? The air outside is bad, maybe I should close the window? Unable to say a single word, I could only sit beside her and gaze at her helplessness, and mine. The clamor and congestion outside the car and the dead silence inside pressed in from both sides; caught in the gap, I could not breathe, time chafing my skin until it tore and bled inch by inch, nowhere to flee, and I curled up like a wounded animal. And yet how could the one truly hurt be me.
Fragments of the past swayed without rest, like light cast through ripples onto a lakebed, illusory and shifting yet truly there; only with effort did I free myself from the flickering memories.
Gods above, guide me where I have strayed.
The shadows scattered across the ground have been lost too deep; I keep trying to gather them, but they are always broken and incomplete. Perhaps I should trace back to the beginning and search through memory for myself?
I still remember, as a child, my mother softly singing "Purple Bamboo" [a Jiangnan folk song] as she gently stroked me to sleep… Yes, it was those slender yet strong hands that held up the sky of my childhood. In my memory Mother was always busy: working away from home by day, and when she came back at dusk she still had to wash her hands and make soup, and the firewood, rice, oil and salt of the household were all in her hands too. At night I would often nestle beside her, asking for one story after another until I fell soundly asleep… Did Mother, too, wish in her rare spare moments to read a book she loved, or see a film she had long gone without?
So as a child I was ignorant and did not understand, taking her giving and care for granted, as if her tending and watching over me were also only natural. Watching my mother, who never stopped moving, toil heart and body between work and home day after day, I never noticed the lines engraved on her face spreading, still less the weariness buried deep in her eyes. So was it then, or even earlier, that the pressure and fatigue began to settle?
Later, as I emerged from my tender years, a crowd of new faces suddenly sprang up in my life, and before long my world no longer turned around family alone, though my mother's still did. That was probably where the rift began. Practical reasons kept shrinking the time we could spend together each day; as time moved on, the distance of space hardened into a gulf between our hearts, swelling from faint ripples on a lake into crashing waves. Through the thousand-some turns of day and night after that, the dozen-odd changes of season… I cannot even remember when I last turned around and truly looked at her face!
Feet that have grown can no longer find their childhood footprints; time never leaves us room to turn back, and now she is gravely ill.
No! What wrong have I done! At some point, that resolute and fearless figure was gradually eaten away by a pressure too great to bear, and fragility was forced out of her very blood; white blood cells cannot kill the reality devouring her, and platelets cannot heal the hole in her heart. No amount of medicine seems to work; what must flare up still rages on schedule. I know she is afraid, but I do not know how to dispel her dread.
More than once I woke in the middle of the night to find my mother's thin, slight figure on the sofa. The darkness swallowed every warmth, magnifying her helplessness and bleeding it outward, and I, in the shadows of the stairway, was stained with a heavy bewilderment too. Can a few steps' distance keep apart two hearts that were once so close? More than once I happened to hear my mother weeping quietly behind a tightly shut door. Each time I stopped, raised my hand to knock and go in, hesitated for a few moments, and in the end gave up. More than ten years of the closest kinship could not withstand the thickness of a door!
In truth I often feel my family's love. Whether it is the fragrant "love lunchbox" [a lunch packed at home] I get to eat every day; or, when the morning has been bright and sunny, being wrapped that night in the particular sun-smell of the quilt; or the tender look, unsure whether to praise or stop me, when I stay up late studying, I can always feel that affection, warm as the gentle winter sun.
I don't understand why my feelings are always so timid in this; I don't understand why I can't even reach out to put an arm around her shoulders, or hold her hand; I don't understand why the words truly in my heart can never be spoken—it is not that I am too cold. It is not that, after a fierce argument, I don't want to be the first to reach out and hug the mother I hurt without meaning to; it is not that I don't care about my father, sitting alone in the dark after coming back from tests at the hospital; nor is it that I think everything they give me is only natural. It is just that opening my mouth is so hard. Truly, I am not heartless, but those deeply hidden words are like a spell, as if, once put into speech, something would collapse.
Regret fills and overflows, overflows and fills again, and I go back and forth in the frustration of my contradictions. What is gone cannot be done over; even dressed in the same clothes, hair grown long as it once was, saying the same words in the same tone, closing my eyes cannot call back the tears that flowed. Though in the future soon to come, parting is a road that must be taken, sorrow is not like a shoe; it does not wear thinner the farther you walk…
Perhaps some things will indeed collapse, like the distance between us, or the generation gap, and the wall around the heart built of countless seemingly trivial frictions and misunderstandings. Perhaps one simple sentence could make it all melt like ice and crumble like tile? I no longer want to be trapped in a cocoon I spun myself; however hard the going, I will break out of it and become a butterfly. Yes, I want to find the courage to cherish all that was so hard to come by; to gather up and carefully keep every garment and shoe of my mother's, every smile and glance, every sorrow and pain, just as she once did, does now, and will go on doing for us.
Offering the last stick of incense, I pressed my palms together in thanks, then turned and walked out. The early sun had quietly melted the morning's ice and brought warmth; the vault of heaven no longer seemed as uneasy and heavy as when I came. Leaning on the parapet, I saw the field paths not far off alive with leaping green, standing water reflecting all around, and the horizon where the fields ended opened up a whole sky of clouds. In the gentle breeze I could at last set down a little of the knot in my chest, and the corners of my mouth lifted slightly.
Gods above, hear my prayer.
I do not hope that the days ahead will be peaceful and smooth, but I pray that however great the hardship that knocks us down, we will have greater strength to hold each other up again, steady our steps, and stand.