IT WILL SUBSIDE
2021
The air at the bridge was cool and crisp, the sky a cloudless blue. To my left, a mother took photographs of her daughter, who posed rigidly while anxiously glancing around. I panned through the never-ending list of times I had been in the daughter’s exact situation – next to my older brother as he smiled his clumsy, rectangular smile, and in my dance costume as I stood stiff as a board, my gelled hair revealing a huge, shining forehead.
Each time my mom and I watch my old dance recital videos, we joke about how anyone could spot me in a heartbeat. While the other little girls had their blonde hair gelled neatly into a slick high pony, my stubborn Asian hair protested being held down by any amount of sticky, syrupy goop. The gel my mom attempted to tame my hair with somehow worsened it; my fly-aways were now twice as tenacious, springing up out my scalp like a lion’s mane. And though my height and bony frame matched perfectly with the other eight-to-ten-year-olds on stage, my tan skin and big, round head acted as a handicap of sorts, preventing me from blending in with the others. Or at least it was something my younger self would’ve seen as a handicap.
I recalled the days in middle school when I would pull down the front visor in the passenger seat of my mom’s car and slide open the small, rectangular mirror. With a hand mixed with caution and precision, I would adjust it so that only my eyes were shown in the reflection. There was nothing to see in them. No colour, not even the slightest hint of brown. They were just black holes, dead abysses. The inner corners of my eyes narrowed and thinned as the crease of my hooded lids disappeared. I hadn’t started wearing makeup yet, so my lashes were short and straight as they pointed down, slightly covering my eyes. I looked as if I was barely awake, like I could barely see out of them. Every inch of my body filled with anger and disgust at the droopy almonds that stared back at me, as I interrogated why God hadn’t blessed me with round eyes the colour of the sky on a crisp spring morning. I folded the visor back up and stepped out into the school parking lot, letting the hatred subside until the next time I’d be forced to confront my own reflection.
I walked across the bridge, and then aimlessly circled around the end for a bit, passing time and increasing my daily step count. As I turned and stepped back onto the bridge, a small, puffy ball ran towards me, her thin, smiling eyes her only features exposed to the cold. I pulled my chilled fingers out from the warmth of my pocket to give a dainty wave to the tiny, beaming child in front of me.
The child’s mother rushed towards us, apologizing hurriedly and flashing an embarrassed smile. As I assured her it was no problem, I looked behind her to see an elderly woman I assumed to be the child’s grandmother, walking after her with a calming smile. As she smiled, her eyes formed the same horizontal crescent moons I saw peeking out from the puffball I had just waved at.
Reminded of my late grandmother, whom I had never met nor would’ve been able to communicate with if I had, the words my mother spoke softly rang through my head.
“My mama would wait for all my siblings to leave dinner before sneaking me my favourite snacks beneath the table. She adored me, and she would’ve adored you just as much. Although she passed far too early, I know it’s only because she had to come back to me in time to be my daughter. That’s why our relationship is so special - you’re both my daughter and my mama. And when I’m gone, don’t worry - I’m only leaving for a bit before I come back as your daughter.”
She’d been telling me this and sharing stories of her mother for as long as I can remember, each time progressively adding more Chinese into the Chinglish mix as I grew older and could belatedly understand when she spoke to me in her mother tongue.
Lately, she’d gushed to me about how much easier, and how much more comfortable it was for her now that I could understand more Chinese. She said it got tiring always having to think of the words in English. Through years of my brother and I playfully mocking her accent and limited vocabulary, I had failed to see how difficult it was for her. I couldn’t imagine being unable to communicate comfortably with my own children, the very people closest to me. Now, as an adult, I felt suffocated by the overwhelming guilt I felt towards her for every little thing I was too naïve to notice.
Maybe these are just trivialities my mind blows out of proportion, or maybe they’re burdens I have the right to brood over. Once, I told my therapist, “I’m constantly worrying about my family, and about existential things. I worry about my mother passing, as she’s already sixty-three. My brother has depression and anxiety, so I worry about him when she passes, too. He doesn’t have a lot of friends right now, nor a job. I feel like everything is on my shoulders, like I need to be at home all the time to be with them while I can, and like I need to make money in case my brother isn’t able to for himself in the future.”
I sat there sobbing through my words on the stiff, polyester couch as she looked back at me with a poker face and a fabricated empathetic nod. She handed me a tissue from the coffee table strategically placed between us.
“Well, your brother doesn’t have any mental disabilities, does he?” I shook my head. “Then he’s just… for a lack of better words, lazy? He’ll be fine then, and you said your brother and mom don’t have any health conditions. So, you have nothing to worry about; these are all examples of over-worrying, and it’s important to recognize.”
I nodded, slightly embarrassed, with a tinge of comfort, yet mostly unsettled by her response. I didn’t know how to respond. Instead, I began to understand why my brother had halted his sessions with his high school therapist, during which a clueless ten-year-old me would watch The Grinch on “the nice lady’s fancy DVD player”. To me, the daily visits to school counsellors, therapists, and psychiatrists that I was forced to tag along to were just ways to pass the time between school and dance lessons. As my parents screamed over each other, arguing over whose fault it was that he “turned out like this” while my brother sat trembling between them, I finally beat the next level of Candy Crush outside the less-than-soundproof office door.
Maybe it was once I entered high school that I began to understand, when my brother had gone over six months without taking his medication, complaining of how numb it constantly made him feel. He punched three gaping holes in the drywall downstairs and spent five days refusing to talk to my mom. She pleaded for him to stop, her voice broken and tired, and I wept quietly between them as my brother clumsily held my hand in an attempt to comfort me. We sat engulfed in a silent pain, the air thick and suffocating, our chests tight.
“Why are you doing this to me?” my mom finally asked, her stifled voice cracking at the edges. I watched the distant gaze on my brother’s face quickly change into one of pure ire. Nothing but his eyes changed, which was somehow far more frightening.
“To you? YOU AND HIM ARE THE ONES WHO’VE ALWAYS BEEN PUTTING ME DOWN AND SCREAMING AT ME FOR AS LONG AS I CAN FUCKING REMEMBER!” I had never heard him yell before, and especially never like this.
“I’m sorry! What do you want me to do? I’m human too, sometimes I can’t handle it all either! You don’t think I worry about you? You don’t think the things you say to me hurt me too?”
They told me to leave the room, closing the door behind me. I huffed short, jumpy breaths between sobs as I listened to their muffled shouts. I couldn’t hear the rest of what they were saying, or maybe I didn’t want to, and after somewhere around twenty minutes they opened the door in silence. The air was frail and tender, but they said that everything was fine now. My brother went back on his medication, and things went back to normal.
My therapist informed me that it was time to wrap up for the day, and my tears slowly subsided as I sat in the lobby, waiting for my ride back. The breakdown receded, as always, until the next time. I stopped seeing her after just two months of our weekly sob sessions, and after I finally started taking my medication regularly.
As the sky began to turn a dim grey-blue, illuminated softly by a warm orange glow, I headed back towards my dorm. The itch on my legs that had just begun to form from the cold, Providence wind acted as an alarm set for the end of my walk. I started to walk faster, telling myself it was only a nine-minute trek back. The itch pervaded, however, and I walked with one arm clawing the tops of my thighs. Just a few minutes after I reached the room-temperature, windless relief of my dorm, the itch soon subsided. Until next time, itch.