Suffocation
A Silent Dream
I was with friends at the playground in my kindergarten ready for today’s exercise and fun. My mom was at the gate about to leave, but there was something unsettling about her. Mom? She glanced back at me; her eyes looked so cold and distant. At that instant I knew, and she knew that I knew, too, that she was leaving me for good.
I sprinted with all my strength to catch up with Mom, but she just kept on walking in her usual pace. It chilled me that she didn’t hurry or look back; she just didn’t care. She then took a right turn down the stairs to reach the lower ground, but when I got there the stairs were gone.
I stopped at the edge of the road and stretched out my neck. Mom, come back. Mom didn’t stop, so I thought, fly. I leapt forward, and my body floated. I glided over residential buildings and sun-bathed gardens; I flew past my mom, who was just a tiny figure beneath me looking up in disbelief.
I fell hard onto the ground right before Mom although I was actually aiming for a perfect touchdown on my feet. She bent down, with the blinding sun above her. I woke up wondering whether she was going to pick me up.
This Is Not a Dream
The math final exam in ninth grade was a disaster, but home was the real one. After being insulted by Mom for what felt like a lifetime, I retreated to my room, feeling hollow and hopeless.
I stood by the window and looked out. It was the typical tropic weather. Layers of dark grey clouds hovered low like a huge mouth threatening to consume everything, and I could hear wind howling and trace its turbulence through the swirling leaves. Thunders blasted and lightnings wiped my vision blank. I loved everything about it; the entropy, the premonition of rain and immense darkness.
When it finally started to rain, somehow a Chinese folk song from the Han Dynasty came to me, singing that the bond between two lovers could only be broken when mountains had no crown, all waters were drained, and the earth and sky became one. I wrote it down in my notebook, feeling so small in the power of nature and its inevitability. I wished I could be invisible and free like the wind, or a dust particle; I just wished I could be something else.
I thought about leaving Mom, like a ninja slipping away in the shadows, and about fighting, resisting, screaming out my pain but I was me, a coward in fake armor. I thought about the end, too, where my body would fall from the tenth floor and splash onto the sidewalk.
But I did nothing. I slept.
I Wish It Were a Dream
Among those very occasional days that we talked—that I chose to pick up the phone—Mom asked me what she could do to end the pain my father’s unresponsiveness and reticence had brought her. I suggested divorce casually as if I was just saying “oh today was a drag like always,” while deep self-loathing was eating me up; I was exactly like my father, torturing Mom with my harsh silence and detachment.
When she apologized for all the hurting she did out of depression and what it had done to me, my throat burned as I recalled those dark days. Although I wanted to apologize, too, for my immature aloofness, I couldn’t—I didn’t want to.
I comforted Mom instead, saying that I understood and I didn’t blame her. She believed me, like how she wanted to and succeeded in believing a lot of things I said.
Love could be so suffocating.