Ba, when you feel like it, we venture out and down to the rocks.
We watch our feet glide carefully over the reef, peering down into the little pools of water and shells containing bodies as clear as we could imagine ourselves sinking into.
But it wasn't a tide pool, Ba, I wanted us to beat forward like the frothing of the rolling waves that swept through our ears, cut down at the crag and trapped below the sand that coats the bottom of our shoes and collapses inwards. Warp the concentricity of the pool. Grain by grain, I wanted you to understand us as too much precipitation to wash away.
One day, we filled our lives by placing our fingers at the lips of the anemone, because the human skin resists the neurotoxins of the filament’s touch, but what if we didn’t know this? We saw their meekness close down around ourselves all too familiar.
The surface catches the light and only for a moment, we are lit on fire.
Washed up and down ashore, we too are caught within a tide.
But in the land where you returned I was as glancing as a speck of light across the California skyline.
Doubtlessly, as we whipped past the cornfields and felt ourselves split in our toothy layers as each shade of yellow came at us like horizontal gravity, we knelt at your mother's ashes feeling nothing but the crevices of our hands eaten thin and the fortunes we had all promised ourselves in curls at the tips of our thumbs. I thought that during the 1960s, the starvation had worn all but the clothes on her back. You traced along my thumb, and because at my center was a circle within another circle, then that meant someone up there had amassed for me a tiny army of miracles and I should be capable of keeping them all to myself. Which is to say that I was as empty as the photographs had shown.
Some days, when I write I hate how the letters appear juvenile, I hated that whatever I wanted to say I had to say to an audience, and I hated above all that my senses were to the craft more than the feeling.
Some days, she is too clear. If I motivated myself with guilt when I wanted to write I did not want to write but I wanted to pin myself down to the paper, flatten myself under the creases of her eyes, shrink myself to a follicle upon her head you say I got mine from, disappear behind the fat tears like amputated raindrops in the lungs that nourished everything but my fingers as dry as ashes. I took photographs for my own good but I was lying to myself when I said I could see past the ones I flung at you in that I was tossing her image around, but in reality I stood as unmoving as her shadow.
Maybe, it is that I question the legitimacy of my creation, because I wasn't trying to speak but I was trying to yell in a language I did not understand, and my words could only have fallen dead as soon as they were alive.
Ba, I fear that to dust we shall return, but this was never a guarantee.
Where I am writing this the motorcycles roar a little too loud around my ears on the streets, and I am sunk like any of your traditional floral, green, jasmine tea bags into water, because to me the notion of traditional is an entity wanting to return to its lair but entrenched in the dirt I stand on.
We were on a boat together last time, do you remember? After you told me they would judge the fortune of our family on the shoes we wore and the phones we carried, and the skyline tilted as if on an axis above the summer waters. Because fortune, I learned, was the rest of the Chinese characters I never learned to write or read, because I could never search for a few that would bring me on a Southwest flight three thousand miles back and forth in the few hours that we spoke, and always for a purpose.
I don't understand what you're saying, you tell me. Speak English.
On the East Coast I take my classes and stand outside the cubicles and catch water from the coolers with their round bodies so characteristic of your workplace.
Yesterday, I hoped to become unstuck in time and take a trip with the Tralfamadorians and you as you ventured a universe away to work on integrated circuit design. Now, in this place I feel I resist nothing yet conduct very little.
Most of the time when I can be alone I wonder if I would enjoy picking up where you have left off with you, and maybe some of the time I feel that this would come with time. I remember that you are happiest when you are working on your plants in the backyard. I remember that before putting in soil we needed to break concrete, arms animated high in the air and coming down with the blunt force of the pickaxe and the groan of physical labor. When I was little I liked the old Lexus’ leather seats because I felt the churning of the gears below me as I knelt on the backseat, arms clutched around an 80-gallon reusable yard container piled high with free mulch from the City. What was the housing contract anyways but a body working the soil? The signature of fish feces and remains could be used as fertilizer, but it was always a trace of death used to raise something else to life.
Ba, I should say that the by-the-wind sailors muster themselves in generations like herds of buffalo. They swear by the very thing in their name that becomes an enemy, and end up beached on the Monterey coast. Now, I float nameless at the other side of the sea, Ba. I am searching for where I cast off.