Bridge | Tong Liao | Visual Art

Bridge, Tong Liao, photograph

This is what self-sabotage looks like. This is the unspoken wish for my body to disappear at the lull in the sea where black boxes malfunction and Boeing 777s go missing; how I deserve to return to earth by way of the underwater crypt built by the very hands that so desperately tried to dig their way out.

But I’ve survived worse than this. Do I not deserve this thunderous torrent anyway? I begged for it, didn’t I: a reason to lie down and be saved? Because if the tumultuous girl comes home, salt-saturated and weather-worn, surely passersby will only glimpse the bedraggled figure and forget.

They’ll forget that she’s the one who summoned the storm.

v. Go/no go point

Space was originally intended to express my resolve, not estrange you from it. The first week of separation was inexplicably effortless. You asked for time; I booked a flight out of Dodge. I chose to leave you.

I had accepted the uncertainty for the sake of ease and absence of fight. It was my own doing, anyway: the precariousness of our situation. Until you leveled the ground with a haphazard plea for a little distance. So, I answered your shrouded prayer; up and left. And for the first week, I slept soundly. Soundless were my days, too, save the playlist I made to forget you, knock me out.

Missing you did not take long to set in.

Yearning for you was quick to follow; ferocity rivaling that of my reluctance to admit that I’d been so deeply and tragically wrong. So sudden how the vindictive absence of you was able to seize my daydreams, the bedside fantasies I’d stashed away.

I may not love you. I may have never loved you to begin with. Yet, I’m tethered by a gravitational force that should not, but somehow manages to, rule this body. So how—why are you able to resist the burdensome weight and leave? The distance that is so unbearable and nauseating to me is so readily painless for you; so please, tell me how to eject myself from my own point of no return.