shrank from Ama’s scowl and Ma’s hushed nods until all I could muster were exasperated screams that fled as incoherent croaks. In the silence, I wiped the grease on my pants. I paralleled the chopsticks in my right hand. Everyone resumed chewing. And I ate—the clean way, while the meters between you and I expanded in what was left unsaid. Our fictive kinship was peeled back, the deafening truth glaring through. Before Ama’s grimaced enunciation of dirty, a word that could never describe you, I cowered behind a bound tongue. Her utterance failed to capture the you I knew, the cruel storyteller who mastered the tale of The Manananggal with jump scares that birthed nightmares, or the potato chip connoisseur who licked clean every speck of cheddar powder as if it were gold. Dramatic, funny, and generous; those would have made for better words. After all, you made me feel like I was whole in a house of women taught to shrink. With you, I was not the disgraceful left-handed granddaughter who ate with crisscrossing chopsticks, or the angry daughter fussing over how my brother got more pieces of seaweed. I was the girl who spent every evening curled up next to you, leafing through issues of YES! Magazine as we ridiculed celebrities with mouthfuls of Jack ‘n Jill chips. We seemed inseparable, evinced by the photos where I clung to you like a koala while my family stood to the side, manifested in the grim corrections that followed when I accidentally called you Ma. Yet, despite your love, I chose silence then and again, and again, until it became the default. Numbed by our severed bond and demoralized by a retrospective guilt, I kept our memories on mute and on pause. By the time I pressed resume, I could no longer produce detailed descriptions of your laugh (a loud one, according to my mom), the way your sinangág sizzled on my tongue, or how you said jia ba bue so swift the spaces in between disappeared. Silence kidnapped you from my memory, seizing with it any opportunities for grief or celebration. Many questions remain unanswered, like whether what we had was all just a performed intimacy signed into contract, compensated hourly. I could never know. Even as I attempt to press replay, I realize that there is much I did not comprehend then, and more yet for me to understand. As I deconstruct those blurred images, I am frustrated by how one-dimensional
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