Ode to My Childhood (50pg excerpt)

Ode to My Childhood

Tony Lee

May 2021

Children of the earth, we are born as fluid clay that shifts with the wind, stretches to fit cracks, and shrinks under the pressure of hands that beat down on us.

What shapes us?

The environments we grow up in as toddlers and young children mold our identities, and as our environments change, we transform along with them.

In this Capstone project, I explore and envision the various environments and circumstances that define us as people — from folklore to corrupt governments; from poverty to whitewashing; from abusive parents to even arson.

We’re all, in a way, just mathematical sums of our internal thoughts and external influences.

Writing and creating art about these external factors that we cannot control, particularly throughout this lonely year full of derailed plans and global turmoil, has helped me gain new clarity over the important things in life, as well as come more to terms with aspects of myself I’ve never been satisfied with before.

I will turn 19 in August. This is an ode to my childhood.

new paved streets

new paved streets

Starchy polyester swaddled me and lifted me from my bed — eyes still closed, breath still steady, inhales and exhales softly matching the beat of the oxen’ hooves on Wai Po’s farm only a short walk to the north: no doubt already awake and greeting the horizon with their gruff snouts, sweeping the morning dew with their swishing tails.

Rays of sunlight barely peeked through the slitted blinds that lined our eleventh-floor apartment windows, but even their subtle presence was the most blaring invader to me. The sun launched its gleaming javelins, and the white spears pierced through the darkness in my room and ignited me with their sudden warmth.

Even through closed eyes and groggy morning delirium, the golden light and soothing voice of Da Yi Ma by my bed were familiar enough to wake

me. Scooping me up preciously in teal polyester, Da Yi Ma slowly made way from my room to the front of the apartment. The steady bumping motion of my aunt carrying me through the hallway, as if she were rocking me to sleep instead of waking me, was the gentle cue of the start of another day. My eyes were reluctantly open by the time she released me from her embrace into the dining room chair; it was time for school.

For ten months out of twelve in the year, I detested the itchy, nonporous uniform my aunt slid on my arms and zipped through whines and flapping arms — “All little Chinese kids wear uniforms to school!” Da Yi Ma would say in Mandarin, her intonations of the last syllables slightly lifted from being used to talking in our regional dialect of 抚州话. “Then I will move to another universe far, far away!” I wanted to retort, but I was fiveyears old and the weakest boy in the village.

The thick teal and white windbreaker, so stiff you can almost hear the fabric crack when you fold it, trapped sweat from basketball games on shabby tarmac courts and offered no comfort on breezy winter days walking home from school. Each plastic fiber made my chest furiously itchy; chafed my sides whenever my arms brushed my body. The front of the

hated jacket always boasted streaks of melted orange and blue popsicles in summer and oil from school-side food carts in winter, the collar and hems stained yellow year-round from sweat and dust from the untilled farmland we claimed as playgrounds.

That morning, in the middle of the two brief months of winter we got in the province of Jiangxi, I could feel the cheap fabric let body heat seep through like a broken dreamcatcher. I tightly hugged myself and shivered.

Every weekday, we marched through the front door and descended the eleven flights of stairs, cracking concrete defaced with polka dots of squished candy and cigarette ash from construction workers given living quarters in the complex. “Your uniforms are better than the ones we had forty years ago. We were the poorest children in the village,” my aunt would say on our way down, and I would shake my head trying to imagine a world when she was young.

Outside, the scaffolding of government projects, hauntingly skeletal in their shabby linings and threadbare cloaks, waved bony wire-fingers at us

from across the street. Construction workers, ushered in from probably another corner of the countryside, hollered obscenities at each other and echoed them back, their conversations atop the metal beams and frames melding with the construction noise to form the crudest cacophony. They drilled into the Earth and guffawed; the jackhammer struck through the humid air and pierced my skull.

Overwhelmed by the clamor, compounded with the misery that accompanied every day with the itchy uniform, I began to cry. Da Yi Ma covered my ears and turned my head away. Pretending the construction workers weren’t there, mistaking my agony for concern that the workers were destroying the earthen streets that my family and ancestors had called home for generations — I realize that only now — Da Yi Ma cooed

” and directed us away. It was just another winter morning, and my aunt and a teary-eyed me headed towards my elementary school on foot through the newly-paved streets.

Mama told me the story of our family’s fall from grace: decades ago, when the dirt roads were dustier than the cracked paper of Da Yi Ma’s childhood photographs, poor government soldiers bustled down the verdant hills in military-green trucks and crickety wagons as brown as the soil that covered their faces. Mama’s grandfather — my great-grandfather — was our village’s landlord, and her father the principal in one of the village schools. The soldiers knocked on our doors and shouted with the kind of authority only backed by gunpowder and money, and with their dirty paws they reached and grasped and seized our land, sullied the grassy fields with their tar-black eyes and greasy fingers, pointed and saluted and bowed with fake chivalry.

I didn’t understand the greater part of the story. Trucks? Tanks? Guns? My points of interest were flawed, so Mama repeated with a more childish analogy: the green ice cream carts rolled down to our doors to serve us scoops of Cultural Revolution communism, and our family slept wealthy and woke penniless.

The strongest in our family, Mama’s grandfather stood at our gates, below our bamboo-shambled arches and brass dragonhead door knockers, and

matched the uniformed fiends with fierce eyes. “You will not take what is ours,” I imagined he would have said, chest and shoulders mirroring a lion’s staunches, faded eyes and dipped nose maybe a little similar to mine?

His resistance was futile, of course. Mama whispered a subtle warning, her idea of a satisfactory story ending: “What’s good might be lost, so when you’re given something, hold on to it with desperate hands. Never let go.”

The youngest of four daughters and fourth youngest out of five, Mama also loved to recount to us the story of the meat. Once, all the cattle and all the farms belonged to us, she said, but the government, the hand that was supposed to feed us, seized us by the neck and shook us like a piggy bank, collecting the fallen coins that spilled through the gaps in our rib cages.

After the communist soldiers came and left, every piece of meat was rare and exquisite. Meal tickets for eggs and oil were saved and exchanged for

savory slices sneaked through pairs of sweaty hands, paper sheets blushing red with juice from the beef or pork underneath. Dinners became festive celebrations where Aunt, Mother, and their three siblings knelt and lauded Buddha for their blessings. The worshippers were ravished, almost herbivores from deprivation; their altar was the meat.

Wai Po and Wai Gong would pass the plate to the eldest sister: Da Yi Ma. A moment of fleeting hesitation — temptation, desire, survival instincts?, recklessness threatening to burst through with a flick of her chopsticks — before Aunt would pass the plate to my second aunt. Who would pass it to the third oldest, then finally to Mama.

She would look longingly at the scarce pieces of meat, an exotic treat that illuminated the table full of rice and bland vegetables. She would eagerly raise her chopsticks, pick up the pieces, but only to surrender the pieces to the youngest sibling — my uncle.

“As is tradition,” Mama told me, repeating twice to emphasize. “In hardships, you must count on each other.” And who made us poor?, she seemed to taunt.

I would often think back to the first story she told me — the one she repeated the most — and shiver whenever I read about soldiers in books at school. Would they come again? ———

On weekends, I would frolic by the streets outside Wai Po’s house while Da Yi Ma and Da Yi Fu visited and took care of Wai Gong, who was crippled and physically frail. The soldiers that came down these same dirt roads thirty, forty years ago, had returned right before my birth to line the streets with smooth tiles; strawberry reds and crisp creams. The lack of new sidewalks had distinguished our poor rural life from the shiny new embryo of a city just ten miles east, but the urban motto was expand, expand, expand. I was then old enough to understand this, to see their dirty footsteps encroaching our land even more, land that they had taken and tainted.

The road workers had even laid out pomelo-yellow blocks on the edges of the sidewalk with raised bumps for the blind and elderly. I would stomp my feet, dust-streaked white socks in dust-streaked light-up sneakers, on

the bumpy yellow tiles and watch over Wai Gong as he warily swept the sidewalk with his cane, then later his crutches, as his age sapped him of leg strength and left Alzheimer’s in its stead.

If Wai Gong looked outside from his perch in his house, glimpsed the pieces of the government’s forbidden blueprint slowly unfolding on the very soil he lit firecrackers on and chased friends in games of eagleand-hen on, the skyscrapers and modern apartment complexes with teal scaffolding blossoming wretched flowers of metal and money — would he miraculously stand and shout? Would his eyes, then dull and almost completely blind, flash with blessed clarity bestowed by Buddha to guard our land? Wave his cane and curse at the workers, as faultless as they are, until they leave the good things be, and leave us be?

I stopped in the middle of my matchsticks game on the sidewalk to watch Wai Gong with a newfound admiration. Wai Gong’s eyes were dim and burrowed in with wrinkles and sagging skin, and I doubt he saw me or knew I wished he would smile and comfort me, but his eyes were still comfortingly similar to mine, even with sixty years of age separating us.

On weekends when I tossed Bakugan and spun tops and ignited firecrackers with my older cousin, in the middle of the dirt roads or atop the new sidewalks in front of Wai Po’s house, rain clouds occasionally gathered.

I imagined the stormy skies would threaten the skeletal structures in the developing city to the east with ancient roars, roars of beasts of myth and time that will return with vengeful monsoons and lion-creatures that devour evil-doers. The torn scaffolding covering the wooden beams, so pitiful they were rags that even Wai Po couldn’t salvage with thread and her calloused fingers, would tremble and beg for forgiveness. We have wronged, they would plead. We were wrong to intrude in this land.

r e e z e t a g

My hands are just barely big enough to wrap around a dandelion near me and try to squeeze. The feathery white petals slip through my clumsy fingers like the bumblebee I had wanted to catch, now probably flown far, far away. They float into the sky like little angels, and even if I had opened my eyes, gotten up, and stood on my tippy-toes, I doubt I would be

able to catch them before they left me forever. I could ask Mom to catch them for me, but I don’t. In this moment, standing just within arm’s reach from the half-asleep me on the grass outside the playground, looking over me, taller than the tallest trees; I realize it’s where I want us to stay forever.

the boy and siena

Golden-brick facades and gleaming buttresses lined the hills, reminding the boy of the future he couldn’t have. On this splendid day, the mountain-locked city of Siena felt alive: canyon-carried winds whistled through monastery arches, and priests hummed their familiar incantations — golden rhymes for the harvest season. But the Apprentice’s heart was dead. His destination for the fast-approaching noon — before the first rings of the temple bells! Or risk the wrath of the sanctioned priests — was the grand Monastero del Mare. A kraken of a cathedral, its amber walls almost competed equally with Siena’s mountain peaks, and to easily-frightened temple boys, it smirked sinisterly with giant brooches of stained glass. The Apprentice, in his grey-hearted lull, idled around the staired path below il monastero, azure glass and quartz-blonde saints reflecting a solemn spotlight onto his sullen countenance.

A familiar old man slowly descended the path from the monastery, a retired scribe that frequented the Apprentice’s school as a teacher when the regular fell ill to chills or mountain-plague.

“Antonio! Cosa stai facendo adesso, ragazzo.”

a b r a c a d a b r a

abracadabra

I was restless. Why wasn’t it enough? Foot tapping on the carpet, a maniac’s tic, a brain-numbing metronome. Waiting and waiting and waiting, breath held as if imitating a helpless victim hiding motionless in the dark closet, serial killer two steps away from the brass knob.

The first step was anxiety, the looming deadline branding a scorching scar into your flesh, bumpy and tender. You were given a day, nonchalantly, and into the test room you were delivered— unprepared, a premature baby wailing silently as Greek symbols and formulas ambush you, hellish metal coils and cations and anions smiling wickedly on test pages. One, two, three— and the severity of the situation registers, adrenaline thawing from its frozen reservoirs under your knuckles and wrists, yet again. Your fingers now see routine in this familiar dance, flesh raw and buzzing after clenching the pencil for five straight hours. Your pencil: your sole weapon of self-defense, coated with sweat on summer days, thick with snot on winter days, and fresh blood four seasons year round, red leaking from every nail bed where you aggressively pick your cuticles as deadlines materialize and new scars burn.

The second step was relief, the break in the marathon when you gasp every breath as if it’s your last, limbs no longer aching but deadshot— devoid of feeling, just a machine now. One, two. One, two. Gasp. The sticker around your waist, bamboo-thin from 4am-nights without meals the day before, only black coffee that made you gag with its bitter austerity— why keep it on? Eighteen years, you feel like stripping in the middle of the highway, falling naked and face-first onto the asphalt to be trampled by the thousands of runners behind you, thirsting with leery eyes at the finish line, propelled by the same pairs of eyes you feel behind you.

Then came the taser from her, behind you right while you were contemplating your morbid plan and stooped down to put your face closer to the ground, to feel some heat or coldness or just something to make you feel like you were feeling. Her jolt shocks you into believing, again, foolishly, that the marathon was worth it— or, if you weren’t lying to yourself, made you realize that death was too painful to attempt a taste.

The third step was restlessness, blissful ignorance of lamb lined up for slaughter, but behind the veil of the guillotine could lie an oasis. Did you do well? Not well as in excellent and better than 97% of your same-aged peers, no.

Your bar was the tippy-top of the mountain peak, so tall it probably broke into the gates of heaven and was kissed by fucking Jesus Christ himself. And even if you accomplished the impossible, journeyed up the treacherous slope and received a golden medal from Jesus, like Mulan from the Emperor of China, her contentment lasts only for fleeting days. Even the oasis would turn out to be a short-lived mirage.

And the guillotine? It’s more of a death sentence that starts the execution internally, twisting and clawing and wringing you out until only your stringy skin remains. Lemons smashed and emptied into a juicer, but sometimes — or a lot of times, it seems — you get wringed out no matter if you’re sweet or sour. 88 — squeeze, twist, wring — sorry Ma I’ll do better, I was lazy but I’ll try harder. 91 — squeeze, twist, wring — sorry Ma I shouldn’t play video games anymore, I spend seven

hours in school then three hours on homework, then one hour on video games then you start to scream. 93 — squeeze, twist, wring — sorry Ma I know it’s A-minus, only A-minus I know I know, please stop screaming.

When 90’s meant you were safe until the next test or essay came around, soon it’s 95’s. The thick, viscous golden juice trickles down her calloused fingers and lands in still puddles on the kitchen table where you deliver your papers and she delivers your sentences. You don’t feel golden anymore, not the same foiled facade your classmates boasted as a genius or your teachers praised as a golden child. Rotten purple, mulberry bruises and mauve eye bags on olive skin. Please stop screaming Ma, I’ll do better.

Three steps to my very own guillotine. One, two, three. Fall term, winter term, spring term. One, two, three. April, May, June.

One, two, three. Fifty page research paper over three months of dripping drool on computer desks at midnight, regressions and neural networks and artificial intelligence spazzing into my empty eyes sockets from the still computer screen, gurgling into my throat and gagging me until I vomit a bullshit algorithm code. National gold prize. International silver prize, but then even that’s not enough for her.

Three steps until my legs snap and I fall face-first and die in my fated race. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three. One, two, three.

blue dream catcher

(this story requires the use of a mirror)

new paved streets

Ms. Cummins tried her best to pronounce it correctly, I remember. She asked carefully if she was right before trying — trying — to impart the knowledge upon my delirious classmates. But it was of little comfort to me.

Every morning, I wouldn’t stand during the Pledge of Allegiance. At first, they thought it normal among my other behaviors of non-native ignorance. Tony doesn’t understand what we’re saying. He doesn’t want to stand, he’s just a little confused. Let him be. Even when their instincts felt the time had passed for a neurotypical eight-year-old to have received and interpreted the social cue of just standing up — not even mouthing or forcing his way through the words with a scrambled tongue, but just standing — they didn’t try too hard. My message was clear, my patriotism ran through me. My shell, my only friend — I wasn’t American. I belong back home.

Every Christmas season starting in middle school, I watched Youtubers string tinsel and lights around Christmas trees, and my classmates blasted “All I Want For Christmas” in every room and hallway.

I think back to standing under the sagging awning of Wai Po’s village home with my Da Yi Ma and Da Yi Fu (大姨妈，大姨夫), and my uncle and aunt (舅舅，舅妈) on New Year’s Days. Jiu-jiu would carry and ignite small fireworks meters away from our cozy cluster under the awning, then retreat back to join us in waiting. The fireworks blossomed brilliant

reds and yellows, sparks I can see even now if I close my eyes, only slightly crowded with new memories of noisy Fourth of Julys.

With American clothes and Chinese-manufactured shoes, an almost-banana brain but hopefully still truely-Chinese heart that yearns for American things and Chinese comfort food— nowadays I see myself in pictures, and discover too much change. What defined me had started to fade, and the American at the end of this metamorphosis was a stranger I feel uncomfortable with calling “me”. Tony? Tony Lee? Please call me 晨晨.

“听不懂抚州话勒？” Wai Po had started asking since middle school, on the rare occasions I remember to video call through WeChat. In our dialect the pronunciation slides the Mandarin words from ting-bu-dong to more of a ting-bu-dewng. She asks if I’m losing my comprehension of our regional dialect, and I shamefully list out the words I can still decipher from her and Mama’s lips: 恰饭 (吃饭), 困告 (睡觉). Eat, sleep.

When will you come back?— 什么时候回来啊？晨晨小时候说了大学会 在国里上，毕业后在国里找工作。小晨晨没说谎吧？晨晨会回来看外 婆对吧？哎，乖孩子。多听听妈妈的话，多听听外婆话。多跟外婆， 大姨妈大姨夫通通话。我们想你。 I could only nod and half-heartedly promise her yes.

On the verdant paths on my way to class at my American boarding school, I listen to the Taylor’s Version of “Fearless” and reminisce about the good old days of 2010, my first year in the U.S. after leaving China.

Come Christmas I’ll hide myself in my now familiar winter puffer (just my teal uniform was almost suffice for breezy Fuzhou winters, despite my constant complaints), and feel at home with Mariah Carey’s vocal runs. The only Chinese song I remember from my early childhood is one vague verse of “Superstar”, a dated S.H.E. single from 2003.

Wai Po, I want to say, the streets outside are paved with gold. Wai Gong had passed away in 2013, and Wai Po, Da Yi Ma, and my uncle have all moved to Shenzhen, a bustling, young city neighboring Hong Kong. Geographically so close to our home province of Jiangxi, yet so far from our Fuzhou roots in east Jiangxi. Our pitiful village houses were replaced with dazzling skylines; from their apartment views in the new city, the stars can probably no longer be seen.

But I left in 2010 — the urban development that had started when I was young must have enveloped even my family and our land that was once on the budding city’s periphery. The stars must have already been gone for years.

Ten years after moving here, after leaving home, I find myself staring at the night sky and imagining dragons in the blossoming American fireworks on New Year’s Days — not lunar, but the Western ones. Like dried forget-me-nots pressed deep in an old love letter, the fireworks dragons smile wistfully at me, hoping I would hold on to the fading memories. Remember me, they seem to whisper, so I’ll always whisper back: 不会忘.

triangle shirtwaist factory fire

You are my dragon. Breathe fire for me while I choke you with gasoline-streaks hands, black smoke spilling from your throat. Feeble whimpers unanswered.

The air hums with our symphony every minute, every hour, every day, until our fingers pill and shed in strips of grey skin like powder-thin fabric. Needles pierce cotton and skin and flesh, red stipples and rivers carve treasure paths on towels — “towels” we fashion from shredded scraps rejected from unworthy stitches. Rags we press firmly into fingers then release before the wound, and our lonely fingertips, can relish the fleeting seconds locked in its embrace with the fabric.

Fuck! Don’t get it on the shirt! You dumbass. Pinkie back and hooked around the ring finger to hold the criminal from staining the moneymakers, as if you were a royal sipping tea with proper etiquette. Four cents for each sleeve, six for each complete shirt. My sewing machine creaking and sputtering adjacent to hundreds of others in suffocating aisles, flanked by piles of cotton and bloody “towels” that keep reminding me of the cents I’m losing with each second yelping and wiping fingers, each minute lost to cracking knuckles and stretching.

The skylines of Greenwich Village are reaching fingers of graffiti-kissed stone walls; thin wobbling trees barely buttressed by wooden bars placed by the city; tendrils of white smoke wafting from greasy food stands in nooks and alleyways. Outside the window by my teetering desk, rivulets of dew drip off of birch leaves onto the thirsting tongue of a mama squirrel— My Ma would be hungry without this job, you know? Who do you feed at home? The insanity of your audacity, the questions you dodge and the bandages that mummy your hands, your enormous pile of hemmed shirts and stitched trousers dwarfing mine. Your smirks.

Two months ago, we huddled in the supervisor’s office on the sixteenth floor, stifling coughs from dirty wisps of smoke from Dean’s fucking cesspool of an ashtray, stained gum wads interbreeding with cigarette butts and condom wrappers. We were the two veteran workers — the retention rate was low — and one of the senior sewers on the fourteenth had lost an eye to a snapped needle. One of us was due for the promotion, and when I had left the room, and the door only slightly ajar, to pant a breath of fresh air outside, I overheard your sly murmurs, “... steals shirts from the piles, when no one’s watching… I was watching… steals money from the vending machines…”

You bought me dinner last night at the stands across the street. The smoke of the grilled beef and hanging ducks — necks loose — swelled from the foil plates into my eyes, gut, lips, until I emerged dripping. Oil streaks on charred flesh, the burning almost repulsive, but not as repulsive as you. After our late shift, midnight churnings of needle and scissor, I almost went back on my word. That one lone lightbulb swinging from

its detached cord on the ceiling, flickering as we squinted in the darkness at the stitches beneath our fingers, praying, cursing at any dots of red. Was it truce? You laughed when I told you Pa died four months ago when the mine collapsed onto him, the canary still singing when the speck of light above suddenly erupted into tumbling rocks. We moved to the city when they said the body was gone for good.

Your Pa was a miner too. That much you let slip, and I almost regretted my aggression.

Fuck you. When I spun around and pushed back in, Dean had already decided before I could reveal your own lowly tricks and sneaky sleight-ofhands. We use our instincts to survive, scum of earth like us. We scrape and peel the pit of the earth and ravish whatever our fingertips meet. We are a pack. When a crab climbs to the bucket brim, the tunnel’s light overflowing the unintelligent creature with hope and renewed strength, scum like you exist to drag them down. You’re filth.

I sneaked into the factory entrance on the corner of Greene and Washington Place after even the last sewing machines rode the tide to the harbor, after the last guarding crow — beady eyes and grimy beak perched on rusty windowsill, it resembles you — had closed its eyes. Moonlight tucked under the flapping collar of my threadbare coat, I sneaked gasoline gallons in two hands, bone arms creaking as dirt-dark oxfords hit concrete. The hollow frame of a door on the first floor swung, screaming, with a push of a shoulder — I slipped in before passengers peered from their carriages, urchins from their sooty alleyways. Even if they spotted me, I fear

not fines nor jailtime. You see now.

Who do you work for? The desperation in your mechanical pace mirroring mine, joints and skeletal hands shaking with every turn of the sewing wheel like the thinnest violin string strung too tight — who do you struggle for? Your Ma? Wilting grandparents, a leeching sibling? Secrets veiled behind your subtle whispers behind doors, in the narrow staircase on your way up to the fourteenth, lingering by the door to the thirteenth and peering in to make eye contact for smug milliseconds.

The first and the second and the third were steeped in gasoline from ceiling to boot-trodden tobacco stains before the telltale flicker of the lights alerted me. Tattooed chap on the second floor, stumbling in before dawn to salvage hours to feed his grandmama, hollered g’morning at me as I crept down the staircase. Meathouse across the way smelling mighty strong today, he says, fingers already pushing thread through bobbin. Metal gallon cans clanking hollow behind my back, I almost laughed.

In the deep of the night, I plotted my cunning trap— a ginger cat leering from the rooftops at rat packs creeping sewage drains below.

You’re the rat.

Here’s the empty cleaner’s closet on the fourteenth. When you appeared in the morning, I swooped and gripped you with my dirty claws, pulling you in and locking ourselves into the filthiest ring fight, two animals barred in an eight-feet cage. The match had already been lit by then, the

first floor simmering beneath us as we clenched each other in headlocks.

Do you think life was a game? Last week, sixteen shirts overdue and bulging eyes transfixed on the shattered clock on the wall, ticking towards one on yet another restless night, I screamed in the empty factory as I counted my pennies. Delirium, frenzy, empty gut, empty soul, my fingertip slipped — needle puncturing knuckle, and a second scream.

Unexpectedly, the next day, index finger frozen in a cast, stiff and useless, Dean brought me to the fourteenth and showed me the new empty station (the last chap? stabbed in a gang fight), and boasted the sudden raise: five cents for each sleeve, and— dresses! My grubby hands would be allowed on the dresses, full eleven cents for each garment. You had glared from your station two feet away.

The other sewers said it’s tragic. Misfortune: a finger crushed under metal, then a fall, because they didn’t see you behind me. How I had grappled helplessly in the air for the skinny railing, the wall, any tangible surface, when my patched shoes lost the staircase from the fourteen and tumbled, screaming bloody murder, down the dark drop, smashing my face into the landing on the third floor. Your quick hands and the gasp — so professional — covering your eyes in feigned shock and your two steps back. No one saw but you and me.

Now windows start to pound and people begin to scream, now a familiar sound to my ears. Only slightly muffled by the layers of walls between us and the world, they open the less-rusty windows to screech SOS, but

they won’t jump. The streams of smoke flow from the ground floor to the thirteenth to here through every crack and termite hole, reaching through the slit beneath our door to warp about us. Black and magenta swirls hook around our waists, threads trapping needles, stinging eyes and choking us until we gag in our syncopated rhythm.

Every footstep is an uncertainty now, at least for the people outside our door. Walls moan and floorboards whistle in kettle-pitch falsetto. The inferno must be devouring the first, second, third, the fourth… I count the floors up to the fourteenth like coins slipping away from trembling fingers.

Was it worth it? Fuck yes. Did you guess it would be me? By your side when the ugly end greets you, the one to send you off and the one to come with you. I want to shake you until you fall limp, smash you with the cast until you beg and promise atonement in our next lives — doubtlessly conjoined for as long as we’ll reincarnate, intertwined like two braindead parasites, thinking we’re leeching off of each other when we’re killing our fucking selves.

For four days, I had laid on the damp floor of my apartment, Mother spooning porridge into my askew jaw — broken from the fall in the staircase, from your quick hands — while I cursed obscenities out the leaky window. Each day, a death toll rang from our hearts, echoing in our coinbags, now empty. By the fifth day, even the porridge and potato scraps salvaged behind the corner mart had run scarce. On the sixth, eyes rolling, head reeling, I limped down the apartment stairs, through the stumbling

streets of Greenwich Village, pushed through the factory doors, gasped and cursed my way up to the thirteenth, only to discover— newly demoted. But still I had to work, have to work, food, food, food, dying…

The shaking reaches a fever pitch, the building and Earth itself threatening to fold inwards and swallow us into its flaming core. Releasing you from my grip, I clasp five fingers and stiff cast together in a gesture of serenity, the floors outside our door still buzzing with the factory rhythm in my head, even though the sewing machines have been long abandoned.

Will the buzzing ever cease? Four cents a sleeve. Five cents a sleeve. Dresses. Hems, bloody hems. Five days, no pay, and hungry stomachs collapsing onto themselves, little coal mines crushing canaries. They were so young, so innocent, left so much behind when the Gods blinked and Earth decided it would snatch their fathers away.

Ma will be lonely, but who do you care for? They will be lonely too, kneeling and convulsing in grief at the sight of smoke seeping through our shirts, ash streaks tattooing your collarbones, pouring from your eye sockets. Two mothers weeping next to dead children, so young before the light above them gave away to falling concrete.

You are my dragon. Breathe fire for me while I picture myself at the ground floor of the factory, peering up to the fourteenth to see two damned fools intertwined in bloody headlocks til the bitter end. The factory workers — the live ones — pound their windows and scream, and the brave ones leap.

doorways

Listen to me sing, and I’ll unfurl memories rooted in the clutches of time. Eroded, but still intact, waiting for my call to resurface from their slumber.

Witness my rhythm, and I’ll unearth the doorways opened and left behind me — seemingly millenniums ago, but still just barely traceable. If I backtrack through my path, hang over the edge where I leapt from the forest’s cliff, I can spot and show you the person I once triumphed but lost.

Freshman summer of high school, we ditched greasy cafeteria tables for lavender fields in France. The gloved perfumers, with delicate fingers meant for plucking, squeezing delicate flowers, ran and shook their fists at our skinny silhouettes.

We were leaping and prancing as the French sun marked our shoulders with cherry wings

We lollygagged through the lilac fields and blew kisses from the fragrant hills to ladies in bright dresses in the town streets below. The sky seemed within reach, so we waved our hands and hollered at hot air balloons that soared through the deep blue like our wildest dreams.

Take us up! Maybe we’ll never come down.

We thought us naive, so when so soon we were rebirthed fresh college graduates, money was our salvation. Bank desk bells and buzzes of traffic on Monday mornings —our new alarm

We filed through grey labyrinths of cubicles during the day, eyes unblinking, to touch grey tabletops illuminated by sunlight — filtered dull by skyscrapers’ tinted glass — then we roamed the city streets at night, loosening of starched collars and ties matching our heavy footsteps through neon doorways.

Blazers abandoned without care, reeking of booze and money on some taxi back seat or bar stool, shameful proof of our Dreamless days and Fantastical nights— was this enough? I thought so, so I stayed put. Staring at the dead end in front of us unbudging, the walls closed in, even though if we turned around, the labyrinth laid wholly behind us

As children, we frolicked and chased bees; each other; dreams Only to thrust ourselves into adulthood before we mean it The world was our oyster — then it became our prison.

Hear the night sing:

By your window at night, after endless days of monotony in doorless skyscrapers, unveil your blinds, and the night sky serenades you with its lonely song, a gentle melody on empty streets, Amber streetlights glowing on speckled tiles, so empty and still, as if the world is holding its breath as we peer out and there’s a sudden realization that the finite days slip away— only at night do you remember time flows

so swiftly and there’s only now

Its lyrics— that time is a tide’s soft caress slowly chopping away sea rocks of memories and the past, and empty possibilities, wave from sandy shores behind you, and those countless doorways passed through and forgotten, regretted, tentalizing — long sunken, so release yourself and just float

As sleepless nights melt away to dawn-kissed mornings, our sweaty fingerprints on blank canvas and easel and fallen drawings, discarded but brimming with past love will have certainly dried into faint memories of an eighteen-year journey now far behind us.

The night shines its gentle light on us, so it’s yet too early to say goodbyes. This is my ode to our beginning.