SAY SOMETHING IF YOU’RE THERE | JOCELYN LYNN SUNG

SAY SOMETHING IF YOU’RE THERE

JOCELYN LYNN SUNG

It’s late. The quietness of the room should be soothing, but without a bit of sound to focus on—a fan stirring up a gentle breeze, the tumbling of clothes in a dryer, or the ticking of a clock—it’s difficult to fall asleep. I’m extremely drained. I’ve now spent a majority of my childhood moving from place to place, constantly having to adapt to new surroundings and schedules. At ‘home,’ my mom boils over with pent-up rage and stress, but that isn’t new; the jagged scar on my left elbow attests to that. My friends at school do things that genuine friends would never do, let alone even consider. They use Asian racial slurs to make inside jokes. One uses a neon-yellow highlighter to scribble all over the math homework that I so meticulously wrote out, because there isn’t a printer in any of the boxes littered everywhere in our new apartment, if you can consider things like strange odors and cockroaches as ‘new.’ I spend each day dreaming of the better things that my future has to hold for me because not only is there only so much that I, a fourteen-year-old girl, can take without having anyone to count on, but if the universe has so cruelly cheated me of a kind beginning, it can’t possibly cheat me of a good ending, too. Right?

Those thoughts wander through my mind as I lie in bed. The moon is full tonight, and its round face peers into my bedroom through the window. It chases away the darkness and makes it flee into the unsettling black of the closet. I’m sure that if I turned, I could see my younger brother’s sleeping silhouette as he dreams of nonsensical, light-hearted things; instead, I’m facing the wall, curled up with my knees tucked against my chest and my hands gathering folds of my blanket underneath my chin. My damp hair lies behind me spread out over my pillow. If I tried my best to lie to myself, I could probably convince myself that the cold circle of tears pressing against my cheek is because of the wetness of my hair. I could convince myself that, in the distance, there are a pack of stray dogs howling at the moon, and I could fall asleep by focusing on that imaginary noise. In my dreams, I could convince myself that I am anyone else anywhere else, and she has so much more going for her than I do. Instead of doing any of that, I lie to myself in another

way.

I stretch my conscience out. I spread it thin like the way the ocean spreads its waves after they clash against the shore of an empty beach. I don’t think I breathe, because if I breathe, that feeling will crumble. That feeling of searching, of reaching out, of hoping to sense that something or someone is there is as delicate as a newly born fractal of snow. If I make a single wrong move, it’ll recoil like a stretched rubber band, stinging me before I even have the time to react, and everything will be confirmed. If so many people of faith claim to have prayed for an answer and received one so immediately or so obviously, then I’m sure some sort of divine being, whether it be God or not, has to have some sort of compassion for me and everything that I’ve been through. Maybe then I could finally find something to believe in.

Are you there? To someone else, those words are simple and bland. To me, I have poured every ounce of myself into them. There’s a deep pressure inside my heart that attests to that. In that quiet, moonlit room, I lie still, waiting for an

answer.

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I remember being young and sitting in the backseat of my family’s beat-up Honda Odyssey van as we sped along the crowded lanes of California’s never-ending highways. Many people dislike long drives without any sort of distraction to pass the time, but I liked looking outside the windows (and I still do). Whether I was half-asleep or fully awake, I liked daydreaming about different things. Maybe that’s how my love for writing stories began: with the gentle vibrations of the car soothing me, I used the blurs of colors, people, and places to create entire worlds in my past self’s boundless imagination. At night, however, those car rides became tainted and my thoughts often wandered somewhere else. Gone were those peaceful daydreams of different, interesting things to ease the length of the drive, and in their place was a deeply-rooted sense of failure and uneasiness. The bright red taillights of so many cars surrounded me, blocking me in. On the other side of the highway, the pure white headlights of those cars twinkled for just a few moments, wasting no time as they hurried past

me.

To most people, they would only see cars. They would see the domino-effect of traffic building up. Knowing about California’s notorious problem with reckless drivers, they might even become a little apprehensive, and their grip on the steering wheel might tighten. To me, a young kid who played with Barbies and Littlest Pet Shops with her friend from down the street, all I could see and feel was my inferiority.

Even as a kid, I felt like those red taillights were significant to sin and despite all of my trying, I would never be able to get to that side of the highway with those pure white headlights. I could ask my mom to stop, clamber past my brothers to get out of the car, jump the divider between the different lanes, but as soon as the tip of my sneaker touched the asphalt of the other side, all I would see were those damning red taillights. It was both infuriating and disheartening, and it lead to extremely unhealthy habits. For example: As a kid, I contemplated death a lot. I was in no way suicidal, but I constantly felt like I was running out of time to be able to enter heaven. On my 12th birthday, I wasn’t happy about growing up. I wasn’t enjoying my cake or the few presents I received. Instead, I was seriously considering my death. For some, religion has a positive impact on their mental health and sense of self. For me, it was the exact opposite. As a kid, I was so convinced that twelve was the deadline for children to die, yet still be accepted into heaven by God. That’s what I was taught by the religious movies that my mom used to watch and the few sermons that I heard during the times that my family actually went to church. I felt like—as I grew older—I would undoubtedly become more and more tainted by sin. I also felt like I would never be able to live up to God’s extremely high expectations of me; each tiny lie, every single negative thought, and everything else that I couldn’t do would condemn me to an eternity of a fiery, painful, and terrifying prison. These things deeply imprinted such a strong sense of failure in me that it quickly lead to issues with my sense of self-worth and confidence, things that I still struggle with today. In that moonlit, silent bedroom, curled up underneath my fraying blankets and trying so desperately to hear some sort of otherworldly voice speak out to comfort me, I am much older and a little less willing to freely place my trust in any sort of faith than I was before, but a small part of me is still naively hopeful. “This is the last time,” I think to myself as I struggle to hear something, to feel anything, but like all of those other times, nothing greets me besides an echoing silence reverberating from a deep, invisible abyss. There is no answer, no comfort. There’s only that same uneasiness and disappointment that I felt with those red taillights.

Four years later, and I’m sitting on my bed, one that’s almost six hundred miles away from my other one back in that room and its deafening silence. Everything is different. The window used to be behind my head, and the door used to be in front of me, but they’ve swapped places. From my bed, I see people in scrubs, suits, and sweaters as they walk along the sidewalk leading to Fort Defiance Indian Hospital. Even the floor has changed. Before, I only had to vacuum every so often, but now, despite all of my sweepings, a thin layer of dust never leaves the linoleum tiles. There’s a quiet knock on the door that I wish wasn’t there. A moment passes before it opens so reluctantly that it’s almost as if it’s able to sense my hostility. My mom’s face appears in the darkness of that small gap. Years of quiet observation have helped me learn how to read facial expressions, but with her, it’s hard. Maybe it’s because I don’t even want to look at her.

come?” “We’re having scriptures,” she says. “Can you

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There are a lot of words that want to come out, but I hesitate. If only I were more assertive as a person, then I could flatly tell her no and eloquently and confidently list every single reason why. If only I were clairvoyant, then I could get on my knees and plead with her to move us back to California before the end of the summer. We could

escape the heartache and adversity that the following years brought. My mom wouldn’t have been suffocated by pillows and wrestled to the ground, and she would have never become infatuated with my stepdad’s sham of a homophobic, racist, and sexist religion. My younger brother wouldn’t have to keep quiet and sit through hours of forcefully studying scripture when he should have been enjoying the freedom of being a kid. My stepdad’s radical beliefs wouldn’t have touched either of them.

As for me, I wouldn’t have had those frustrating dreams, the ones where I’m screaming at my stepdad so loudly and for so long that my voice gives out, and I can no longer make a single sound. There would be no need for me to cry so hard that I felt like I was choking on every single word that I wanted to say. There would be no need for me to talk to the police, salty tears streaming down my cheeks as my feelings, which suffered from years of neglect and suffocation, began spilling out so quickly that I couldn’t even say one intelligible sentence. There would be no need for me to justify to my stepdad or my mom why I couldn’t (and still can’t) bring myself to believe in a faith, a “truth” that so openly discriminates my friends, my classmates, and all of the other future people that I haven’t even met. People find comfort in their faith. Some have an easier time coping with death and illness because they believe in a welcoming afterlife, a reunion with their deceased loved ones, and a forgiving God. Others have a need for their life to have some sort of deeper meaning, so they turn toward religion to find it. We see so many strange, terrible, or beautiful things in our world, and we need to find a means to justify it. I don’t disagree with these facts, and I don’t disagree with people’s choices. We choose to be who we and to do what we do are based on our past experiences, our current knowledge, and our future aspirations.

For me, however, based on my thoughts as a child and my experiences as a teenager, I can no longer find the ability to trust in any sort of divine being, merciful or not.