Dear Ma,
The more I write to you, the more I realise this was all futile. But maybe that’s the point – that this is ostensibly for you, but really, it’s for me. To satiate something in myself. Or perhaps I am a storyteller, much like you, and this is the only way I know how.
I think back to when you would stroke my hair, soothing voice in my ear, and then your hands would twist above both our heads, the shadows drawing memories down our walls. You’d call them stories.
Your arms would arc above us, fingers tracing the curve of ceiling, stitching together fragments of broken heavens. Things your mother had once said to you.
‘Where are they now?’ I would ask, in a ten-year-old girls wonder.
Gone, 消失了, you’d say. Or forgotten. Or broken.
Years later, I had wandered into the library, its wooden floors creaking beneath my cracked soles. A place where dust clung to the walls desperately, but the shadows were at bay. It hurt to take your hand in here, Ma. This place, with its rows of lives trapped beneath their covers. The words in these books were ghostly – they would whisper only to me. Whilst they lived in my hands, in yours, they would have been strangers.
I found it tucked in a corner, its spine crumbling. The pages marked by years, the contents stamped haphazardly, their edges curling as though they, too, had weathered something. I ran my fingers along the cover and pulled it open.
The story of Nvwa - the Goddess who pieced the sky together, who mended the world when it tore itself apart. The one you used to tell me, in your voice, soft and urgent, in the dark of our room where shadows danced like figures from the stories you carried.
‘Here it is, Ma,’ I said, pointing to the title.
‘The myth you would always tell me about, years ago.’
You looked at the book, then back at me, your face blank as if I were showing you a map of a place you'd once walked but now could not name. I watched you search the shapes of the letters; confusion flitted across your eyes. You couldn’t see the world we once made together in those pages, the sky you once patched with your voice. The words had slipped through your fingers, and the shadows of your face suddenly looked darker.
I saw you break once. It was the night I tried to teach you English. I did it the way I knew how, and of course that was through books – our fingertips hovering over each word hesitating, lips to your ear and hand in yours. Reading was even difficult for me, and I guess a fourteen-year-olds patience runs thin.
‘No’, I’d say, sighing, ‘that’s not how you do it.’
The false starts, consonants that stutter and stumble over themselves, your words warped, locked away in your throat, trying to claw their way up.
I don’t need to read, you declared suddenly, slamming the book shut on my fingers, red.
This time, I didn’t fault you. You stormed off, chair heels screeching.
On the good days, I would take from your hand the measly clatter of coins you’d make from the dusty tips jar down at the corner store. I would jingle my denim pocket louder as we skipped down the aisles of Vinnies on a Sunday, flaunting the white flowery dress I had on, hand-picked for you. But there was always something uneasy in the reflection, like I wasn’t sure which part of me was real and which one was stitched on to please.
Hangers of dead men’s ties lay row upon row; bright neon discount scrawled across them.
I pulled one of these over my head and posed with you in front of a dusty mirror, and tried to imagine what I might look like if I didn’t have to choose.
Do you think we made it? You had asked, suddenly. Do you think we’d fit in?
You would ask this, standing beside me with dark sunglasses pushed up your nose, the neon dangling between your eyes.
I would always huff a small laugh at your questions. Somehow, they always lingered in the shadows of my mind.
Yes, you would say to the tie. It was one of those don’t look too closely or you’ll know, but just passable enough to fit in at school, the blue a hint more indecisive than the rest.
We stacked mounds of clothes as high as our dreams, and I would speed recklessly down the aisle, the trolley wheels veering maddeningly left.
You remind me now of Nvwa - the goddess who patched the sky with five-coloured stones.
You patched your life too, didn’t you?
With dollar-store lipstick, with hand-me-down clothes, with words that didn’t quite fit but held anyway.
I didn’t see it then. That your hands - calloused and quick - were mending more than just dinner tables and school uniforms.
You were patching a whole sky for me to live under.
I’m not a relic, am I? 我不是遺物，對吧? You declare abruptly over dinner.
The steam of the rice whistled in its pot, a forewarning.
I’m not sure what came over you, to make such a proclamation, but I felt the need to reassure you,
‘You’re not.’ Pause.
‘Why would you think that?’
God, forbid I reveal something a little too close to home here. But who is reading this anyway, except me, in the corners of my mind in need of a little relief.
I’m at school the next day, the tie of my uniform hanging off my figure a little too loosely, and the hem of my skirt waring a little too thin. I smile as she walks in the gate.
You know who she is. You were always thankful for her.
My bub has a friend! You’d laugh and clap your hands when I told you about the girl in with the glasses and the dimpled smile.
Of course, I would love to meet her. She can come over someday.
Oh, how I think you’d take it all back now.
She was my friend first.
But I would stare - and stare - and smile. I didn’t know what I was smiling at, not really. I knew that she felt like sunlight through frosted glass. We would sit side by side, our fingers occasionally brushing on purpose and then pretending they hadn’t. Her laugh curled itself into the hollow of my chest and stayed there.
At school, we began to move differently. Or perhaps the world moved differently around us. The corners of the courtyard became our refuge - the quiet space behind the old bin near the basketball courts, or beneath the library’s sagging roof, where sunlight filtered in like secrets.
It was safer in the shadows.
There, we could laugh louder. There, her fingers could brush against mine and stay a little longer. There, I could look at her like I wanted to without the sun catching us in the act.
But nothing stays in the dark forever.
Side stares started first. Then the whispers - low, wet things that slithered down hallways. I saw it in the way their mouths moved without sound when we passed, the way desks shifted to widen space between us. We were something to be warned about.
That day - the day they saw us - I held her hand like it might anchor me. Like if I held it tight enough, the rest of the world might dissolve.
We walked like that through the gates. For once, we didn’t run to the shadows.
And that’s when it came.
‘Freaks!’ They called us. ‘We know what you are.’
The words hit sharper than the rocks that followed. Her voice trembled when she said my name. I let go of her hand.
Not because I wanted to. Because I didn’t know how to hold it in a world that had no place for it.
The bruises, the silence on the ride home, the sound of my own heartbeat in my ears. I would tell myself to forget.
But this is the type of forgotten that carves itself desperately into skin, into memory.
I skid into the driveway, as I always do.
Dust kicks up around my ankles, and I let the gate clang shut behind. When I open the door, Ma is already standing in the hallway. Her stare heats up my face, straight at the bloom across my cheek and the scrape across my knee.
Her eyes harden, just slightly.
What happened? she asks, voice soft, but the kind of soft that hides a storm.
I open my mouth, and the lie is there before I can think.
‘Just playing too rough,’ I say. ‘Fell. Stupid.’
I force a laugh. It sounds like something breaking.
She stares for a moment too long, then nods once, slowly.
Go clean up, she says. Dinner’s nearly ready.
I brush past her, the scent of ginger and steamed rice clinging to the walls. It should feel like comfort. It doesn’t.
In the bathroom, I avoid the mirror. The bruise is already swelling under my skin, a dull echo of shame. I turn the tap on full, let the cold water sting my fingers, the way I wish it could erase the heat behind my eyes.
That was the day I failed to face you. I cannot stare into the brightness of a sun, only for it to look like me.
I have come to realise that maybe I lied that day.
Perhaps you are a relic - but not the crumbling kind.
What I truly wanted to say was that being a relic is not so terrible.
Archivum - a Latin word, but not for what has passed, but for what persists. A beginning made durable. A keeper of names.
In essence, to be an archive is to be incomplete but vital. A mosaic of stories told and untold. A myth waiting to be remembered.
A living history, your quiet fire the only light I knew, your memory the only map I have.
Our mother tongue - no longer a mother to me - but locked away.
But I walk into the shadows to face you, piece together broken syllables, because this is the only way I know how.
From,
Your daughter.
