Desire Lines

August, the peaches in my grandmother’s garden ripen to full bloom. She laughs celestially as they burst between her teeth like stars. She beckons me with her hand, wrinkled like the lines of a mountain. 

廖香, my grandmother says. 试试桃子.

Under the American blue sky, she calls my name in a language hooked to my throat like fish bones. Her voice ripples like a distant ocean. I do not know how to tell her I’m sorry. 

~

Sometimes, I press a switchblade to the animal of my tongue. I carry this small violence with me into the day.

~

Memory is a chord of wind passing through my fingers. It is shapeless, with no beginning or end.

The last memory I have of my grandmother: the folds of her skin illuminated by the afternoon sun. Peach in her mouth, small rivers forming around her chin. Her garden of yellow grass and hummingbirds, a still-life in watercolor. My Mandarin name, sung from her lips like a hymn. 

Memory is shapeless because it knows the emptiness of grief. It moves from body to body, transient as water. 

廖香, my grandmother calls me. In the garden. On the hospital phone. 

I mourn the geometry of what I’ve left behind.

~

I once loved a girl I never kissed. Strawberry brown, eyes like the sea. We danced in abandoned boxcars and slept on the floor. In the lullaby of night, only our shadows touched. 

She rarely spoke of her father, his days pierced by radiation. A chest barren and marked, the quiet shame of his own nakedness. Instead, we listened to each other breathe beneath the purple veil of twilight, for proof of the other’s existence. For if we weren’t alive, then who could create such music? 

~

You are my little joy, the girl once sang. So come closer to me. It was late out, and the radio crackled a warm jazz song, and in the half-dusk, she looked inconsolably beautiful.

The moon’s last stray light pinned itself to the hollow of her cheek–I wondered if there was a language for such tenderness. For the evening we spent barely touching, just two fingers pressed to the red of the other’s mouth. Her pulse rippling against mine like the sweetest rain.

~

My grandmother fell in love with a writer. Her husband, a journalist for the People’s Daily. They lived in an apartment in Beijing and smoked cigarettes on the balcony. Traveled to cities under foreign skies. Posed in black-and-white seventies photos, smiling dizzyingly for a chorus of cameras. 

My grandfather died before I could remember him. Lung cancer, a smoking addiction. All I know of him is folklore, stories passed from my mother’s bones to my own. She says I inherited his writer’s hands. I imagine him hunched over a typewriter, cigarette curled between his lips like a prayer.

~

To be a writer is to document the world and its histories. To know the language for beauty but not the ability to touch it. 

I wonder if my grandfather smoked to quell the longing trapped inside his ribcage, if the very thing that made him feel most alive was the cause of his dying. 

~

Grandmother always wanted to be a singer. She wanted to feel sequins hugging muscle as she moved, to taste the immortality that comes with fame. 

Instead, she birthed two daughters. Dishwater soap wrinkled the skin on her hands like cellophane. In the tradition of the women in my family, her body became a vessel for emptying. 

~

When my mother was born, my grandmother miscarried the dreams that rested inside her. I wonder if, when she looks at my mother, a small, shameful part of her sees loss.

~

At the end of her days, when my grandmother can no longer speak, there is no music to be found. Only the static of a waiting room, the lines of fabric holding together a hospital gown. The light refracting off her pupils–glassy and beyond sight. 

~

The girl I love begins to speak of her father in the past tense. Stillness creeps in, and I do not know the words to reshape her grief. I do not know how to hold her without leaving scars. 

There is poetry in silence, but all my silences are elegies.

~

After high school, the girl moves across the country. She scatters her father’s ashes alone at the coast beside the highway. I imagine her standing at the edge of the Pacific, her hair swept in the wind like a horse outrunning the horizon. 

~

To carry on living is perhaps the most erotic act in this precious and lonely world. 

~

The night my grandmother dies, I untangle my limbs from half-sleep and drive to the garden behind her house. The sun shimmers along the trees, a mosaic in green and gold. The morning birds sing the previous night’s sorrows. 

I call the girl I love. She fills the time with stories of her childhood. Her father’s one-dimpled smile. His hands, calloused from softball lessons in the backyard. 

Neither of us speaks of the deaths we carry. We understand that this is what the living do. That in the shadow of memory, we do not stand still. We wake up and feel the sun on our skin. We walk onward into the sad and gorgeous day. 

~

Winter, a train platform. The sky at dusk a bruise. Snow cleaves New York into a stack of powdered properties. Wire fences, barking dogs, the old man at the corner bodega. Near the tracks, I hear the music of strangers’ conversations—the girl arguing in Spanish with her father, the man on the phone comforting his wife in labor. We are only a passing glance in the window of each other’s lives. Some of us stay longer than others. None of us know who we are but we keep on going. 

Grief is the child of love, the passing joy of another’s existence. Tonight, the moon reminds me of the girl I love. What separates her from the strangers at this train station is only the sharing of a brief and quiet intimacy. California, New York, the distances we cross.

~

At the window where my life ends and begins, I see a peach tree. My grandmother sits in a white chair, her skin baking in the lemon sun. The names of the people I have known and lost flow from my lips like wine. In English. Then Mandarin. Wildflowers dawn along the grass. Swallows perch on the windowsill.

To be a writer is to preserve, but it is also to let go. Memory is an unreliable narrator, and the scripture of our desires is shrouded in fog. But what a joy it is to touch someone, if only for a moment. Today, I will wake up, exhale. Watch light swim through glass and linger on skin. Snow will slip in, a brief tenderness. It’s a bright winter day, and I want to wear love like a second skin—to be seen through another’s eyes—more than anything else in the world.