Origin Story: Triptych
by Jenny Qi
1. Infant I don’t remember the first time I lost my mother. I can only imagine: infant wheeled through airports infant crying in grandmother’s lap infant diaper change in economy class bathroom. Birthed from Latin infant means not speaking unable to speak. In other words I cannot ask her what it was like: each separation a loss. In other words the past is a kind of infancy. After returning I’d sit in mother’s lap staring at photos of myself who could not speak: infant in blue stroller infant in yellow sweater infant in blood-red coat. Now grown I scan photos of my mother from when she was younger than me. Is death a kind of infancy? The dead cannot speak either. In dreams we babble a nonsense language infants together cradled by stars. 2. Kid In the first dream I’m a little kid on my first yellow school bus. A man with a greasy ponytail snatches my mother from the sidewalk pushes her into a dirty blue car. He looks like a shadow of Disney’s Gaston. I watch them disappear from the bus window wake from naptime gasp-sobbing so I can't speak. My animal panic scares my bullies into patting my shoulders with kid gloves. Kid was once a crude word for children sold into labor in British colonies—children bought and worked like livestock—little goats born to be seized and consumed. Kid nabbed. Kidnapped. Now I am old enough that my friends have children. The babies scream when their mothers turn away for a moment—primal fear of loss. In the second dream I follow my mother up the long spiral of a crumbling stone castle. In one version she stands outside helpless as a tower collapses around me. In the other I am frozen watching her buried beneath gray stones. 3. Stone Like stones I skipped a grade and then another. When a skipped stone slows it quickly sinks. Does the stone feel itself slowing? Does it know when it sinks? Did my mother skip me because she knew how soon she would die? When I stopped I thought I might die too stoned and moss-sunken. The sea by San Francisco is filled with worn headstones of the forgotten. Stone comes from an old Germanic word meaning to stiffen. My father accuses me of being stiff which is to say he does not like me with boundaries. After he remarried he kept my mother’s red urn in the attic for years. I thought of stealing ashes to wear around my neck in a precious stone like a neighbor who made her Siamese cats into a string of diamonds one after another. One day I was away he buried her in my garden beneath a mound of small white stones. He only told me after the large cactus yellowed and died. I avoided thinking about it for months. Is it okay to replace the dead with living?
Oh ok I didn't know I needed to cry today. Thank you for these.
"Is death a kind of intimacy?" This line stays with me.