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When Language Overwhelms Meaning: Heaps of Paper in Bleak House
"He wos wery good to me, he wos!" is the only thing Jo seems to be able to say regarding Nemo's, or Captain Hawdon's, death in Charles Dickens's Bleak House (178). This one repeated phrase, in its earnest simplicity and the faithful representation of Jo's dialect, distinguishes Jo's speech from the "proper" English that many other characters use. It is also on account of this speech that, only moments before, the Court of Chancery dismisses Jo's testimony on Hawdon (177). The Court makes a clear judgment: Jo's speech, considered too "improper," is reason enough to dismiss him as not having anything to say that is worth listening to. The Court conflates the means of expression with the meaning itself, penalizing Jo's "improper" speech as though the contents of his speech are improper or inappropriate as well. Many characters in the novel similarly blur the distinction between language and the meaning it communicates, becoming unusually fixated on the language itself. The systems of the novel—the church, justice, philanthropy, or even the household—built upon these means of expression, drown in the excesses of language and reveal themselves to be fragile, unable to be closely scrutinized.
Mr Chadband is one such character who places more emphasis on his communication, namely his elaborate speeches, instead of the meaning it communicates. Meeting Mr Chadband on the streets of London, Jo, who "afford[s] a subject which Mr Chadband desires to improve for the spiritual delight of a select congregation, was seized by Mr Chadband" (408). This interaction demotes Jo from a human being to a mere "subject," one whom Mr Chadband treats as a character in some tale, whose life story—or at least, the life story that he imagines for Jo—remains safely at the distance of fiction. At this comfortable distance, he can more easily reconcile the fact that while he addresses Jo and takes Jo's circumstances as the "subject" of his sermon, he is really only preaching "for the spiritual delight of a select congregation," not for Jo's benefit. But the novel challenges this presumption as well. Listening to Mr Chadband speak, Mrs Chadband arranges herself by the fire, whose warmth the novel describes as "favourable to the reception of eloquence" (410). Mrs Chadband is not arranging herself in a comfortable position to receive spiritual enlightenment or even knowledge—she is arranging herself in a comfortable position to receive "eloquence." This choice of word puts the emphasis on the way that the sermon is delivered, how "eloquent" it is, instead of the message or call to action of the sermon. Mr Chadband's sermons, then, are not really about communicating meaning, despite his claims to the contrary, but rather about the act of speaking itself and the "eloquence" of the speech.
Mr Krook's warped understanding of language manifests in his obsession with reading and writing, underscored by repeated imagery of heaps of papers. When Esther first meets Mr Krook, he shows off: "I have a turn for copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor write" (76). Mr Krook is oddly proud of his skill, a skill which strikes readers as peculiar—to be able only to copy, to regurgitate from memory, without knowing the content of what is written, completely misses the point of language as a means of communicating meaning. Tony Jobling, or Mr Weevle, recognizes this tension as well: Mr Krook will "never read. He can make all the letters separately [...] but he can't put them together" (512). Mr Krook is forever arrested at the step of parsing the letters separately, too lost in them as individual letters to be able to access the more advanced realm of understanding their meaning. In this obsession with reading and writing, he leaves behind, after his death, "a well or grave of waste paper" (634). The words "well" and "grave" indicate the sheer volume of papers that he leaves behind, but also invokes images of drowning, whether under the waters of a deep well or buried in a grave. In addition, the property of a "well" as a source stands in juxtaposition with the "grave," hinting at how papers and literacy itself initially assist the purpose of communication, yet, in excess, become their own downfall.
The Jarndyce and Jarndyce case presents a similar image—the Court of Chancery drowns in heaps of papers, carrying out justice at a suffocatingly slow pace. As Esther observes the proceedings of the Court of Chancery, she notes that when the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case is called, clerks "brin[g] in of great heaps and piles, and bags and bags-full of papers" (397). The Court of Chancery is like Mr Krook on a larger scale, where there is such an excess of documents—the clerks can't even finish bringing in all the documents before the Court finishes discussing the case for the day—"nothing can be made of it by anybody" (397). These papers, and the written language on them, are originally designed to communicate and preserve information effectively across space and time. Although the Court of Chancery stands apart from Mr Krook, all being able to read, the sheer excess of the documents drowns out the meaning, and the judges become like Mr Krook, too stuck in reading individual letters to put together their meaning as a whole. Ada recognizes this tension when she questions: "But do you think that, among those many papers, there is much truth and justice, Richard?" (598). Ada cuts to the heart of the matter, highlighting how this system of justice, or the Court of Chancery, is both constructed on and obscured by these heaps of papers—they form the basis of legal precedent and procedure, but in such excess, they hinder the workings of this system instead and serve as a way to hide these failings with an illusion of progress.
The heaps of papers that characterize Mrs Jellyby's house serve a similar function of drowning any benefit her philanthropy may have and obscuring the failings of her household. Mrs Jellyby is obsessed with writing letters, which can be extrapolated from the room, "strewn with papers and nearly filled by a great writing-table" (53). This description recalls the heaps of papers found in Mr Krook's home and the Court of Chancery and suggests Mrs Jellyby is a philanthropist who gets too lost in the process of communication to make effective change. When her room is requested for her daughter Caddy's wedding, Mrs Jellyby replies that "it's quite impossible that I can put my papers away" (478). Her statement, while alluding literally to the messy state of the room and the difficulty involved in cleaning it up for the wedding, can also be read as a complaint of the time that this wedding would take away from her work—as always, she is "overwhelmed [...] with public business" (479). She conflates her work, her amorphous and ill-defined "African project" (53), with her "papers" themselves, blurring the lines between her letter-writing and the actual impact she hopes to make on Borrioboola Gha. This fixation does not come without a cost—Esther observes of Caddy Jellyby, who serves as her mother's scribe: "nobody ever was in such a state of ink [...] she really seemed to have no article of dress upon her, from a pin upwards, that was in its proper condition or its right place" (53). The novel presents Caddy's disheveled appearance in tandem with her being covered in "ink," an immediate symptom of Mrs Jellyby's obsession with letter-writing. Uniting these two images, the novel suggests that Caddy's state, as well as the general messy state of the house, is the direct consequence of Mrs Jellyby's misguided fixation.
Characters in the novel blur the distinction between the means of communication and the information communicated itself, focusing their attentions on the language instead of the meaning. Systems of church, justice, philanthropy, and even the household slowly drown under the burden of this misplaced focus—Jo admits to not being able to understand Mr Chadband's sermon (733), the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case continues to drag on, readers never hear about any reforms being made in Borrioboola-Gha, and the Jellyby household devolves into more chaos every day. The frailties of the systems built upon this misguided focus on language instead of meaning challenges the assertion that the Court of Chancery makes when they refuse to let Jo testify on account of his speech—when flowery decorations and flashy ornaments are stripped away from one's language, readers see that it is sometimes the simplest of declarations that carry the most weight. After all, Jo's refrain is a modest phrase, yet still sincere, touching, and haunting: "He was wery good to me, he wos!" (178).
Works Cited
Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Penguin Books, 2011.
Sounds of My Grandmother
Your house is silent now. At night, one by one, the lights turn off, and in the darkness, the house is silent, still, devoid of life. The silence sends goosebumps over your skin, but at the same time, you feel a selfish, prickly sense of relief. At last, she is gone, you think. At last, your sleep will be undisturbed, your life will go back to normal, the normal that was disturbed several years ago, when she first arrived here.
Days after she first arrives, you notice changes in your home, uncomfortable changes that you don't want to voice out loud for fear of being rebuked by your parents. You notice her language, the unfamiliar harsh rasp on the "h" sounds that she makes, almost as if she's scowling, a grating sound that makes you flinch. The more you will yourself not to notice it, the more abrasive it sounds, and the more unavoidable it becomes. You notice the way she almost bares her teeth when she pronounces the Chinese word for "black", 黑, hei, the way her throat seems to drag over the syllable, jarring and displeasing to the ear. You hate the unfamiliar vocabulary she introduces to the household, 馍馍 momo instead of 馒头 mantou for the soft steamed buns that have always been a staple in your family, but take on a new light with this new terminology.
You don't notice at first when she changes. The timeline of the entire matter is a tangled mess in your head, one that you have never dared to voice and untangle out loud. You only remember, at some point, realizing that your parents now take it as normal that she will come up every few days to inquire about some person who had died years ago. This realization is jarring—it makes you wonder when exactly she had changed, and how you possibly could have missed it, and since when your grandmother, the one who brought you around China as a child, who brought you to eat tanghulu, to walk the length of the Great Wall, who cooked for you in the summers, when she had finally faded from the world without anyone to notice her.
She feels that she is disappearing, but can do nothing to help herself. For one, moving to America has restrained her. She does not speak the language. She does not know our customs. She cannot drive or travel on her own. She has no autonomy, no independence in this strange world, and now, she is slowly losing control of her memories. She cannot contribute to the household. She panics. She overcompensates by cooking, attempting to clean, taking it upon herself to repair the holes and rips in our clothes, trying her best to make herself useful. A person who feels themselves fading away will do their best to maintain their grip in the world, to assert their existence, to voice their story for anyone to hear—but you have no sympathy for her struggles.
Instead, her overcompensation only makes you push back more. Every little thing annoys you, reminds you that your home is no longer your own. Her hands are dry, and the skin stretched over her bones sounds like paper rustling as she smooths her hands over her down vest over and over again. She adjusts the pots and pans and dishes on the drying rack. The heavy pots clatter on the kitchen counter. She puts away the bowls into the cabinet. The white glass bowls clink against each other. She shuffles those thick winter slippers that she wears even in the summer on the kitchen floor. The sound of the shoes against the floor irritates you. It irritates you especially when it wakes you up in the middle of the night, and you hear her turning around and around downstairs, one slow, heavy footstep after another, as if with each step she takes, she carries a heavy weight on her back. You think that her shuffling footsteps will at least be quiet for a while, until she comes back downstairs to turn again and again around the kitchen island, restless, unable to stay still. They are all sounds that you would never notice normally, only, now, like a feedback loop from a malfunctioning microphone and speaker, they echo back and forth, growing louder and louder, and you feel it coalescing into a shrill scream in your head, the high-pitched squeaking of a boiling teapot about to explode.
You become ugly. Whenever she asks you questions, you brush her off perfunctorily, and you get mad whenever she touches your belongings. You lose your temper when she makes too much noise, and you can't stand it when she meanders back and forth in front of you. You refuse to see yourself for who you truly are—it is easy, in fact, to ignore the truth. On the other hand, you sometimes catch brief glimpses of yourself in the mirror, moments where you can't suppress the vague twinge of guilt and panic at the stain on your soul. It is a stain that gets darker every time you lose your temper, every time you ignore her because you are frustrated, because you don't want to talk to her, because you don't want to look at her, but oh, you cannot go on avoiding it—
Because you hate her. You hate her, that is the truth. You hate who she isn't anymore, you hate that she is intruding on your home, you hate that the grandma you know from years past, who taught you your Chinese culture, who opened her home to you in the summers, who cared for you, is no longer in front of you and can never be found again, and most of all, you hate that she stirs up this ugly hate within yourself, because how could you possibly resolve the conflict between your idea of your own innate goodness with these moments of evil?
When her mind dissolves further under the grips of dementia, your parents don't dare to allow her to wander around outside of her room without supervision. This must be when the hallucinations begin. You don't know for sure—everything about her blends together in your memories, a tangled mess of horror that smears years of a snowballing disaster into one muddy clump, one that grows even messier each day you refuse to speak. But it is around this time that you begin to hear her voice coming from her bedroom, day after day, talking with imaginary companions. At first, they sound like intelligible conversations. These conversations soon devolve, too, as even her capability of speech dissolves into nothing. Her words become noises, syllables that you know are supposed to form words but can't quite understand. You cannot decipher a single word of her language.
You hear her voice in the middle of the night, mumbles and syllables of a foreign language you cannot speak. At first, you cover your ears and try your best to fall asleep anyways. Later, though, as the realization slowly dawns on you that this may be her last hurrah, her last desperate, fumbling attempt at telling her story, at communicating with the outside world, you begin to listen—only, it's too late. You strain to listen, strain to hear, thirsty to find meaning, only to discover that her voice has long become meaningless. Her meaning will never reach your ears ever again. In the middle of the night, you lie in bed under your covers and stare at the ceiling in the dark, letting the noise surround you in a twisted, eerie embrace.
Your parents move her to a nursing home soon after. You don't know what to expect when you visit her for the first time. The truth is, you haven't seen her in months, ever since she became confined to her bedroom. You don't know what to expect, but you are not expecting the frail body curled up on the bed of the sterile nursing home that reeks of cleaners. The floor is squeaky clean, so smooth that it is slippery. You wear shoes, but you can imagine how cold it is, the countless others passing over it never having considered this place a home. Her skin is now like tissue paper, barely covering any flesh beneath it, sinking into the hollows of her bones beneath, and she is so thin that you can clearly see the outlines of her skeleton. You are surprised at how helpless she seems. With guilty relish, you find the word that describes the sight before you perfectly. She looks pathetic.
But you don't say a word to her. You do not really look at her. You won't acknowledge it, but you are afraid. You are afraid to look at the frail body on the bed, you are afraid to see the shell of your grandmother and to recognize where she used to be, you are afraid that you will start missing your grandmother when you look at her—an emotion that you have no capacity for, no room to fit it alongside your hatred—and you are afraid, too, in the most selfish way, that this will one day become you. You are afraid that the buried curse that was inherited by your grandmother from her mother, that was inherited by you from your mother, that this curse will one day come alive and this debilitating, humiliating disease will then fall upon you.
You feel like a coward. You feel like a coward when you don't cry after hearing that she has passed away. You feel like a coward for never having the guts to talk about her with your parents. Most importantly, you feel like a coward because you can never bring yourself to acknowledge how horrible you were to her.
The silence kills you. Mentions of her never make it into your familial conversations anymore. Your parents do not bring you to the cremation. You cannot even attend the funeral, which is held in China. It is as if she never existed in the first place. The silence suffocates you, leaves you alone to deal with the complicated feeling of grief that is not quite grief, because even though you didn't show it, you have already grieved in those long, long months in which you knew that the soul of your grandmother was already gone but she, somehow, in a cursed way, remained here in flesh. You feel relieved that you no longer have to suffer by watching her suffer. Then you feel guilty that you have the audacity to be relieved at her death. Most of all, the silence tricks you into feeling that you are the only one.
But when you endeavor to break the silence, you realize that it is no easy task, either. Your family likes to keep its matters private. Disagreements behind closed doors never make it past the front steps of the house. Some things, your mother always tells you, are not meant to be shared beyond the household. That is just the way things are. After all, in Chinese culture, the face of the family cannot be lost, and appearances must be kept up. Therefore, you, who tells the secrets of this family, you are a traitor. You have betrayed the family, you have betrayed your grandmother, and most of all, you have betrayed yourself, your morals and your values and your story, by selling this story for judges to approve and colleges to admire.
My house is silent now. A dim lamp illuminates my desk, messy and unorganized, and I sit before the tangle of thoughts that I just finished putting onto paper, thoughts that I don't quite understand yet. The house is completely still, and the lamp is the only light left. There are no sounds—no shuffling of slippers against the kitchen floor, no nightly conversations, nothing but silence, a silence that only succeeds in highlighting everything that is gone now. I try to break the silence with the sounds of my typing. I try to break the silence with the sound of my voice, the sound of my voice as it tells my story. My grandmother never got the chance to tell hers—hopefully I will get the chance to tell mine.
When Birds Sing
I'm doing the one thing I should not be doing while practicing piano: checking my phone. It's basically a reflex, the way my hand reaches to the top of the piano to grab my phone when I stop playing. Perhaps it's because I'm feeling bored, picking at the same details in the same piece, over and over again. Perhaps it's to stave off the feeling of anxiety that seems to get worse the more I practice for my audition. My back hunches as I lean over my phone, facing away from where the kitchen connects to the living room. Outside, the sky has already gotten dark, the nighttime starting to encroach more and more on what used to be the time of day during the summer. Likewise, the birdsong has also been quietly silenced due to the impending frigid winter. My leg jiggles and bounces on the black piano bench.
It was only a few months before, at a small recital like any other. I had started playing my recital piece just as I had started countless times before, but as I got close to the end, I just couldn't continue. The music that had been stored soundly in my memory, in my fingers, had suddenly disappeared. I was left there in the oppressive, waiting, expecting silence, as silent as a forest devoid of life in the dead of winter, punctured by my occasional random notes at the piano as I tried my best to find my place in the piece again, each valiant effort at recreating and propping up the collapsing melody, the notes slipping away into silence like wisps of disappearing smoke from between my fingers. My heartbeat quickened, jumping in my throat, my hands trembled, and I felt an overwhelming urge to shrink into a ball and disappear into a hole in the ground.
When I finally finished my performance and the recital was over, my piano teacher came over to speak words of empty comfort, "I think only the other piano teacher could tell that you forgot your music." I mustered a smile, trying to suppress the trembling of my bottom lip. It had only been one of the many recitals of late during which my brain inconveniently froze up when I needed it to function the most, no matter how much I practiced beforehand. It was a late-onset bout of stage fright that had been suppressed all my youth, yet emerged to sink its claws into me in my adolescence. When it came time to sign up for auditions to play chamber music, I had told myself I would be able to get over my stage fright. As my leg continues to shake with increasing frequency, I'm not so convinced anymore.
I take my fifth practice break in a row, pulling up my messages and beginning to text. On a fleeting whim, a small sliver of truth I'd never wanted to acknowledge slips out of its locked cabinet in the back of my mind. "I'm scared," I tell my friend on the other side of the line. But then I curl back in my shell, trying to push back the emerging realization in my heart, and I send a series of messages trying to lighten the mood and put my phone down, starting to practice again. After a few moments, I can't resist picking it back up, but before I read a single message, I put my phone down again. I play another segment of my piece, pick at a couple of details, and my fingers itch to pick my phone up again. Part of me wants to read the messages, and the pit of my stomach burns, butterfly wings chafing against soft skin.
Half an hour later, I finally open up my messages. Inside are reassurances, long paragraphs of explanations of what happens at auditions and encouraging words that I hadn't realized I was looking for when those few words of truth had finally wormed their way out of my stomach, where they usually stay to rot. I'm going to be okay, my friend assures me. Those words on my phone screen are like a little knock on the window, one that interrupts my spiraling descent, briefly putting my thoughts and worries on pause long enough for me to be able to notice the chirping of the birds. My eyes burn a little, and I sniffle. I haven't forgotten about my stage fright, but my heart settles back down into its place in my chest. Inside my head, for a brief moment—as fleeting as that moment when you catch a fragment of the melody that someone's playing from a practice room down the hall that you swear you've heard somewhere else until the impression slips away from you as if it had never been there before—I hear my piece the way I want it to sound, as melodic and as smooth as the birds that sing the songs they are born to sing.
The next Monday, I make it to my audition a few minutes early. The big room is almost empty, save for a long, bumpy plastic table, surrounded by some chairs, and the piano, elevated a foot or so above the ground, its isolation in the room naturally drawing the eye. The lady listening to my audition greets me, and I answer her questions on autopilot, an awkward smile pressed into my lips, but I'm not really listening, a ringing like the sound of a scratched record echoing in my ears. After a few more questions and social niceties, I sit down on the black leather piano seat. I adjust myself, once, and then twice. My fingers find their spots on the piano, and I double check, once, and then twice. I force my legs to still, and I glance over at the lady judging my audition. She smiles, "whenever you're ready."
I don't feel ready, but at the same time, I want to get this over with. For a brief moment, the room is silent, a dead forest, devoid of the joyful chirping of a single bird, and the pressure of filling that silence starts to loom over me. Willing myself not to think too hard, my fingers begin pressing down on the piano. My head is in a fog, trying not to overthink the notes beneath my fingers lest I break my concentration and the fragile flow of the music. My muscle memory is the only thing dragging me along as I try to empty my mind of all thoughts that might trigger a chain reaction and stir up the blind panic just waiting to erupt within me.
But in the middle of the fog, I hear something—I hear my own music, my own playing. I hear the singing of the piano, the warmth and softness of the notes that vibrate out into the big, empty room, and for the first time, I let my fingers dig into the keys, coaxing out the natural rise and fall of the music. Something light washes over me, reminding me of the feeling of waking up on the first day of spring break to the song of a bird perched on the tree outside my bedroom window at the slightly chilly dawn—something relieving, something relaxing, something as carefree as that bird as it launches itself into the skies, disappearing in the gray darkness that, after a long night, has finally been touched by the warmth of the sun.
After the audition is over, I pull out my phone and begin texting. My friend was right. I'm going to be okay.
a tough pill to swallow
i. infection and incubation
Finals week on campus is a breeding ground for illness. I, like all of my other classmates, have lowered immunity levels against the germs and viruses spreading around campus. And I never feel it at first. I might go hours, days even, after being infected with the contagion before I feel its consequences. The fever acts silently, sneakily catching me in its grip. I never know what's coming until it hits me in the face.
I never know the obsession's coming until it hits me in the face. It starts with simple thoughts, a little burst, a bubble of admiration when I listen to her talk with poise and easy intelligence, or when I see her series of awards. I never know when exactly the seed is planted. Maybe it was that Tuesday when we walked together to an event and chatted on the way there. Maybe it was those few weeks when we sat together at the same table. Or maybe it was formulated in those moments when I allowed myself to dream, to craft an unrealistic image of someone I desperately wanted to know.
ii. onset of symptoms
It's always at night that I start to feel the fever creeping in. What begins as an innocent headache, or a persistent dry throat becomes a fever that grips my entire body and makes me reluctant to get out of bed. I dread the rush of cold air that sweeps across my body when I force myself to push back my covers, like the unbroken ice that chills the air when I try to make conversation with someone that I don't quite know yet.
I try, though, and they respond a little. There's an awkward fog in the air, the uncertainty of whether or not they're just humoring me and responding to be polite, or if they're beginning to return the same interest. I tackle conversation topics the way I memorize biomolecule structures for biology class—I keep a running list of topics that I haven't breached yet, waiting for a chance to get to use them, and every time I do, I feel a jolt of nervousness. Is his smile too polite? Is his answer too distant? Is she responding just to be nice? Does she want to avoid the topic?
The persistent questions, coming back again and again in different forms, scratch at me like a relentless itch, like the tickling of my sore throat that makes me want to drink more and more water until I drown the discomfort. Subconsciously, though, I know that it's just begun. I am not delirious yet. It is too early for me to trick myself into thinking that they like me just the way I like them, that their distance and refusal to confide is just their own personality, that I haven't lost all hope yet of developing a relationship with them. It's only been a month, I tell myself. It's normal for us not to have too much to talk about.
It will soon get worse.
iii. fever and delirium
When I wake up the next morning, the delirium has already set in. I feel strange yet almost normal. I don't notice the extra fatigue that seems to wear at my willpower to get up. I don't realize that I'm running a fever until I glance in the bathroom mirror, and even then, it takes a couple moments to realize that the gray face reflected in the mirror is me, and that it means that I'm sick. I feel like I'm moving through mud, but something about the delirium tricks me into thinking that this is normal, like the way I accept being constantly stood up or being ignored, their changing moods, the enthusiasm and closeness one day just to face the chilliness and distance of being ignored the next day. Something in me has gotten out of balance, and my desperation to interact with the idol and image of this person that I invented in my mind makes increasingly self-demeaning choices seem logical and reasonable, if only it would elicit the smallest of reactions from the other person. Sure, waiting for hours for him to show up is completely fine, putting up with the countless times he stood me up is fine, all because sometimes he does show up, and when he does, I have a frame onto which I can drape my imaginations and fantasies about who I think he is, the person I have grown attached to.
Seeing my gray face in the mirror makes me, ironically enough, want to laugh, even though there's nothing funny about the situation. I brush my teeth and I stare at the pink spots of color on my cheeks, fascinated. I'm balancing these two different perspectives at one time, one, the perspective of an outsider observing the delirious and slightly outrageous behavior of someone running a fever, and, at the same time, the perspective of that very madman who stares in the mirror at their cheeks, flushed hot, highlighted against the background of an unnaturally pale face. From this outsider perspective, I know that I'm sinking in quicksand, that concessions, excuses made for his absence, all drag me down a delusional path that only gets harder and harder to return from.
As I change from my pajamas into clothes, getting ready for the school day ahead, I feel the bitter cold piercing through my skin and seeping into my bones, cold like the silence that suffused the atmosphere after I asked a question. "What are you guys talking about?" Silence. "When are you getting here?" Silence. After I pull on a thick sweater and begin doing up my hair, my entire body burns. My torso feels stifled in my sweater, and my face is hot, my neck radiating heat, like the sudden warmth I feel when he lets me hang out with him for an entire afternoon, when she talks with me like an equal, the warmth I know will eventually burn when the cold inevitably sets in, but embrace nonetheless, like a reckless moth flying towards a flame.
I sit, numbly staring at my desk, feeling the fever rage through my body. I lose my sense of time. I could have been sitting there for twenty seconds, or an entire hour. Stillness settles through my entire being, and even the thought of lifting my hand, much less pushing myself out of my chair, feels like sloughing through neck-deep water. I have no energy to drag myself downstairs and take the pill that I know will break my fever.
A splitting headache builds, initially just a tickle behind my eyebrows, but soon seizes my entire forehead in its clammy, unforgiving grip. The pain clears my mind, pierces through the delirious fog like the raging torrent of a river, held too long behind a dam, as it tumbles down the hills, destroying and devouring as it goes, slicing a new path through the earth. I, unwillingly, know what I must do.
iv. recovery (it tastes like this)
I dump a pill of Ibuprofen into my palm. One time, in desperation, when I had a twisting stomachache but no water, I chewed a pill to swallow it. It stung as it went down, bitter, curdling my taste buds as its guts spilled open on my tongue, crushed by my teeth. Even though I have water and I can directly swallow the pill without tasting it, the taste seems to return to my tongue. It's a reminder, a ghost of that creeping realization, knowledge that I've always known but willfully ignored, the realization that no matter how much I try, how many conversation starters and questions from previous chats to follow up on I memorize, I can't make them light up the way I do when I see them. I can't make them like me the way I like them. If they don't like me, they just don't. There's nothing I can do about it.
I choke slightly as the pill goes down. It battles all of my misplaced convictions about how hard work must lead to success in personal relationships. It challenges the value of all the efforts I had been putting in for the past few months to get just a little closer to them. But as I breathe out, the pill successfully making it to my stomach, I have faith that I will feel better soon.
By the time I'm leaving the house to head to school, my fever has subsided. My head is still marked with the faint grip of a migraine, and my tongue is still stained with that bitter taste that makes me recoil—so long, though, that it remains on my tongue, I will remain awake, clear, lucid, and fever-free.
My Fake Infatuation
She, technically speaking, was a first for me. The hot summer after my seventh grade year, in the barely air-conditioned Waltham dance studio, provided the backdrop to my first crush on a girl after coming to terms with my sexuality.
She leaned back on her hands and her legs extended in front of her, unapologetically taking up space while neatly but lazily crossed, with an air of elegance and the type of confidence that tricks everyone into thinking it comes easily and leaves people in awe. She wore a crop top with a dappled blue-gray pattern, a pair of athletic shorts, and a thin, sheer black sleeveless shirt over the crop top. I probably already knew that day that whenever I looked at her, I saw another girl, not her, who wore a dappled blue-gray swimsuit underneath black athletic shorts, with a pair of plastic-framed glasses, a kind grin, and hands that "looked like salami" after doing headstands. Who I saw, if it bears repeating, was not actually her. And yet, I let the ill-advised infatuation blossom nonetheless.
My infatuation was like a short-lived, spectacularly burning fire that was beautiful enough to shake the heavens but at the same time was a cause for shame, for hiding. It was ignited out of nothing, out of nowhere, and lived much more ferociously and passionately than I'd ever expected. It consumed my thoughts and caused my brain to think about her, and then to think and then think and then think again. It created something that possessed me with a strong, maddening desire to unveil and shout it to the world and, at the same time, to snuff it out, to choke it to death with my bare hands, stamping it out vigorously and savagely and never letting it see a sliver of daylight. But, nonetheless, something born from nothing was, at the end of the day, nothing, and after summer concluded, it died down and left only ashes behind. Still, it branded a spectacular scar on my heart, making me swear an oath that I would never forget its ill-lived existence. Never once, though, during its time did I dare to speak a word of it. It was born in silence, suffered in silence, and also died in silence.
It was ill-lived not only because of the words I'd been too afraid to say, but also because it had been a mistake to like her in the first place. The mistake I had made was to take her for someone else whom I'd liked before, whom I'll call my old friend. Likewise, my brain filled in what I couldn't see underneath her face mask with my old friend's face. Therefore, it came as quite a startling surprise when I saw her real face for the first time, over Zoom, on a day when the rain fell in torrents, as if determined to stir up a flood and drown us all, when the wind blew wildly and without restraint, threatening to cut my connection to the Internet at any moment.
This must've been the start of my realization at the time that I, perhaps, from the beginning, had not liked her, but rather the shadow of my old friend I saw in her. In short, I liked my idea of her, not her at all. It was, needless to say, quite unfair of me to expect her to be like my old friend, or to use her as a replacement.
However, to like (or dislike) one's idea of someone else as I did isn't, actually, all that uncommon. In contrast, one of my favorite stories from Chinese legends is the story of the zhiyin (知音), which describes two people whom Westerners may describe as soulmates. One of them is a master of the guqin, an ancient Chinese instrument, and the other is the only one in the world who truly understands his playing. After the guqin master's friend's death, the guqin master smashed his instrument and swore never to play again, for there was no one else in the world worth playing for now that his good friend was dead.
The people we meet in this fleeting lifetime cannot be counted, and we will become friends with only a precious few, and such a connection of mutual deep understanding, if possible, is even rarer. Most people we meet we only have a shallow understanding of, and when talking about them and thinking about them we reference our idea of them, which oftentimes is nothing close to how they actually are. How many people, then, in this life, will we judge and misjudge without understanding, at all?