How Was I To Know, If You Didn't Tell Me by Jamie Lin

"How was I to know, if you didn't tell me," I said to you in a different language. The sentence came out fluid, surprising both of us, for I hadn't spoken in that tongue for a long time.
    Last night, I took two little white pills and went to sleep. I dreamt about two white rats, a mother and her offspring. Separated by an object cold and iron. A machine monitored the baby rat for stress hormones. They ran through a maze, became close, but neither finished.
    I dreamt of myself standing in that maze, facing numerous hallways stretching in different directions, on top of each other, sideways collapsing into each other. I tried to follow the strongest white light, but they were all faint. I was trying to escape something in the room behind me. Something naked and grotesque.
    I chose a hallway and it led me to a wooden, narrow bridge over an abyss. There was a parade holding up two coffins. One for a female adult. The other for a child. The coffins started flying toward me, and then downward. I tried to save the coffins with a long satin rope, like in the Chinese movies. I shuddered myself awake. It was dark and my ears rang.
    This afternoon I watched my mother stand by the door to the family restaurant waiting for my father to come home. A week ago, my father defended her in front of me, said in a huff, "To care about you is to care for you." Now she, with a barely concealed smile, waited, as if my dad was going to come home and sweep her away from their greasy, twelve-hour labor and working class salary. Her smile widened like a giddy preteen's, as he came into view.
    Once, my dad caught me crying. We were never close. He never helped me with my math homework or packed me a turkey sandwich lunch. He never said he'd shoot the first guy I bring home. He didn't know what to do. Finally, he put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed. His hand stayed there for a couple of minutes until the tightness inside my chest lessened. "I can be your confidante," he said.
    "Maybe I shouldn't show people my writing," I said to you. "It raises too many questions that I don't have answers to. What do you think? Well, but, it is such a huge part of me. It'd be like not knowing the other half of me."
    We were riding down a three-story high escalator, hands over eyes, pretending that we were free. I would later use those feelings as rationale to convince you, as if they were exceptional promises we made to each other.
    We went to a museum once. One particular piece caught my eyes. The medium sized statue was of a child holding a bird, both gazing into each other with a kindred-like connection. The child could be either a girl or a boy. There was a girlish softness in its round, hollow eyes, but also a masculine strength to its angular cheekbones.
    "Hard to say," I murmured. "I wondered what happened to this child. If the art was made before or after the incident."
    "Does everything have a story?" you said. "What incident?"
    I took a step back, looked at it from afar. "An incident that changed everything." I studied the child's fingertip since its eyes were too hollow.
    At the end of the Greek section, we stared down at an entwined couple with ankles chained above blatant waves. They looked desperate with mouths stretched into cries, though their eyes executed an extraordinary amount of calm. We both looked at it for some time, read a couple of sentences from the detailed caption. Drowning was once popular, to sink and disappear with only a single ceremonious ripple.
    We wanted to hold each other, but instead we looked further into the other rooms, parting at the beginning of the tunnel to South American artifacts. The deeper we ventured, the further we drifted away from the other, each preoccupied with what we found as individuals.
    Behind a South American stick figure, I found a brochure with written words on the pages, in smudged pencil;

"I want to be an anti-paper roof hand-made
over you, a crane to carry you away
from the country fighting,
a sailboat to hold you over the river
drowning, a collection of words to convince you
I am trying."
    At the end of the day, after we exited those heavy doors, we shivered out in the cold wintry afternoon. We looked at each other anew, smiled slightly as if we were strangers. We wanted to hold hands, to jump down the steps and scatter the folded wings. Instead the pigeons ignored us and the wind blew through us, pushing an arm forward, a leg back.
    "I wish you had raged for me like I raged for you."

---

A narrow river lay nearby my new apartment, yellow like mustard and shimmering from the noon sun. Industrial buildings dotted the horizon with multiple wire lines and metal poles stretching away and into each other. I tried to count all the important things, but I ran out of room in my mind. I was waiting for you, but you never showed up despite my palpations.
    On the train into the city, I realized that the world was composed of monstrous chunks of metal designed to keep us alive, separate us from immeasurable space.
    On the phone last night, you asked, "When will we stop talking?" Outside, the light was fading into a purple, a color deep enough to sink my fingers into. I said, "When I run out of things to say."
    Or maybe it was the other way around. After my pills every night, facts became muddled; my mind like a bucket of melting ice chips. I remembered that I had wanted to ask what he thought unconditionality meant. Every morning I woke up that way, a list of questions to ask someone who wasn't there anymore.
    After years of detachment, I didn't know how to sort through the compartments, though the first step, others instructed, was to be honest with myself.
    You had said once that, "People change. People shift, like gentle little, musical claps. Clap. Clap. People change and after a certain point, they never go back." I didn't believe you.
    Lately, I have been thinking of trains often, of rails that stretched on, how I wanted to follow.
    Inside the city, I looked into a hundred faces; a woman with strong, broad features like a mule's, powdered to finesse, a man with a sly smile and fly-away eyebrows, a elderly woman with the most fragile set of eyes beneath heavy lids. But I only stopped for one.
    He was a little man with a modest, black hat on a little wicker chair inside the subway station. His notes were long like dedicate strands of metal rubbed together, bursting with tinges of color, of gold, every five, ten minutes. I tossed my change into his opened, velvet-lined instrument case. He said, "Thank you" and it came out hoarse.
    I fiddled with my winter scarf as I waited for the subway. I could wait forever, but little in this world could never outdo something as this. Broke and shaped me, quick, clap, clap. And so, we shifted and we would, could never turn back.
    Inside a small white office, my doctor looked down at me sitting on the table. "I can tell that you have been through a lot."
    I squinted up at him. "Really? How?"
    "Signs. Shifty eyes. Fiddling hands. Your posture."
    "What is a lot?"
    "More than one out of ten people."
    "Really?"
    "I think you have post traumatic stress disorder."
    "That's interesting."
    "It's not interesting. That's what you have."
    I wish you had raged for me like I raged for you.
    I wish you had protected me so that I knew you loved me.
    I wish you cared enough to make sure that I am okay.
    I wish I could translate this into a language that you would understand.
    "Did you just diagnose me with PTSD?"
    "Eventually, you need to tell someone. Let it out."
    "I can't physically get the words out of my mouth."
    It took me a long time to accept that we were two trains passing by each other. You were going somewhere I couldn't follow. I didn't have that ability nor that right. The continuance felt like it'd go on forever, but in a blink, we couldn't see each other anymore. In the overwhelming openness that followed, it was almost like it never happened. After a short while, there remained almost no remembrance of how it felt to be so close to the rush of something, so close to you that I felt all the compacted parts of your consciousness. I felt a similarity between us, of a basic, fundamental ideal. I couldn't imagine letting you go. I believed that we were unconditional in a world where everything could be taken away without explanation, without warning, without remorse.

About the author:
Jamie Lin is currently reconditioning herself after years of psychological neglect and denial. Although she is progressing, she still panics on a daily basis. Her inevitable collapse in internal stability has led to improved writing abilities. Her website is at jamielin.net. Past publications include Blood Lotus, Storyglossia, and Mud Luscious.