Once Upon an Autumn

Everything wonderful. And everything painful, all at once.

. . .

My youngest cousin (who is three years older than I am) was a huge romance novel reader when she was fourteen (and I was eleven). On Chinese New Year’s, we snuck out of her condo and walked to the closest bookstore, and we spent my money that I had gotten from my relatives (in the red bags) on lots of Korean romance novels (she couldn’t buy them, of course, because my aunt would get mad at her, but no one would get mad at me since they weren’t my parents and technically did not have a right to punish me severely). My favorite was a tragedy, a story about a guy who falls in love with his half-sister and dies of some unknown illness.

At the end of the story (which my cousin read first), the half-sister and her boyfriend and her little sister and brother went to visit his grave, and the heavens poured, and the boyfriend said, “We’re here now, so you shouldn’t be crying.”

And miraculously, the skies cleared.

My cousin said that when she wrote a tragedy, she would end it with a funeral with rain as well, except she would keep the rain falling.

I thought rain was a fair tribute to the dead. A gracious gesture that they were not forgotten, and even the skies mourned for them.

In one of my prior stories, I wrote, “Heaven has always hated me. I am not lying. Every time something good happens, Heaven always takes it away from me. Every time I want to cry, Heaven makes sure only the brightest sunshine falls on my head. I want to make this perfect for you, because you only get one chance at it, you know? No rewind button. No undo key combo. We all have only this one chance, and I want to make it worthy of you. But Heaven hates me, and I can't call forth the rain I want.”

I am now reconsidering. Maybe it is not so bad to have sunshine when I feel like crying. That golden lining on the leaves as we waited outside the church makes me wonder if I had been wrong all along, that sunshine and melancholy are two very interrelated things.

. . .

Sometimes there are no words to describe emotions. Sometimes I find it hard to find the words. So I tell myself I will be short, and I start describing things, and somehow it ends up long and convoluted all the same. As if the words had a mind of their own, and they just spilled out of me (using me as their medium, rather than me using them as a medium).

I don’t know if I am supposed to write a lot or only a little, or none at all, nor do I know exactly what I am writing, but I do know that writing makes things more manageable for me, whether there is an audience or not. Whether what I am writing is logical or not. Whether it even matters.

Whether anything matters, anymore, does not matter.

Remotely, there are the faint hummings of things I should be doing, and places I should be going, and even words I should be writing (or at least I think I should be writing). It is happening a lot lately, although that is a slight stretch of the truth, because it has always happened frequently, only it hasn’t gone away yet. This sudden feeling that I no longer know what I am doing, or why I am doing it, and all that is left is a ghost of reason that only gradually makes its way to my consciousness.

And even when it does, I think I am missing the most important part of it.

. . .

The yellow flowers I thought were nice. They were a little blurred—perhaps because my glasses kept sliding off, perhaps because there was something in my eye, perhaps because I wanted fall to into that trance-like glaze that made things blurry by default.

The sunlight made it seem almost real. Like I was sitting there, plucking at the petals. Talking, perhaps. Joking. Laughing—and I had done my fair share of that—and maybe just smiling. Singing—I am awful at that, decidedly awful, not the least because I stare at notes and think they make less sense than commas. The sun made what was not reality real.

And then I reverted back to literature, to the books we read this summer, to the books I am reading now, and it is all about Reality vs. Real, as if they were two outlaws with guns cocked and tumbleweed twirling past them, each ready to shoot the other and claim its importance in the world of perception.

And then I remember that someone once said, “The two most trite subjects that generate the most crappy writing are love and death,” or something to that effect. It was a response to a newspaper article about a girl who wished someone in her family had died so she could write about it for her college essay.

So literature was out of the picture. There are times when I would rather write than read, when I would rather write tragedies and read comedies, because when I write the ideas are already there, and they hurt less because they are predictable, because I know where the knife is going to plunge and have tensed my muscles in preparation. When I read, I am always hoping for the best, and that does not always happen, and when I fall short it is a stab that, if exaggerated, may be similar to what Caesar felt when Marcus Brutus stabbed him and Caesar said, “Et tu, Brute?” (Or he did not actually say that, and it was another exaggeration of the truth by Shakespeare or whoever else it was, but that is another literature-related story.)

Anyway. I loved the serenade, but I thought the violin was too high-pitched at parts. Nothing is truly perfect. The viola is lower in pitch, but it uses a clef that is oft-ignored. The cello and bass are too low. Piano does not resound enough—it is too mellow. Flute is nice but too crisp. Saxophone has a buzzing sound. Along with trumpet and trombone and tuba, and all the brass instruments. Percussions are of course out of the picture. The organ has its redeeming qualities too, but it is too sombre at times, too formal, and evokes too many memories that should not be evoked.

And I think I am picking fault with these instruments because they are not perfect, because I am trying to find fault with the small things so as not to think about the big things. Or maybe I just really do not like raw instruments. I would not be surprised. I usually listen to heavily remixed and electronically vamped music anyway. Mostly trance. I am a huge trance fan.

Of course, then there were the golden leaves. Golden green. That is a color in a box of 64 Crayola crayons, or Yellow Green anyway. It is different from Green Yellow, so green golden must also be a different color from golden green. I am not sure which color the leaves were. Half golden, half green. Molten gold flanked with pools of emeralds.

And whoever Nick Frost is, he was also a part of the golden-green-green-golden. As were the zombies, of course. Even if autotext does not recognize it as a word.

. . .

Holding hands, we formed a circle. Layers of a circle, anyway. A mass of bulging, quivering black. The lady across from me was crying but trying not to cry. Her sunglasses hid her eyes, but her mouth was pulled tight into a frown. I stared at her, although it was probably impolite. I stared at her because I could not bear to stare at the tips of more flowers, or black-dyed cotton, or the tips of my mom’s shoes.

. . .

The little sandwiches and cupcakes were incredibly cute. Bite-sized. Of course, it depended on how big your bite was, but the cupcakes were definitely bite-sized. The egg sandwiches were okay—one had weird bread, one had weird filling. The turkey somethings were good, as were the turkey cucumber somethings. The cheese and olives and peppers on flatbread was also good. I didn’t like the white-icing-covered one.

All of this reminded me of The Gathering, where Veronica’s older brother died and the family was gathered at their old house, and everyone ate the “funeral meats,” which were anything ranging from fruits to crackers smeared with cheese (or hummus, for the vegetarian of the week) to the inevitable wine and vodka and gin and whatever else can make them drunk, even though they held the pretense of not drinking. But I am not talking literature.

The ledge is nice on the feet. Red feet that have seen much trails of gravel and asphalt. Feet with blisters.

I should have taken another bite-sized cupcake, I think now, as I am sitting in front of a too-white, too-bright screen. I really should have.

. . .

I received an email from one of Mr. Coffee’s students regarding AP chem tutoring, and I searched her name up on Google. Half of what came up was from her collab portfolio sophomore year. The other half was from our school’s theater group (is there a nickname for it?) site, and when I clicked the link and scrolled down I saw his pictures.

There is nowhere to run.

And I have a confession. I have a confession started in those white plastic chairs and solidified by Nyx’s status. And perhaps now is not the best time to make it, but it never will be, I think. With time it will disappear and perhaps will never be mentioned at all.

My confession involves fourteenth floors, balconies too high for sanity, and chocolate and knives. It involves the Grand Canyon, although it could just as easily involve the Golden Gate Bridge. It has been a part of me since (and perhaps before) I read those Korean novels, and it has continued and is a part of why I drift with the winds easier than I root myself to the ground.

It has no words. Words would distort its essence. But I think about it sometimes, and I think that I should have been there, because it is such an ingrained part of me, and I think I should have taken the role, and sometimes I think I would, if I could, and sometimes I think when faced with the reality of it I would panic and run.

Not to mention how much it would hurt them.

. . .

Everything I have not mentioned, of course, is everything that actually matters. But I have no words for those, or else I am not adequate enough to say those words, or else other people have already said them and I would be merely redundant.

Here, then, are the words that may have been missed that I am trying to write, insh'allah.