By Ming Wei Yeoh
When I wake up, I realize I’m looking at you. I thought it would be years before we met again, and that it would happen on a pillow of clouds, facing ivory gates. I saw it once in a dream: you, gray and repentful. Me, the same as always.
We’re in my bedroom. My arms and legs are bolted to the ceiling, but I don’t mind. Even if I could reach out and touch you—even if you begged me to—I wouldn’t. You’re stubborn, even now. Your shoulders look as hard and uninviting as I remember.
You’re standing in the doorway and there’s nothing on your face, none of the fast, hot emotions that used to burn in the stern texture of your scars, eyebrows, chin, mouth. None of the expressions I fantasized might shoot cracks through your composure, the kind you wouldn’t be able to hide. You’re simply thinking. I wish I could read your mind.
Mom appears behind you. She says something I can’t quite catch, and you turn and follow her out of the room. My pulse spikes. I flail in place, trying to loosen my frozen limbs.
I’ve imagined you saying countless phrases in these first few weeks. I’m sorry, mostly, but ones that express your regrets, too. Down to the specifics—everything I’ve noted, tracked, and retained until now. I’m waiting for them to come flooding from your mouth, bitter and irrepressible.
After a minute of struggling, my body detaches from the drywall like a balloon cut loose. I drift along the ceiling until I reach the dinner table, where I find the two of you sitting over a familiar meal. Porridge, pickled vegetables, canned dace with salted beans. If I think hard enough, I can still taste the salty oil and feel the rough fish skin on my tongue. Mom cooked this on days that were especially hectic, when I had a piano recital or a soccer game or a big exam. Days we were all too preoccupied to think about food.
She eats—in the small, slow bites of a tired woman—but your hands are in your lap. You stare out the window at the sun-bleached grass and the fluttering leaves.
I remember a lot about that day. I remember how cold the pills felt, heaped in my palm like marbles. I remember my pulse thudding in my ears. More than anything, I remember thinking about how sorry I was going to make you—for the nights I spent studying instead of sleeping; the nights I cried until snot bubbled on my lips and my words were too botched by hiccups to decipher and you yelled and yelled. Stop crying. Get up. Keep going.
Outside, summer is having a party. Birds whistle and sing, insects meander. They socialize by your apple tree, drawn by the scent of the honey-sweet fruits. On the other side of the glass, you and Mom clear the table in silence. The clunky AC whirs in the background, shouting over all other noises. You scrape your untouched porridge back into the pot.
After dinner, you and Mom pull away from each other, drifting to opposite ends of the house. You used to spend more time together. On summer evenings like this one, when the sun still peeks over the trees at eight or nine, the two of you would pull weeds together in the garden, speaking to each other through silence and dirt-smudged fingers.
I follow you to your office, floating almost close enough to brush the white-dusted tips of your hair. This room is so familiar, from the blinds you always kept halfway closed to the desk that sits against the far wall. You used to sit at that desk like a king on his throne, so terrifying and alluring at once to your little girl. As you shut the door, I remember the way you used to shut it every morning after breakfast and every night after dinner. I remember the tricks that enabled me to sneak past it, that white wood wall: breaking the tip of my pencil so that you’d let me use the sharpener on your desk, asking for your help on math problems I already knew how to solve. And I remember, forever ago, standing on my tip-toes by your desk, trying to stick my pencil into the sharpener, and feeling your arms wrap around me and lift me into the air. Your laugh, a rare gift, is tucked into a pocket of my mind, as clear as though I heard it yesterday.
You sit down at your desk. Watching you, my chest squeezes and releases and squeezes. I wonder if you’re going to sit and think again, letting your grief leak through quietly, subtly, stubbornly. Instead, you power on your computer monitors. One by one, they blink awake from the darkness, as startled as I am. You replace your regular glasses with your farsighted ones, and start working through spreadsheets and data tables like it’s just another day. Like I’m not even here. I look at the calendar hanging above your desk. Tuesday, July 14. To you, a weekday means work—means hiding away in your office—above all and anything else. Above even the one-week anniversary of your daughter’s death.
My body shrinks into the ceiling corner again. I close my eyes. For a moment, I simply listen—to the sound of plastic keys clattering, the gentle tick-tick-tick of the clock, and the insistent, muffled chirping of the birds outside your window. I guess, in the end, my expectations didn’t make sense. The tears, the sentiments, the dramatics: those aren’t you, are they? When you’re so stern and tough and unbendable, the father who shouts at tears instead of pausing them with his thumb. When I’ve only ever heard you laugh twice.
Then I hear you, clearer and louder than the keyboard, the clock, the birds. A sound like a mourning animal’s wail. I open my eyes. Your back is turned to me, hunched over your desk and shuddering with each sob. For a moment, I don’t believe it, but I blink and the scene doesn’t melt away. Your crying doesn’t fade into silence.
I’ve won. The statement pangs through my body. It’s almost too much, a feeling like a plastic bag puffing up inside me, crowding ribs into muscle. This is what I dreamed about for months on months, my “sorry” wrapped up in a bow and popped in my face like confetti. But it takes a moment for it to burst and collapse; and then all I can think about is how gray your hair looks, how your shoulders don’t look so hard anymore. How I want to put my arms around them and squeeze.
The noise in my chest skips and sputters. I can’t feel my limbs anymore.
Your back stays turned to me, even when I call out your name. I feel something in my nose, rising into my eyes. My regrets pour down my cheeks, slip between my lips, salty like the oil from canned fish. Outside your window, nature enjoys herself, and we cry.
* * *
Ming Wei Yeoh is a writer from Minnesota. She is a national Scholastic medalist in writing, 2024 YoungArts Winner with Distinction, and Semifinalist for 2024 US Presidential Scholar in the Arts. Her work has been featured/is forthcoming in Bending Genres, The Apprentice Writer, Blue Marble, Kalopsia Lit, and more. She has participated in several youth writing programs, most recently the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. When not writing, you can find her fangirling over her favorite romance manga, obsessively taking walks, and watching home barista tutorials.