Can You Remember
art by Lanie Myaing, words by Diana Zhang
The ceiling has peaks and dots on it. It’s white and grainy and yellow and black. It’s not the original ceiling I stared at as a kid, perhaps the 11th now. My bedsheet is a reminder of childishness—flamingos line by line placed under me. My hair is long and black—a tangled mess resting beside me. I haven’t found myself in this position for a long time—but whenever I do, I knew who I was at the moment. This still moment of madness, powerful, chilling, yet comforting.
There is something so wonderful about biology. My motion of staring up at the ceiling hasn't ended since I was a kid. My eyes saw the world in technicolor as when I first opened them. I remember my hands tightly holding on to the metal swings in the neighborhood park. The metallic, blood-like smell it leaves after. I remember the ecstatic feeling of flying towards the sun. Oh, how I knew that I was a flower ready to bloom. My hands are the same hands, just longer and thinner. They now know how to play the drums, how to solve equations, and how to shake hands with important people. My skin, the same skin, stretched to build a figure taller than my infancy. At some point, those hands learned to cinch my clothes behind my back and check my waist and my belly. My lungs that only knew how to breathe now work extra time to suck in my abdomen, so the low waisted jeans sit casually around my body. Because the world told me again and again that I need to be beautiful, that my figure will need to grow prettier as I grow. So my body adapts to time and their words, stretching it longer and longer, and hopefully thinner.
I remember helping a kid get up from the playground, the same kid that pushed me off the swings. I remember lending out pencils until I am left with nothing to write with. I remember the stern words of my parents, instructing me to no longer say hi to the kid that pushed me on the playground, because the world will never be as kind. Ever since I was little, they told me the sweetness is a disease, that I was rotten inside with caterpillars threading through like a maze. They told me to say farewell to the child that flew towards the sun, because my wings will one day melt and I will fall. The stuffed animals’ glossy eyes have gone dull. I’m back on the swings, trying to fly higher and higher and higher.
The ceiling fan is turning around and around, there is a stillness in how my chest moves up and down, taking in oxygen and repeating. I dread every birthday more and more because the world tells me that getting old is horrid. People always talk about the realization of growing up, but it is really more about remembering. I remember the excitement of turning 10, it’s flowing through my veins still, barely there. I remember high school graduation, stepping on to the stage in my broken high heels—how the moment ended as quickly as it began. Maybe there is something comforting in how things change, how the branches sprout new buds after the old ones break off. How the sun sets and rises in different directions. Maybe there is excitement still in the unfamiliar. It pumps into my heart as I swing my legs off of the bed. Another day hoping for the swings to take me higher.
