White Flower Elegy

Fifteen minutes after school ends, I stay behind to mop the floors. I straighten the lines of desks and stretch to erase the blackboard, reduce formulas and English vocabulary to chalk dust floating through afternoon light. The exam is coming up, so I’m careful not to topple the towers of books at everyone’s spots. And I notice that your flowers are beginning to wilt, so I take the bouquet I bought this morning and refill your vase. Your desk is the only empty post, save for that glass vase, and light glances off its laminated surface when we’re studying sometimes. But look, look at the flowers I got you—white chrysanthemums, because I think I love you, and white carnations, because I can never feel true remorse.  

The concrete courtyard downstairs doesn’t get much sun now that it’s late afternoon. When I lose focus during class, I look out over the yard and wonder if the school was intentionally designed this way. Our high school is a single building in U-shape, like a cupped palm with the courtyard in its hold. It’s more a broken panopticon; our cramped classrooms thrum with an anxious rhythm, a routine rhythm of frantic pens and mumbled recitations, barreling forward so recklessly and awfully. We’re on a speeding train that's ripped past all its stops, stealing away to a destination that grows more distant by the minute. But none of that was news to you.  

Truth be told, our lives are offensively unchanged. Every once in a while, a teacher will pull me into a stairwell and ask how I’m doing. They’re either asking about my wrist or, the ones who don’t know any better, about you. I think I’ve designed the perfect response: something soft-spoken and grateful but nonchalant enough to suggest that I’ve moved on, something transactional that receives their concern and recompenses with reassurance before I drift away. Because it’s true, I’m doing alright. My wrist is healing nicely, surgery fixed the compound fracture. And I hardly even knew you. 

Most teachers I know seem to have forgotten that we’ve always left flowers at your desk, the same clinically white flowers. People started noticing you last September, so we must have been doing it for at least six months—it feels ironic to realize that you were just about to scrape past school unobserved, ironic in a terrible, Greek tragedy sort of way. Because of course, right? A room full of restless third-years who didn’t know how to relieve their perennial frustration. No way you were leaving unscathed.  

All those years ago, when you first transferred, you took the window seat right next to me. Maybe you looked for comfort in me, I can’t say. But I saw you wore a red string bracelet around your knobby wrist, and it matched my own. And I know it’s some Chinese superstition, that red invites luck and wards off evil, but when I was especially bored and delusional, the thread bracelets were instead strings of our fate, binding our pulses and blood.  

Did it surprise you, that I let everything happen? The flowers were the most bearable part, the white funeral bouquets with the mocking manila paper condolences. The first time they left them for you, I was just waking up from a nap at my desk and saw your reaction. You picked up the card, took too long to read a few scrawled words. Your eyes dreaded for a moment, then became horribly passive, hollowed and glassy when you thumbed the white flowers. The same carnations, before and after. I don’t think the adults ever realized, or maybe they didn’t want to—who leaves death flowers for someone who hadn’t died? 

The flowers are almost a rite of passage, a formality to prelude the gauntlet they prepared. And I don’t think they care to be inventive. They’re only capable of raw, unsophisticated violence that doesn’t pretend to be anything else. (Now that I think of it, the flowers were the only artistic part.) Every few months on the dot, a new target shows up to class late, blank eyes that echo like stony voids. Band-aids under uniform sleeves, skin scrubbed red and blistering when permanent marker will always stain. Uneven hair, rips in clothes. Exhausted, brittle voices, slowly replaced by silence. Bright red dulling into rust, into rotten black. I’ve seen it all, I hope. A lot can happen in a concrete courtyard that gets no sun.  

I never explained myself to you, but I’ll try now. Twice in my life, I’ve felt pain that I can’t remember because I refuse to recreate the feeling, even in memory. The first was on the eve of Lunar New Year’s, eleven years ago. Loud noises and sudden movements give me headaches, so I always stay inside during the fireworks. I really can’t say where it came from. Fifteen to midnight, slumped over at the dining table and completely still. The migraine was parasitic, it sapped any energy I had. A slow, serpentine intrusion: a nebulous pressure in the dead center of my head, and then a routine throb, and then a violent burning biting writhing awful agony with its own heartbeat that reverberated everywhere under my skin, that made me fight to stay awake but wrenched away any hint of sleep. I wished more than anything that I didn’t have to contain it, I wished I could throw up, I wished I could bleed, bleed gallons from my core, anything to let some of it out. Oh, I can’t describe to you how scared I was. It was all deafening and simultaneously static, blinding and bottomless pitch-black. 

I don’t think my family knew. Through a thick fog, I saw Dad in the kitchen, Mom following behind him, the anxiety of seeing them together an unwilling reflex. For the first time, I closed my eyes. I think everything has its saturation point, a breaking point, where water boils and boils and marinates in its own red-hot rage before it releases into formless vapor, drifts toward an uncertain sky. I let the pain drink me in and sink me into silence at last, wait for release. I let it bite into, through me and overwhelm the gentler ache of old sores, the phantom of breaking glasses and long cries in the bathroom lingering behind my ear. And all night long, I clenched my fists until glittery red crescents branded my palms, waited for the venom pooling in my stomach to boil bright red and turn to poison instead. And all I could want was quiet.  

When I woke up later, I was dizzy and strangely light, hollow—like a defect, like an exhausted abyss, like life disqualified from body—and I noticed the red thread bracelet Mom hastily knotted around my wrist, before she left for good. As far as I can remember, it all started then, and this is not an excuse but at least one of us owed you an explanation. 

The second time, you were there. It was that night in the classroom. Was it January? The girls in my dorm sent me down for hot water, and I was on my way back up when I saw our homeroom with its lights still on. Our desks were stacked atop one another against the back wall for the weekend, the teacher’s things gone from her desk. You were there, so small and pale that you almost blended right into the linoleum. When I walked over to you at the center of the waxed floor, your eyes were defiantly shut. Your fever-pink skin gleamed with sweat, angry and red where your arms were burnt. Small round craters outlined in ash, large slant ovals where the flesh scarred and rusted—contraband cigarettes and curling irons, I could tell. A smattering of diluted red next to your hairline and the corners of your lips, which I wiped away with my thumb. With your formal uniform and long hair splayed out around you, you looked like an angel, far too close to the ground.  

After all this time, I think I’ve figured out why.  

From the first day, I knew the two of us just live differently. I knew that you were attached to your body like embroidery through soft cotton; the fibers of your soul have been sewn through skin and sinew with a serrated needle, then double-knotted around bone. You’re whole and complete. You’re saturated and secured. In a sea of people who’ve reduced themselves to their synthetic skins, you can fall and break but stay the same person fundamentally, through and through. The way you’re attached to your body is different from the way I’m attached to mine, because I’m tired of clinging to this hollow skeleton, and I’m too weak now to keep going and watch the thread fiber by fiber. I wanted to reach into myself and catch the steaming red excess, feed myself back to life in shame and disgust, but I fear it’s too late now. For that, my resentment for you is a relentless beast of a thing.   

You opened your eyes a crack to my ice-cold touch. From where I was squatting, I could see your glittering waterline trembling, shadowy faults where cosmic terror has carved itself into the lines on your face that used to smile. You were very beautiful from where I crouched over you. We stayed that way for a bit, your broken breaths echoing in my ears. I pinpointed the exact moment you realized I was too awful to save you, when your doelike fear flattened out into resignation, acceptance. And it hurt me where I thought I was forever desensitized, seeing the heart and emotion be swiftly stolen from your expression, your dark irises resounding in their emptiness. And in them, I saw myself, with the same relaxed face and brittle, glass eyes. And the two of us were mirrors reflecting each other’s hollowness.  

I place a gentle kiss on your drowning hands and return to my dorm.  

There’s something else I want to tell you, maybe it’ll give you peace.  

There’s a street in Singapore, somewhere deep in the dimmest and most forgotten district of Chinatown, where funeral parlors used to line the sidewalks. I remember Grandma telling me this on one of the Saturdays she stole me from Mom and Dad’s house, when I was small enough to curl in and fit entirely in her lap, hold myself closer and tighter and longer than a mother would her newborn. She talked about Sago Lane, the single-file line of concrete and mahogany houses. They weren’t exactly funeral parlors either. Sick-receiving houses, relief shelters, Chinese death houses. A final resting place where lives came to end quietly.  

Grandma’s voice was thin and level when she described the Samsui women. Migrant women from southern China, overseas to seek manual labor jobs. They wore red cloth scarves over their heads to shield from falling debris, dark linen blouses to hide stains. The red headscarves reminded younger me of gaitou, red chiffon veils Chinese brides wore on their wedding days. In the stories I read, the bride would dip her neck in a ginger, birdlike movement as her beloved lifted the veil, looked down with enough tenderness to make young hearts swell and bleed. I remember giggling at the thought and telling Grandma, and she smiled with half her face and told me to quiet down.  

Grandma said the Samsui women worked all their days, ground through each breath their lungs could exhale like chalk on black, solid then thin and gravelly. They got halfway through their lives and, one unassuming morning, reached deep into their pockets for the business card, the one they kept safe all these years and hoped to never need. They’d call the number scrawled in black ballpoint on the bottom corner, and they’d feel an inexplicable stillness when the man on the other end answered. And the day they arrived, Sago Lane and its concrete houses waited dutifully.  

Then, Grandma asked me what I thought a graceful death was. She didn’t wait for me to answer before continuing. The death houses were dark, smelled of mothballs and thick dust. A bed cost more than three months’ pay, but the women had finally reached the day they no longer needed to care about surviving and, at long last, no longer needed to fuss over their families. As they stepped foot inside, they were no longer mothers or wives or wageworkers who’d never deign to self-preserve, they were free from their lives, from themselves. The beds—really just wooden slats across wooden frames—would be hard against their swollen joints and tired spines, but soft and gentle against their old souls. The parlor assistant in the corner kept a watchful eye as the women sank into their long-deserved sleep.    

And in my imagination, everything followed those women to their death. I imagined Sago Lane as a void in phenomenal reality, a glitch, where the air and ground around the houses warped ever so slightly. The lawns lining the street would be dark yellow and gray instead of green, the sky desaturated and the air hot. Grandma explained the houses were for the superstitious to die in grace and dignity, miles away from all they loved. Because at least the last moments of their lives were solely at their will, they could have back an illusion of control after an existence kept in the balance between futile living and near-dead. I stared up at her and wondered what she meant, I wondered until that night I went to find you.  

That night at the station, I finally admitted I was wrong about you.  

It was already mid-April, all of our waking thoughts had long surrendered to gaokao practice problems—I doubt that many people noticed you leaving. I’m not sure what compelled me to wander down to the tracks, but I’m glad I did, and I’m glad I saw you there. You spotted me immediately. You looked exactly the same as you did months ago, blank and near-transparent, graceful in your freeze-frame stillness, like a snow-white bird plucked from the sky and laid to rest between old concrete houses. You were flightless on a bed of dead grass, I stood over you and prodded at your crippled wings. I knew instantly that we were the same. Somewhere in that ghostly void, I saw your watery stare and numb face, lit by headlights, and I knew instantly that you would be there with me. 

And as the train grew louder and faster, I reached towards you and towards a quiet end, the red thread around my wrist sailing through infinite light.