November 29, 2021
❄
See, it wasn’t always like this.
The enforcer of consistency, the mellow of stigma:
thusly,
at the end of it all, a splaying of light, splattering onto the walls
like blood out of a clot, the remaining neural impulses of
this mind’s last thought. “I am a scientist,” I proudly exclaimed,
a white rat of truth where home equals firehose. Raytrace and retrace
my duty to the past, with haste, I echo into the chamber: the secret is just a means
for a question to ask its next.
So inside the fiber-optic I skip along the light, knowing full well
the worth of a scientist is his nose, as well as his plight. The deeper we descend,
the further light disperses, but our intuition tells us nonetheless
a story of beauty. For there is little reason to believe
that all these rays of present are the result of one bang, one burst,
except in this nose of ours: a rich aroma of fragmented snow,
each flake a glass shard, broken by a web of lies, and tied back by the string of causality,
the only thing which can live forever: a shattering of the snowglobe of the past,
and a memory with it.
See, it wasn’t always like this.
Beneath the scar’s pink is a human’s yellow.
Before there was the scientific method, there was folklore
of the first-generation immigrant, flying all the way across the Pacific,
taking American jobs, stealing American research,
just three years old, knowing not a word of American;
of the great revolution, a fight for representation, a mother of only taxation,
for three days in mid-December, a tea party,
for all men who were created equal.
Before there was folklore, there were memories,
memories of leather so fake it wouldn’t even smell if it was burnt,
and the parents who would bring lighters to clothes stores;
memories of the oppressed who came down from his mansion,
to toss a king-size mattress, barely slept,
and the model minority in the dumpster, dreaming yet again for their son
asleep on hand-wiped hardwood;
stories of the forbidden word, and all the stigma around it,
each memory a ray of light from this forsaken snowglobe.
See, it wasn’t always like this.
So when someone was stabbed at Times Sq. last Saturday,
I said that I wished that were me, doing the stabbing.
Where I come from, human lives are worth less than those of ants.
So when a beggar at Penn asked me for $3 for food,
I spat in his hand, and he spat back, before we both shook hands.
Where I come from, all humans are created equal, equally worthless.
So when they stopped me at the voting booth,
and told me I was Chinese, I only asked for tea,
and they wouldn’t give me even a single leaf.
So when I left my dream school, two weeks before graduating, I had to ask, “why?”
So when weeks would pass in a day, and days would pass in a blink, I had to ask, “why?”
So when the weight of the spoon reminded me of a knife’s scar on my hand, I had to ask, of course,
“why?”
Because as a scientist, that is my duty.
To retrace the steps of the past, the light which once was,
from inside the tunnels of the firehose, from beyond the shattering of one’s memory,
purposeful or not, without recognition:
when questions land on our plate, we must eat them.
So when I cried to my mother about my suicide attempt nine years ago,
she said she wouldn’t have done anything differently; so, I kindly asked
her to kill herself.
But that would be too easy of a punishment,
for someone who dreamt for their son,
and scarred him for it too.
See, it wasn’t always like this.
People who committed suicide actually wanted to die.
Not just be reborn, not because they couldn’t find another way out.
See, it wasn’t always like this,
that this word was so stigmatized,
hushed at every corner, redacted at every turn.
See, it wasn’t always like this,
that I had just one dream,
and a negative number of lives,
that the blood of my creation has been all bled out, nine years past,
and all that remains is only what is wholly inhuman: a life for a dream,
the dream of dreaming, for a life to be returned
to someone who actually deserves it.
It’s a red tide, this life of ours.
Surf on the wave, or drown in the sea of insignificance.
See, it was always like this.
Humanity has had but one dream for all of history,
from Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to you and me.
It is shaped like an hourglass of bodies, with each human standing
atop a mountain of failed flesh and bones and scales and feathers.
I don’t mind tossing myself into the pile, seeing where I end up.
But I really do wonder what the world above is like.
See, it wasn’t always like this.
At least, not until you showed up,
with your golden missive,
across the northern sunset.