9/6 

When children first arrive to a class environment that uses a language different from their own, they go through what is called a silent period. I, too, had such a phase. 

Looking back at my past relationship that occupied the full duration of my college years, I feel like I had gone on an adventure and came back. An adventure to another world, where I was no one, or everyone but myself. I delve head-first into the person of my past lover, fearing that I could not find anyone else foolish enough to love me again. That loving me, I secretly believed, was a mistake. I delve into the otherworldly deep ocean of species not of my own, where my organs were so bent out of shape from the pressure they had stopped functioning properly: they had stopped doing what they were made to do. And I also had stopped doing what I was made to do. When I finally came back to the land, hair drenched, my body deformed, I needed to breathe to postpone a visit to death, but my respiratory system had already forgotten how to do what it was meant to do: breathe. For months and months, every second of it stomping on my falling chest, I waited. 

I waited until it finally rose again. 

As soon as I learned enough characters and pinyin to form a full sentence, I began to write. The earliest drafts of my writing, which were made throughout first and second grade, were short diaries and stories. Sometimes I would write about my neighbor, whom I called 小麦哥哥 (Xiao Mai Ge Ge: Brother Mai). I would make up stuff about him, or I should say that I welcomed him into my fictional work with open arms. My writing was made alive — barely — from my grammatical and semantical mistakes, pinyin of characters I had not learnt yet, and I gave it form with my first-grader attempt to move a pencil across a page to draw squares, crooked lines that should have been straight, and beautiful, graceful strokes that turned into graphite and clay laying rigidly on my notebook like lonely, leaf-less trees standing in white winter snow. 

How I wrote through that and then an immigration to the U.S. at thirteen, but not the three-year relationship, remains a mystery to me. I was loud for so much of my life, not always in public, but privately on paper all the time. How does one become silent, even on paper? How does one learn to become unresponsive to the callings within one’s own body? 

For those three years, I was a stranger in myself. I didn’t just go on an adventure, the adventure — the foreign land — was the body I had stepped into. I lived in the same Californian world; but within my self, I existed as an other. 

Healing was a lot of waiting. I thought I was waiting to return to myself again. As it turned out, the end of healing was the arrival to a new self altogether, a self that ate up the past self as nutrients and grew out a new set of skin and bones, blood and veins, and a heart as vital as a green young earth. Healing is recognizing, chewing up, swallowing down, digesting, growing and finally, one day, stumbling into a more resilient body to call home.