Banyan Moon

Grief is a lake of perilously thin ice. You never know when you'll fall through it, or when you will fight your way back to the surface.

I wonder if you can inherit evil.' 'Maybe. Or maybe it's not something you inherit, but something that runs through you, another person's trauma, their violence. It sits below the skin until you name it. And you root it out like a cancer.

I think there's something so heartbreakingly beautiful about boys -- their softness, their vulnerability, before the world tells them that they must be something else. What could the men who hurt us have been, had they been loved enough?

I let the silence stand, let the truth sink in, but then I hear my daughter's giant heaving cries. My heart feels as if it's getting grated, pink flesh littering the ground. Is there any pain larger than the echo of your child's heartbreak?

Then I think: Maybe that’s the root of all my problems. With men, with life. I’m always asking what they see in me, and never considering what I see in myself.

Maybe then she would understand how love cannot possibly be simple, or easy, despite all the adages to the contrary. When we chose to chisel pieces of our heart away to offer to another person, we must always make decisions. What flaws will we life to the light? And which will we bury, in the hopes of protecting ourselves and others?

Our lives slid together like tectonic plates, ever so infinitesimally, until we couldn't picture them apart.

For him and so many men, violence was a birthright.

Embarrassment? You know nothing about what it’s like to feel shame until you have a child that defies you. You stupid fucking

Perhaps I can't face the safe, because it is Bà Ngoai's final gift, and like the last bite of ice cream, I draw out the anticipation, prolonging the pleasure. Except in this case, I know the discovery will be a mix of joy and grief. As everything is these days.

I wonder if there's an invisible string somewhere they can carry my message to Bà Ngoai, like a phone wire between the living, the dead, and the little fluttering being in between. Kumquat, our conduit. Maybe from the heavens, Bà Ngoai could lean down, blow all that misguided goodwill into the wind, where it would find its way to me, to my womb and to my baby boy. I almost feel her breath in the sunshine, and in it is the shudder of relief and love, both so wrapped up that I think there should be another word for the feeling entirely.

History exists in nicks and scratches, scar tissue that pinks and puckers.

Everything feels half written. Like a storybook with invisible ink. It disappears before I figure out what I want the future to look like.' 'Not all stories have to be neat. Some can be messy and unfinished, and we can let other people pick up the line for us.

Her love is not flawless, a solitaire sparkling from a smooth hand. Rather it reminds me of a geode - rough and worn by time yet cracked, occasionally, to reveal a vibrant cluster of crystals.

Love can cast a light like no other.

This is what happens to women living alone. You’re all growing strange, speaking in riddles. Soon your hair will get witchy.

Because you know what, Ann? Your bà ngoại was a shit mother. She may have been an angel on earth as your grandmother, but she left me and my brother every chance she could. She was a shit mother.

Why are you like this?” Ann asks in a low voice. “Let’s not do this.” “Every goddamn moment I get a shot at happiness. You’re like a black cloud. Are you utterly incapable of joy?

Yet the wedge would always be there between us; that choking guilt of knowing my mother and I had killed my daughter’s chance at a family. In exchange for our safety, I would have to live with the gaping distance between me and my daughter, and harbor a secret that threatened to crush us all. What kind of bargain was that?

I know more than you think,” I said. I stood behind the couch, as if it would shield me. “Your whores who call in the middle of the night, testing me? What’s stupid is a man who doesn’t even bother to hide his tracks.

I want to tell Ann all about it. Swimming is the first thing I have done, perhaps ever, solely for myself. This keeps me moving.

So cryptic. Like Mẹ,” he sneers. “This is what happens to women living alone. You’re all growing strange, speaking in riddles. Soon your hair will get witchy.

She went away to get that art degree so she could wind up back here? What’s a girl like her doing in the middle of nowhere?

To him, the house is not a shrine or a love story, but a stand-in for something bigger.

Knowing, perhaps, that his violence would find release in a woman and her young children. I imagined an ogre at a castle threshold, terrible violence gathering at the edges of his mouth.

There were always boys running around our house, inside and out, causing me more trouble, more cooking and cleaning and shushing. For all our lack of money, our parents never begrudged friends in the house.

how could I say that to my daughter, the child we all protected like she was a glass figurine? Her privilege was cultivated; we were all complicit in wrapping her in tissue, shielding her from the outside.

I wanted to lean toward him, even though I knew I shouldn’t. I could tell he liked how I was rebuffing him. Later, I learned some men thrive on that. They see a challenge rather than a true refusal. Those are the men to watch out for, because their rapture is tied in with rebuff.

A week ago, the thought of Noah dating someone else, bringing her to our house and introducing her to his parents, would have felt like the end of the world. I would have sobbed for days. Now I’m a shade from indifferent. Relieved, even. Does this make me utterly heartless?