Between the Boxes

You haven’t been home in a while. How long, I can’t quite say, but long enough for the stillness to solidify. Dust amasses discretely, until one day it forms a visible shell. I hear you brushing it off surfaces, coughing, groaning in disgust. There are many surfaces. But you’re determined.

You’ve done this before, unsettling the boxes piled to the ceiling. You’d open up memories from three other houses, two other countries, unable to discard them. Your father’s got his own. Your mother, your sister too. The memories sit on one another, hiding the walls like a growth, cutting into hallways. Stuffed, the rented basement apartment breathes in short, shallow spurts. You’d dawdle for hours in the mess, deciding. In the end, the remnants of your childhood and adolescence are re-encased in cardboard. A new order but the same weight.

Not this time. Something’s changed. This isn’t home for you anymore. It hasn’t been home in a while. Not since the last two moves, one when the three-story house was sold, the other from that first rented basement apartment, which looked and breathed like this one. I haven’t heard your laughter in years, the bursts of piercing squeals as your sister tickles and flattens you into the couch. Now the noises are routine. Your parents don’t laugh much. Every week, your mother scrubs the toilets—the squeak of sponge against porcelain, the pluck and flop of rubber gloves—five minutes and she’s done, filth and stress swirling down the bowl. The vacuum is taken out for a weekly stroll, its roar drowning out obsessive thoughts. I imagine flecks of fluff and lone hairs are sucked away and hidden like all imperfections. On Fridays the laundry machine sloshes and thumps, renewing the uniform she wears at work, your father’s jogging sweatshirts that smell like dirty dish towels, perpetually salt stained. As you know, your mother likes starting the weekend without the soils of the week. When she gets home from work, she cooks. A knife for cutting fruits, a knife for cutting meat. A cutting board to match each knife. Metal clangs against stainless steel as all cookware must be washed; nothing soaks in the sink. Your father—newly retired—helps, sometimes. Most times he yells, though not as much as he used to. You remember the sound. Explosive condescension, most effective in banal, unsuspecting moments.

I imagine you have your own home now, one that has no space for me. You used to tuck me into bed, curl your head on my lap, try but fail in your limited words to depict for me your fear of oblivion, of not existing. The dread of being removed, your consciousness effaced, was like water in your brain. You’d drown if you didn’t tweak my button nose so it sat straight. Kiss me three times, no more, no less. I had a whole wardrobe of toddler shirts—winter, summer clothing. You’d stretch and smooth the length of my top against my entire body. A wrinkle was foreboding. A threat. A sign of death to come. Now I smell of box, aged plastic.

Something’s changed. This time around, as I hear you working through the boxes day after day, memories are unearthed, then unpossessed in quick succession. Some aren’t even memories, it seems. Junk for which your family made room. The trash bin fills. You’re using words I’ve never heard you say. Your father isn’t pleased. He doesn’t want your medical labels. He thinks they’re dangerous. Condemnations. No one is sick in this house, he declares. Every object has a purpose. The broken toasters—they can be fixed. The old computer monitors—when the need arises, he’ll use them. The crates of clothes and shoes bought in Hong Kong, symbols of more profitable times, never worn, never out of their plastic sheathes or shiny cases—why throw them? I’ll wear them one day, he says. I’ll give them as gifts. They weren’t cheap. In storage for decades, they dry and flake, crinkle and stink. You and your mother hide them at the bottom of donation bags behind his back. When you turn around, he rifles through, he hides them, nestles them back in place.

I am stored between the box of hats and the box of linens and sheets. You’re close, sitting a few feet away, sorting through your pen pal letters and sticker collection. You probably don’t remember how you packed me away, gingerly, wrapped in layers. One country, one house to the next. I’ve been on a cloud of your other stuffed toys. I’ve been comfortable. But I long to see you, the wholeness of your changes. You’ve been telling your mother about your new recognition, the budding desire and ability to identify patterns, their possible causes, the larger context. You’re attempting, with your new therapist, to make sense of the turmoil that is inherited but unnamed, the loss and loneliness that pervade when a family severs from their native home, language, and culture. The compulsion to control and possess. To hold on. Your mother is quiet as she takes it all in. How different you must look, carrying, accepting, resisting the demands of these concerns.

I hear you strip away tape. The box I’m in shudders, agitating dust. You’ll smile when you see me, I know. The patch of missing fur above my eye still gives me a scowl. My weird anatomy resembling a humanoid polar bear never quite made sense. My bum, protected by that red kid’s shirt in which you dressed me, is still the softest, whitest spot. But your smile will be fleeting. You’ll see yourself as a child, the rolling distance between the present and that moment, how much closer to death you are. I know this because you’re speaking through my voice. I am the embodiment of your childhood fears, your loneliness in your contemplation of death and loss.

I’m saying you can remove me. I won’t hold it against you. You have my image in your heart. I am more than this carcass of cotton.

When the tape is all off, you lift the top flaps of my sanctuary. Darkness softens. Light seeps in. There is a breath of anticipation. You unwrap me, carefully, removing the barrier between us. We are back in that first cramped apartment in Taipei, lying on the bottom bunk in the bedroom shared with your sister, crowded by boisterous visiting cousins. That strange old squat house in Arcadia, with yellowed neon stars on the ceiling, the dirty brown carpet swallowing your feet. The legions of crickets so loud they might as well have been inside the living room. Your own bedroom on the second floor in the new house in Surrey, the winding staircase tall and majestic. A small forest right outside your window, as hushed as it is still. These homes are with us, heavy with loss; we can never return.

I see you, and you’re the same. Something has changed, but that change is a fraction of the whole. The process is slow. I see that now. You straighten my button nose and you flatten my shirt. You hold on to me. Maybe you shouldn’t, but you do. When your parents’ backs are turned, you repeat the ritual of preservation. I am enfolded, returned to my cloud of comfort. You whisper a promise to bring me to your future home, one that will have space for me. I wonder how it will breathe, what memories it will retain. How long I must wait, you can’t quite say.

I scowl. I wait. I’ll wait for you.

-Lily Chang

Lily Chang is a writer, editor, and filmmaker based in Montréal, Québec. She is a graduate of Concordia University’s MA program in creative writing. Her work has been published by Frog Hollow Press, Headlight Anthology, HerStry, and Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop/Dark Helix Press. She is a finalist for the 2018 CBC Nonfiction Prize and the Speculative Literature Foundation’s 2018 Diverse Writers Grant. She is currently at work on a magic realist play set in Taiwan supported by a Canada Council for the Arts grant. For her portfolio, visit www.lilychang.art.