📁 RETURN TO JUST ANOTHER DAY

Your father and aunt were writing to prisoners today. Neat letters with kind words. My page stayed blank, and I felt selfish. I couldn’t write, not even to you.

I went to the place where your heart stopped beating, hoping I could make more sense of it there. You don’t have a memorial. People rushed past me because it’s just an ordinary place. An ambulance drove by, lights flashing. It reminded me of the urgency that suddenly whipped around us when I found out it was the end for you. How it started as a normal day and chaotically spiralled into the blackest day I’ve had.

I suppose the part I struggle with most is knowing that nothing could be done for you. My choice was whether it would destroy both of us or just you. And I lived, so I must have chosen. If I could have made it the other way around, I promise I would have.

I like to think that you were burned. I regret not asking if that’s what happened. I’m drawn to the idea of the transformation and release, you disappearing into the air. I don’t want to think of you as stuck while everything else moves on.

I didn’t even note the date until days afterwards. I was too consumed to realise anything about the wider context. But some part of me wants to think that you could, that it being on this day would help me to remember you.

I can’t talk about you, not to strangers, not to anyone. It brings up all those stilted syllables. I’d make them un-com-fort-able. It’s in-a-ppro-pri-ate. Mourning you could be mis-in-ter-pret-ed. I half smile about the mutedness of today because there are many of us trapped with unarticulated thoughts, memories, frustrations, pains. Of course, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist, that’s the most laughable part.

I even wonder about that candle I lit for you. It was one of those old-fashioned birthday cake candles, the only one I could find. Short and skinny with a fine vein of pink spiralling down its length and a plastic flower-shaped holder. I stabbed it down too aggressively and nearly snapped it in half. I lit it and watched the flame flicker for a while. I blew out the flame after the wax had dripped down and obscured all the pinkness. I wasn’t sure if I’d done the wrong thing. You were never born and I don’t think you really died; you were barely even a potential.

At least now I have written something today. I’ll go to a different fire. Your father and aunt are up on the roof, silently toasting white squares of bread, cutting up meat with scissors and dropping it onto the hot grill so it sizzles. We’ll be thinking of you.

How to cite: Hay, Elizabeth. “Just Another Day: Elizabeth Hay.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 4 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/04/elizabeth-hay.

Elizabeth Hay works and lives in Hong Kong. Her writing has appeared in Cha’s Hong Kong Protesting, Cicada, Yuzu Press and Stories on the Nature of Cities.

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