Since I was a child, a vision has stayed with me, one where I am floating... blissfully nude in a vast, salted and waveless ocean. Shores nowhere in sight. Whenever this vision comes, I am the same age. Face slightly different with each presentation, drifting with my back carried by the depths of unknown ultramarine. Face, knees, and toes, encircled by saltwater, rays transmitting messages of the Sun--shining prisms through the aqueous beads that sit atop my skin. My body, floating between worlds... existing in the middle.
I’ve lost count the times where I’ve been met with myself in the middle. In the middle of not knowing who or where I am—yearning just to know something. “Where do I belong, with-in or with-out this mirage that’s taken shape outside of me?”
It’s hard to say when this all started. Maybe it’s been present ever since I incarnated into flesh, this small body that packs punches before I knew what to do with that power. There was always a strong desire to be accepted by the people around me, only because I longed for belonging. I desired somewhere or someone to offer the feeling of being Home.
At the time, I didn’t realize that those around me, would serve as a foundation for my insecurities, my perception of invisibility. This could be something that may have been passed down from my parents…especially my mother. She was culturally bred to believe that the guise of performative materialism, status and prestige, degrees and pedigrees, was something to be mindlessly marveled, even if you didn’t have it.
It wasn’t until much later in life, in my twenty-something’s, where she finally told me she never went to university—that was such a shameful part of her past, she told falsehoods to folks so they would grant her access to grander spaces, to climb society’s ladder, and to become accepted into spaces that would inevitability create an internal world of disease and stress. Leading her to take her last breath just before the sun would rise.
My family history, both on my mother and father’s side, was always something of a mystery. One that remained hidden, behind closed doors, locked and sealed with a talisman so strong, it would take generations to break through. I’ve always longed for a close family. I’ve longed for my siblings and I to be close, my grandparents, aunties and uncles to teach me and tell me stories of that started with, “back in the day.” As the youngest of all the paternal cousins, most of them got married and had children when I was barely five, attending weddings, funerals, and celebrations that held the subtle secrets of ceremony and symbolism that only being of a certain culture could keep clear.
Those gatherings slowly diminished after my paternal grandmother crossed over. I remember the feeling of excitement during New Year, making dumplings from scratch, wondering who would happily bite down on the lucky coin. The scent of mixed flour and water, chives and raw meat, round tables and affectionate shouting has always felt like a distant memory. Sometimes I question if I’m honoring the traditions in the “right way,” constantly doubting my broken Mandarin and my imperfect Japanese, later learning of my Hakkanese heritage--wishing I could learn to speak a dying language, only made that distance feel like pangea fissuring further beneath me.
This distance has grown not only from one point to another, but a manifestation of hollow-chested pain, one that isn’t expressed often, to those even close to me. I find we live in a time where the sunken layers that bare our soul are so dense and repressed that thawing them in this blazing solar flared sun could not expose them. Most things stay superficial and flat, keeping our dimensionality down. It’s an immense pain that can only be shared with those willing to dive into waters, where Beings beam with transparency...
“Skies seem softer when clouds caress spaces where they sleep. Stretched like spun wool, silkened by threads that speak in song. We reach up for rainbows, waiting to arch their backs--to glow and rain upon us.
Today... I saw a dragon in the sky, eating a Sun on fire... and I felt my body seep into complete coalescence.”