Emma Wang
Emma Wang was born in Beijing and is a student studying in Singapore. She believes in the transformative power of words to heal and connect.
Easy read of the prose in the image above:
One Half of Her
It sinks into your heart that she is finally glowing. Like blood in veins that finally flow into rivers, like an ache six inches deep in you that finally mended itself, like the corpse of your mother aliving herself to take you shopping for shiny clothes and bags on a Saturday morning. On your way you watch the red carnations flirt and the daffodils sleep. You try to take this glowing warmth of the Saturday morning inside yourself and press it into her, holding her so tight so it wouldn’t escape into cold air. You clutch onto her frail body, and for the first time, you realize that she’s nothing but a pile of fragile bones now— it scares you that when she walks out to the groceries for fresh tomatoes later, she will be walking side by side with masked strangers unknown to you. For the first time, the whole world seemed vile and deceitful and undeserving of her tenderness and glow, her marble-like eyes too clear for this murky and beige world. You take this thought and keep it inside of you, for the next time she throws and scrapes the kitchen chair against the wooden floor in rage, or the next time you come home to her asleep on the couch fully dressed, the curtains drawn and blinds shut but the TV still on, her frail silhouette enveloped in the room’s darkness and an empty whiskey bottle lying inches from her draping fingers. You savor the temperature, the sweet and stickiness of it, something you know you will cling onto in another hollow evening as she is howling at you for being too much like your father, knowing it is true that you are indeed one half of him— the half of him that bonded with her like water droplets colliding together as they make their way down a rainy windowsill, or single mittens finally finding their pair after a long winded December of snow and frost. What she doesn’t know is that one half of her makes up the whole you, the you that’s shrivelled in the scorching sun once the rain has stopped, and the you that was thrown away with the battered mittens once winter slipped away. You know it’s nothing more than anatomy, but that half of her makes you want to tear out your rib cage and build another home with the scattered bones, because at least then she wouldn’t be able to point out which parts of you came from her and which parts came from him, at least then all you’d find is the same skeleton, the milky clay whiteness of it built from a pile of carved love notes and roses, even if it means you’d have to peel away the skin and scratch at the flesh. You tell yourself maybe if you teared down the facades of memories and places and him and her, maybe you’d find Intimacy raw and bare, even with its worn holes like an autumn sweater too old, even when the brush of her soft fingers sweeping a tear away from 10 year old you feels enough to fill the vacuum. Still, on Saturday when the sun rises over the lonely city, you remember yourself shopping extravagantly with her, your heads thrown back as laughter rang in the air, stumbling into each other like mother and daughter, her eyes too clear for this world.
