46 Quotes by Emily X.R. Pan

Before me lay a body grayer than a sketch. Someone had applied makeup and colors to try to make it look alive. I didn’t cry. That was not my mother. My mother is free in the sky. She doesn’t have the burden of a human body, is not made up of a single dot of gray. My mother is a bird.

Here, in two dimensions, they looked so happy. But then, didn’t everyone, in pictures? That was almost the point, wasn’t it? To be able to look back and see yourself smiling, even if the camera had shuttered and clicked while you were standing there thinking about all the things that were wrong?

I think people see ghosts all the time, ” says Feng. “And I think ghosts want to be seen. They want to be reassured that they truly exist. They back into this world after passing through the gates of death into another dimension, and suddenly they hear every thought, speak every language, understand things they didn’t get when they were alive.

Did my mother ever get to see a cicada molting? Did she wish that she could do exact that? Shed her skin and be someone new? There were days when she seemed to transform into something quieter, darker. Her colors deeper but also muted. Both her truer self, and not. Or maybe it wasn’t a transformation. Maybe it was a momentary reveal. A peeling back of the protective layers. A sharpening of a pencil, bringing the tip to its most focused point.

Once upon a time we’d been an almost perfect family. I wish we could rewind, go back to live in those years forever.

Memory is a mean thing, slicing at you from the harshest angles, dipping your consciousness into the wrong colors again and again. A moment of humiliation, or devastation, or absolute rage, to be rewound and replayed, spinning a thread that wraps around the brain, knotting itself into something of a noose. It won’t exactly kill you, but it makes you feel the squeeze of every horrible moment. How do you stop it? How do you work the mind free?

If he looked in my eyes straight on, he would know how he’d pierced me with an arrow, how its shaft was still sticking out of my chest, twitching each time my heart contracted. And maybe he’d see how my mother had sliced up everything else.

I wish I could command my brain, say to it: Here. Go ahead. Unspool, and let the memories go. Let them be gone.

Pain has an element of blank; It cannot recollect When it began, or if there were A day when it was not.