These stopped being the stories to pass on. They whispered once in our ears, too close to hear words — only the rustling of leaves and feathers like wing-beats in the sky.

We never came.

They sit in 124, and they rock their own loneliness until it flies away. We live just outside 124 when the world remembers their story but not their stories, their name but not their names. We live with our fingers smoothing over the silky thread of a scar, expecting it to lead us out of our labyrinths while we leave the stones of their walls unturned.

Pink chip like a fingernail, the crashing of old tides on new sand. Life shaped out of fire, vultures picking at open seams until they numb. Until the men without skin and without breath numb.

Our eyes clutch for purchase on the portside of a ship. We walk in curtains of sun and wind, and the footsteps of children and mothers and men fit together when we watch the wood ripple. Their names blur and crash and burn when we look towards the west and our shadows fall east.

We have never come for the men without skin and without breath and without life and without hope and without harm and without guilt and with scars and with innocence and with family and with loss and with pleas. Their pages laid out on new shores to dry old salt until new tides rip at them again. Their candlelit flames with dripping wax, lined inside those churches and labyrinths to guide us again until we bury them in shallow graves and erode the smoke scent that still lines these stones. We have never entered 124 again because we think we have found our way out after we give a hollowed-out mother another six letters on her beloved’s pink chip headstone. We see the tides recede and light shine on the deck, and we forget the 124’s who see the vultures circling at the seams of their stories.

Just shadows filling in the rest.

Dearly Beloved.

Today, like Meursault remembers, you lose her again. You get the message on your way home from Safeway, walking while the birds chirp in the foliage: Qianliu will be remembered. Hope you can come to the funeral. Your phone hums like a eulogy, each vibration sinking something soft and heavy into your chest.

You keep walking as you tilt your head towards the sky. The sunlight drips into your eyes and the clouds swirl counterclockwise -- a scorching hurricane in the middle of your suburbian Californian winter. The stone in your chest settles softly, weathered by bone and blood and something terribly unkind.

You talked to her three days ago, and she smiled as if everything were the same. As if both of you didn’t carry little shards of regret from holding each other once upon a time. As if your arms could embrace her without cold warning seeping into your veins like adrenaline, like the residue from a long-dried water stain.

And yet the birds still chirp. And yet you still walk on the snaking path past your post office, into your neighborhood and into your home. Your earth, it seems, still spins.

By tomorrow, the news will spread, and with it cometh the flood.

~~~

You sit among friends, hearing their words snare in their throats as the rainclouds pass briefly over the sun. There’s a stark rainbow through the window: one-way glass is confidential, you remember the counselor assuring you once. Little pieces of irony, scattered among these remains.

“Grief comes in unusual ways: beyond the five stages that some of you know,” comes the counselor’s voice. It rings quietly across the office, but it’s not soft like you expected. When you imagined the people around you stooped over with the weight of tragedy, you thought his words would be crooning and soothing and utterly empty promises. The type of person that Qianliu always hated.

“If you’d like, you can introduce yourself and how you feel on a scale from one to ten. If you’d like to skip your turn, just say so, and remember that this is always a judgment-free zone. Your emotions are valid, and you are always welcome to express whatever you’re feeling.”

When the introductions come to you, the onetwothreefourfive drifts aimlessly on the tip of your tongue, and you swallow it before it betrays you.

There is movement again when the counselor gestures to the butcher paper and the set of markers on the edge of the table. Together, you spread out the roll of translucent paper onto the table and break the seals of the dollar-store pens and Mr. Sketch markers that smell like burning rubber and blueberry. This is catharsis, you’re told, for the memories that now only belong to this 200-square-foot room. You thumb at a red calligraphy pen, brush tip already frayed from the air.

Your friend Lina bumps at your elbow. Her teary eyes shimmer with grief. “These pens are terrible for calligraphy,” she jokes, “and if I’d known we were writing and drawing for Qianliu’s memory, I’d have brought something better for her.”

Qianliu told you that tears came in different types. She told you that the emotional ones dropped cortisol with them, so after you cried for hours on the day she wanted to die, you felt better, even as your skin stretched dry with salt and cracked itself hollow. You’d wanted to be her friend, know her flaws and embrace it all, but these deals come with strings attached that only cynics see. You wanted to learn so much, but you only see those strings now when it’s too late to change yourself.

You shake the pen and think of her name, smiling faintly at those precious memories. You press the tip lightly over the paper, and you hope for the stroke to curve properly, to work normally, to pretend that it was worth more than it seemed to give. It should be more. It should feel more. But when the ink feathers unevenly over thin paper, no catharsis has happened. You don’t feel the phantom wave of disappointment. You haven’t drained yourself dry because all you feel is a vague and unconvincing puppet of grief hollowing your bones.

The counselor notices your staring and pulls you aside after the meeting, genuinely asking if you’re feeling overwhelmed, if you need to sit out 5th period even as the bell rings from a speaker in the ceiling. You thank him quietly and walk until you reach your English classroom, and you step back into odd public school odors and trite conversations about making online friends via Instagram. Your teacher seems delighted to see you, sitting you down to watch To Kill A Mockingbird in class even when she must see the ground beneath your feet. A cracked-dry riverbed. The scent of dirt that crumbles away with a feather’s touch.

You tell yourself the same old flood will come soon.

~~~

You carpool to the funeral, and the calla lilies sit quietly next to her portrait. Qianliu’s name is written in hand-inked calligraphy on a tiny scroll -- in black ink, no less. Red is for New Year’s parties and baijiu-drunk wedding guests, along with your own personal sense of irony. It cannot belong in this little church filled with mourners in black.

It’s still quieter than other Chinese funerals. You’ve heard of professional mourners, and you went to a distant great-aunt’s funeral a year ago, where one of her sons took to the microphone to lay out her faults in life until he was pulled away by the rest of her bereaved family. This one has none of the spectacle nor the agitated misery you’ve built up in your memory.

You remember talking to your therapist in a grey-cushioned couch, voice quiet as you recounted Qianliu when she was with you. When she cut her own bangs in a $3 pocket mirror and you watched, faintly impressed at how easy it looked. When she watched Inception with you, curled up by your side and sipping milk tea at four in the afternoon. When she stared at a basketball hoop at freshman homecoming and told you she was hallucinating. When her light laugh twisted itself into something bitter and angry that snapped at you once you left, once you found out what a 5150 was. You were once heavy with terror because even though she was still alive, you’d never know if you could save her from the yellow-red haze that stained both of your thoughts.

You wish you still had your therapist. You wish Qianliu still had hers. In the end, saving face for “your own” good was your standard.

When you read your eulogy for her, you see the tears. You see the heavy veil of grey that hangs over their heads. The paper creases beneath your fingers, yet your voice is far too steady to be real. Once you arrive home, your father searches for matches inside the garage to burn on the ground, telling you that the smoke will wash away any negative energies before you enter the house. No need for a therapist now.

You lie in bed as you guiltily stare at the ceiling. The flood never comes.

~~~

“How are you feeling?”

You pick at the yellow hall pass, and the corners crimp at jagged angles.. You’re doing alright, you say. You joke unoriginally that you’re perpetually exhausted, as is usual for a student taking too many APs in a year. The counselor earnestly explains this is all a routine check-in for everyone at the support groups, just for the sake of checking your state of mind.

There is no long-winded probing of your psyche. There is nothing much except an attempted start of conversation. He asks about the summer camp application you’re filling in, some Ivy League resume booster that seems too short to be worth much. You tell him how your teachers fill the days with study sessions. You briefly mention going out for boba tea runs with your friends, fifty-percent-sugar and zero-ice earl grey milk tea condensing a film of cold droplets against your fingers.

You know how easily people are expected to adapt. Qianliu’s death is a hole, ripped from the seams of the world. There are condolences. Grief shared in group chats after the funeral. Instagram stories and closed window shutters. The gaps are never permanent, however; they are soon filled with the bustling of the group that comes after, moving and shifting and testing until the world goes back to normal and its people wait for the next loss over again, like a wound sealing itself in a blast of heat.

When you heard of her death, you expected you’d keel over in the street, feeling too much and too little in one stroke. You imagined the inky excuse of devastation, wailing and thrumming, heartbroken and gone. Emptiness would sweep into your limbs, grotesque in its beauty, and you were willing to welcome tragedy as your elegant fall from grace. Whatever story it’d take to hide reality.

Your reactions now, it seems, are struggling to keep up.

After a lifetime, the counselor smiles again. He tells you, “Take care.”

~~~

You’re walking on the path towards the post office, the same road tread again and again, when Lina calls you and you tell her the flood has finally come. That it hurts. That stones are dropping again and again from your throat into your chest and chest.

“You aren’t wrong to feel,” she murmurs.

You miss Qianliu. You tell Lina you miss the arroyo that leads to the hiking trail off the side of the bridge, where your conversations with Qianliu could tumble down concrete into the river like chunks of loosened gravel. You tell her about the hug you shared in front of the post office, when you and Qianliu were friends who didn’t drop the world on each other, expecting each other to hold it on their shoulders.

Lina’s voice is muffled but insistent against the speakerphone. “I can tell you, right here and right now, that you two left impacts on each other. For better or for worse, now you’re here. What I can’t tell you to do is how to handle the rest.”

Poor you, wanting so much from a high school sophomore. Wanting so much, waiting for the Dionysian part of tragedy to spiral yourself into doomed platonic romance. Wishing for so much suffering so you could understand someone else’s.

Her voice drops a little. “You haven’t been sleeping. You’re not eating nearly enough everyday. Do you think you deserve the pain like this?”

You know you don’t.

“What are you going to do when you get home?”

You aren’t sure.

~~~

You spend $100 in a fit of rage to recover your text messages with Contact: Qianliu Huang on Fonepaw.com, clicking through a series of “Claim Your Free iPhone!” and “Offer Ends Now!” alerts with unseeing focus. You hover your mouse over her icon, but the conversations have blinked away. The time of the past erased, and along with it, your hopes and regrets for her have gone.

Nothing belongs to you, either way.

~~~

Have you moved on?

Cheery orange pumpkin spice candles flicker next to boxes of lotus egg-yolk mooncake, and you’ve grown into junior year. This is where school counts, they tell you, and you’re grateful for the opportunities to bury yourself into a grave for academics’ sake. It must be better than sentimentality to begin with. You’re allowed the time to stare into tests. You become so stuck to the chair in your dining room that your mother jokes she’ll erect a statue in your honor when you get off your ass to exercise (or something). Months soften the stones caught in your ribcage; it does feel better once your heart learns again how to beat of its own accord.

You’re holding a fifty-percent-sugar earl grey milk tea, but you left the ice in accidentally like Qianliu often forgot. You’re rewatching Inception in your living room. You shoot hoops in the same hoop that she saw twisted by a tired brain. When you cut onions and rub juice in your eye by accident, you curse and try to remember Qianliu’s remedies for reflex tears.

You circled past her family’s apartment, never approaching the door, and you toss a pebble down the arroyo. You feel the ground beneath your feet, and your eyes brim again with the tears that will drain the stress from your limbs and might crack your skin if you let it too loose.

So, are you doing better now? Is this what you expected in grief, days away from when it started?

~~~

You finally text Contact: Qianliu Huang. Your hands shake a little, raw and freezing, and the stones still roll there in your chest. You text her number about TV shows and junior year and Casablanca and AP testing. You imagine what she’d be like now, vibrantly filling up the space around you that took you too long to feel and so much longer to mend.

The counselor who helps you (Mr. Yu) sometimes sits back in his school-provided rolling chair and waves hello to you. He is immeasurably proud of your tenacity, and even in the moments when you felt alone, he believed in the path of your grief.

Lina texts Qianliu’s number from time to time. It’s stupid memes. It’s a sketch of a Mario mushroom or a picture of her new French girlfriend because Qianliu would’ve found a way to tease the hell out of her taste in girls. Your worry of texting a number to cope? Lina’s done it months before you, always resolute in her silence because her fear of weakness mirrored your own plunge into tragedy.

You text. You cook. The air shimmers sometimes, on the days when dirt feels like powder or when sunlight drips and blinds in your eyes. You live. You dream.

Hundreds of days ago, you lost someone. You didn’t know and still don’t know what to do, especially in the cracks between the days. Grief came slow. Grief lingered and still stays, making a home in the ventricles and hanging in your ribs. Grief smells like rain after a thunderstorm, despite the rainbow in the mist. Grief hovers, filled with irony and ringing bells. Not a curse. Unpredictable. Unexpected. Sweet. Someday you might find your grief perched on the moon, out of reach but always there; and today, unlike in Camus’s absurdism, you will find her again.

It is winter again and again, rising fast

and I leave my single blue-paper bracelet

on the wood next to you, kissed by

uncles you’d only heard of. / uncles who

came when you found a single

broadsword in the cabinet and boasted

as the preschool X’s // scattered across your

arm in tactless inkless tattoo lines. you are

sleeping, merely so in a haze of the red

in-between you called your future home.

in the end /// we left you the fish and oranges

just beside the calla lilies, and they all slept

slowly and carefully alongside you, keeping

watch. //// keeping the one eye open dark.

Three: your faiths are machine gunning

me down as we spill

in clouds of dried ink that mutter

find you, find me in this bubbling

a thing of yours, a thing of mine --

bridge the maw in the lilt of my and your

-- entering from stage left.

Two: we don’t speak in the yawn of

the firecrackers that speak of so much

not me, so far away from these patches

grinning sharp, coughing up miracle

pushing against a round belly, leaving

us calamity to gawk at, scrape raw

like I gave you the right.

One: grayness, stinging of

you and me, us and them, trembling

bright and clawing soft amongst our cage

they find used up, panting things

smother me and you in red and blue acrylic

propped up with fire pokers and tell me

welcome to you and them.

hungry

or don’t know

him at all, but soon

we find the pills under

his bed, or the things that

stretch his eyelids wide shut and

bring them nothing but the push-pull

of a helpmeplease when he stands, ramrod

straight: distilled unease creeps into his mouth

when we freeze in the headlights of oncoming traffic,

and we find sugared vitriol stuffed into cracks in his skin

that bleed red ink, bleed the fine dust that he spends hours

grinding with his teeth -- a fine boy, carved with love and dark

nothings, young at 15 and old at hospice, living in pushpinned space

when he runs furiously, dripping yellow ache to lose a spot in

this race after all, living on wooden skewers in a puppeteer

ville and stabbed with the cocktails in which he finds a

sliver of his insides mixed to bitter perfection, the

sort of love he half-heartedly reached for to

stop it all -- bring the faulty assembly

line to a sparking halt, bring his

four-oh-four binges back

to a dirt-packed floor

that doesn’t forgive

nor bring him

respite.

What a skip!—

The universe blesses me kindly again,

I think, as I fall out of my chair (again)

To recover a pen that’s now drying out just to

Spite me, a little wicked curve leering at my tangled limbs.

Like the time I re-posted a picture six times just

Because each time I forgot a location marker,

Caption, or a friend;

Or it could be like the time I tripped over my flag

At a marching band competition (again) because

I taped the wrong side of the lamé and silk while

Trying and failing to point my toes;

Or maybe it was like when I made jokes

Snorting all the way through, like a congested stoner pig (again)

And no one else appreciated them the way I did

(Maybe for their sake, those were smart choices).

What a thrill!—

A skip, a beat in the timeline

I think, as I,

The impossible child with the tiny size and

Heart problems of a overgrown diabetic,

Find enough spare life in the sofa cushions and bedroom—

Or maybe at the back of the lavender closet,

Or at the front of the classroom while panicking for forgotten 2018 election debate points—

Just enough life to get through the life

I find so endearingly frustrating

And so painfully vivacious

We walked into the streets, mouths

burning and sparking with the words we found

but didn’t offer to each other.

When I slept, my belly tingled as I slipped into restlessness

while you ached with escitalopram and me

with fluoxetine— like heartburn but more sluggish.

I circled you when God and Death came to our doors to make

us hold on, so we did

and we never would’ve found something that would work.

Your fingers crushed my flannel and my

head, but I was supposed to be the savior and a gallon

of precious light, and I wasn’t supposed

to spill it on the concrete stained with shreds of fabric

or lose it in a vast sea of muted waves. I knew that

we were strong, but I know now we were as drunk as

two fourteen-year-olds could be on something with the shape of commitment

or maybe something purely mundane because

that’s who we were— teens with souls to tap against the glass and

find their fortitude in hazed up streets and heads and burnout

that stumbled away in clean, blueish air.

We have done it again.

Five minutes filled in our palms and

Dissolving in salty mirth--

It glistens on the Tour Eiffel

To shatter in Atlantic waters.

My breath--

Bouncing from my lips

To a spot four inches from my mouth,

Like chaos in three seconds.

I wonder if you feel it too--

Along with the double scent of greened mints

And blackened joie de vivre

Mixing in plein air.

My bitten fingers find yours

In a world of pallid whites

And pained rouges--

Once touched or maybe never again.

We are the enemy of the Elbe Marshes

But lovers of les Alpes

Misty nights and days, but

We will never forget those lights.

Now I am become Lady Lazarus,

Eater of men.

My bouncing breath

Drops from my throat to a spot

Two inches away from my mouth —

Like a springing ball

Did they know this?—

Gilman and Plath and Lincoln

As they wrote in frenzies

And breaking breaths

5

It’s my first time holding a flag.

I sit cross-legged in outgrown leggings, excitedly watching the drum corps video on the band room television. The dancers’ silks fly in the air like water, and everyone holds their breath when they toss, then cheer when they catch.

I want to be like them, so badly. I want to be the person on that screen, whipping through flourishes of color and air and metal.

I know it will take time and work, but I’m so enthralled already. Push and one starts to grow in my head.

6

Today at the color guard workshop, in the faintly dingy and cluttered band room, we practice spinning the flag for the first time. It’s easy, they said. Push and one, down, up, down, up, and stop. It comes naturally, they said.

“You’re going too far ahead,” a veteran member calls out, and she lightly walks over to adjust my grip. I feel inexplicably embarrassed as I watch silks flying like tangible magic.

We sit down for a second, and I learn that there’s a gash in the ceiling of the impossibly tall band room. It sits there proudly, courtesy of a decade-old class and a color guard sabre.

I laugh. It sounds like a little kid, even though I’m 15 already.

7

Band camp is hot here. I think it’s over a hundred degrees today, but I haven’t checked my phone in over an hour.

We are supposed to learn a toss today, but I’m thinking about my summer homework. I have Charles Dickens to finish, and I have highlighters waiting for my first AP summer assignment. School is there, on my mind and pressing on my sunburned face.

But I try to listen to the instructor, who’s now tapping out the counts for us.

“Counts are your life now,” she had said while we stretched our legs to Hamilton.

Orchestra taught me that. This will be easy.

When the counts arrive in my head, I fumble with the release and reel back to watch the pole clatter to the ground for the umpteenth time.

I am about to cry, but a tall senior with sparkling eyes consoles me, voice gentle and praising, like a friend. She didn’t seem like one when I first saw her, but I’m glad she’s there.

While she shows me again, I watch the other members spin some more, talking about friends and drama and bruises. I don’t know what a double is, or a 45, or a quad on rifle is, but I hear the push and one happily.

I want to learn, so when I release this time-- push and one-- I catch the pole without bruising my fingers again. I thank her, and she tells me her name is Cathrine-- pronounced like Katrina.

8

My mom asks me how color guard is going.

The bruises from flags still ache, but they make me feel alive, and I tell her so as I organize my glittering bright show makeup into an old red bag.

She purses her lips. “Be careful,” she says.

I brush off the words as I rehearse my counts with a push and one.

1

I cry in the band room during warmup.

Just a few especially nice color guard teammates are there for a sobbing me in October while everyone else stretches with perfect splits and perfect flexibility and perfect poise. They laugh and talk of homecoming dates, whereas I had awkwardly asked a trombonist friend to go out of insecurity. They talk about marching band and how it’s a family.

I’m not even close to my teammates. I wish I was.

I hear push and one when I finish drying my eyes and throw away my tissues into the trash.

2

When championships come, I am elated to perform with the push and one, but the final score says otherwise.

Amador, 6th place. Our teammates vow to erase the season from our memory.

3

Color guard workshops are popping by again. I bail and claim it’s my homework. We have AP exams soon-- those are more important than me dropping tosses in front of veteran members. No use.

My outgrown leggings shift uncomfortably when I hear the push and one leaking from the band room, and my skin is picked raw with doubt.

4

I grow desperate, so I try spinning rifle too.

The push and one, two keeps falling to the ground.

“You’re trying too quickly,” another veteran member says, voice gentle. “Be careful.”

5

The summer gives me time.

I read books and focus on orchestra and laugh till I get dizzy. I study for the SAT with my prep books and take tests whenever I can.

Color guard has begun to loosen its grip-- it no longer hangs from my mind, but softly taps the recesses of my head every so often: when I watch my friends audition for drum corps, or when I watch that same video from almost a year ago.

I can’t come to band camp this year, but as I take yet another SAT practice test, the push and one hums in my mind. I count the seconds from the timer in color guard time: that mantra of push and one, the time of the drums and the fluttering silk flags.

It feels better, like the slip of a glove or the coolness of the metal poles.

6, 7, 8

School starts again. Classes weigh on my mind with all their stress and toil, but I start walking towards the color guard room more.

The problems still smolder red hot in myself, but I let them aside as they jostle through my mind. Let them pass by, I say.

I pick up the flag, and that image of one-year-old-colorguard me beats through me like the people in my team and the harshness of the sun and all the strife I needed.

I push and one and go, and my life is, for the moment, cradled in the silks I spin. I regret not seeing them earlier, so I look towards the new color guard captain, the tall brunette I take under my wing, the bright eyes that so mirrored mine in the previous fall. I see something, but I’m not sure what it is.

All around me, dusty silks are reviving in the nighttime August sun.