For as far back as I can remember, stories entwine with my memories from childhood. Memories of Harry Potter and fairy tales and oral rememberings from my parents have been worn down, soft and dull and subdued, from being handled by my clumsy hands one too many times. They are fond memories.
But recently, I’ve realized that the mystic, fantastical air with which my parents tell stories sometimes shroud the truth underneath. Here’s a poem that I wrote about it.
Once upon a time, they are just stories. Once upon a time, she listens to them with awe: tales of magical beasts, ancient kingdoms, and endless seas that have hungry, filching hands awaiting escapees and adventurers alike. She learns of humid rain and the smell of earth before a storm; through these stories, she tastes sweet lychee and raw coconut; she learns to build boats with her bare hands and -- from her concrete jungle of a city -- she dreams of the old country, her thoughts laced with nostalgia and stained with syrupy condensed milk and blistering tropical sun.
Every night, right before she slips into the blurry haze between consciousness and sleep, her parents swirl stories into her thoughts.
Once upon a time, there was a princess who found unimaginable wishes at the bottom of the ocean: rich draperies and gold rings and the scarlet feather of a phoenix. Long, long ago, there was a young man by the ocean, who woke up early every morning to watch the sun blink sleepily, to sail out on the sea and surround himself with endless, endless water, waiting for the right day to sail across the ocean. In the old country, there was a slumbering dragon, its belly full of fire hotter than the sun and its wrath larger and older than the earth and its greed deeper and colder than the icy ocean.
Here, her parents tell her, here is the overlap between land and sea, a kingdom less of an empire and more of a land only loyal to the earth and the wind and the slow storms. Here, when summer comes, the plants unfurl their leathery fronds; the earth begins to move slowly, like a great beast stirring into consciousness. The dirt and soil drinks in the clean rain and the soft smell of petrichor releases from a yawning maw as the beast awakens. Storms crackle over the horizon and the dragon flexes its poisonous claws, unfurls its leathery wings. Here is the edge of the world, here is the line between sea and skyline, they say, and here is how you cross it.
She asks for more stories every day, reaches out with sweaty palms to ask for more, as if these stories are real, as if they are reminders that can fit into the palm of your hand, remnants of a past life that fit in the hollow of your cheek so you can bring them on a small boat across the sea.
In school, her chubby fingers grab fat red crayons to carve mountains and fire and dragons out of printer paper.
Her mother tells her of the food there: tin Tiffin boxes and enormous bowls of rich pork broth, carrying poles with enormous woven baskets on either side, the banyan trees peering down on curdling goat’s milk; her father tells her of a revolution: an endless fleet of boats -- like fish swimming desperately up a stream -- fleeing a harbor, out of the maw of the beast and into the hungry, filching hands of the sea. Here is the match that lit the flame, they say, here is the call that woke the beast; here is fire and here is fury and here is how you leave.
Outside of her open window, the city calls, a screeching cacophony of urban traffic and the rush of life, a constant reminder of where she lives, of where she will have to go. She wonders where she belongs. She wonders where she has to go. On her desk, her notebook paper rustles with the wind. She picks up her pen.
Once upon a time, she believed they were just stories.
She grows older and realizes that they are not just stories.
Once upon a time, she’d never seen anything with a knife for a tongue or creatures with poison-tipped claws; maybe she believed those stories were fantasy because it wasn’t possible to understand, it was so difficult to comprehend. How can you understand a wildfire when you’ve only used small matchsticks to keep warm? How can you understand what it takes to leave your home behind when home is where you’ve lived your whole life?
And how could she know? She will never feel the insistent flames of a revolution or that horrible, dark fear of no land past the sea, of no wind filling the sails; will never come face to face with beasts as ancient as dragons. But perhaps, she will face mountains of steel and birds of metal instead, swap out dark jungles for concrete cities.
Either way, she has her stories.
And in the end, they are still stories. Except they’re slightly starchy with grains of truth, a little gritty on the tongue, slightly bitter with a worldliness and a deep kind of hunger too powerful to be made up; but, after all, aren’t the best stories the ones of our own lives?
Once upon a time, there was a girl who lived in a world half-fantasy and half-reality, living the best kind of lucid dream, between the sky and the shoreline, between the past and the future, between kingdoms and democracy.
She is insatiable; she is young and she wants the world. She wants blistered skin from the tropical sun and treasures from the bottom of the greedy ocean and a fang from the yawning maw of the beast. She lives with once upon a time and long long ago and in the old country tucked into the space between her molars and her cheek, small enough to fit in the hollow of her cheek, to bring with her wherever she goes. When she smiles, the edges of her lips twist with the sweetness of condensed milk and raw sunshine, with the fire of a dragon’s breath. And, with that, she lives happily ever after.
