On My First Encounter with the Sisters, “Hopelessness” and “Futility”

From a young age, I began to be told I was built of a weaker constitution.  “Sensitive”, was the word they used- the reference encompassing matters of both body and heart.  I’d like to say my childhood was filled with bouncing around the playground with other equally bouncy children, and though it wasn’t without its fair share of it, my two strongest memories of childhood are of being sick, and the visceral sensation of trying to breathe while crying.

Undoubtedly, these experiences laid down the foundation upon which much of my worldview has been shaped and reinforced, with “Futility”, and “Hopelessness” as my earliest mentors.  While I recall noticing them lingering in the background it wasn’t until the day they formally introduced themselves to me that I understood that they would be the two shades that would continue to color the way I’d see the world for the rest of my life.  

The day began with a confirmation: a phone call declaring that it was,  indeed the glorious day all children wait for, a snow day.  Kindergarten was cancelled, and I had bought myself an extra day for an absence among the few I had already accumulated in the past several days.  I had come down a couple days prior with a fever blister, one that covered a large portion of my lower right cheek.  As the blister had been determined, from previous episodes, to be a harbinger of a fever to come, I was, since its first appearance, made to stay home, and wait until the fever, which eventually did come in the next day, had passed.  

This snow day fell, perhaps, around the fourth day of my sickness, right when I was on the mends, yet still not up for a full day of playing outside in the snow.  I could hear the other children that lived on my block already out, waging snowball wars and building fortresses, as I sat inside on my couch, watching cartoons, trying to ignore the sounds of their play.  I knew, my family, wouldn’t dare let me outside; and I too, learned to adopt these fears so that even I wouldn’t let me outside.  I protected my life as if it were some delicate plant, with the nuisance of the measures it took to care for the thing quickly overshadowing the beauty for which it was desired in the first place.

Clear to everyone in the house that day, my mother and grandparents, was my suffering.  I kept looking out the window and asking if perhaps I could just play right outside the front door, not venturing too far, yet simultaneously vocalizing my fear of “death”, as I understood it at that time.  After some more rounds of oscillating between my hopes and fears, my mother, by some stroke of ingeniousness, devised a solution: she’d fill a container one of our family members used for taking hot foot baths in with snow, and bring it inside, so that I could build a snowman within the comforts of my heated living room, within arms reach of my medicine, and vigilant adult eyes.  

I was elated.  The concept was genius.  It was like breakfast in bed, but better.  Snow in Living Room.  It’s a wonder this concept wasn’t already  a phenomenon across the world.  As I schemed to find some way to capitalize on this concept, my mother disappeared and reappeared before me with a small mountain of snow.  Seconds later, there was a small bowl full of adzuki beans, dried dates, a little hat, and a variety of other small objects, all ready for me to build my indoor snow friend.  I went straight to shaping the creature, and did it with such joy.  The ice on my little hands burned in the most exhilarating way!- then burned too exhilaratingly as I then requested and was promptly provided with a pair of mittens.  I shaped and shaped and shaped, and the thing I was breathing life into was inches away from taking its final form- until I noticed, to my horror, a small puddle beginning to form at the base of my beloved new snow friend.  I looked up at my mother and indicated to her this troubling development, but she, in her carefree fashion, brushed it off as not a thing to worry about.  “Don’t worry!  We can get more snow!”, and gestured me to go on with my sculpting.  The lack of any concern in her tone reassured me somehow that “more snow” meant my snow friend would be able to maintain its shape just as it was, even though it was melting; that somehow “more snow” had the magical property of reversing and circumventing the nature of how I understood regular snow to behave.   Appeased, I went back to my building, only to find moments later that to my horror, this was not what was meant by “more snow”.  My beloved friend was melting as fast as I was trying to save it, and right at the height of my panic I heard my mother cry, “Jessica!!! Smile!!!”

I whipped my head around to see my mother pointing a camera at me, and my grandmother smiling and waving excitedly behind her, indicating me to look in their direction.  

FLASH!

A bright lingering spot of light now occupied the center of my vision.   “Pose with the snowman!!!”, cried my mother, her face overflowing with maternal glee at what she must have perceived to be a great triumph in her ever turbulent life of motherhood.  Here she had managed to find the solution to her poor sickly daughter’s dilemma of not being able to go outside to play in the snow, and she would make sure this moment of victory was cemented in history through these photographs.

Still blinded by the flash, I looked down to try to see my snow friend.  As the light began to fade, the reality of the world I lived in began to come into focus.  I could build and build, and shape and shape, I could add tons of snow upon snow, but nothing can stop my beloved snow friend from melting away right before my eyes.  “Jesica!!!!” - My mother was not yet finished with cementing this moment in time.  I looked up again, but this time everything: my mother, my grandparents, the walls around me- everything I saw- I realized, was in essence, no different from my snow friend.  We build and build and sculpt and sculpt, but right before our eyes, and with nothing to stop it from happening, we are, always, inevitably, melting away, creeping back into the cosmic stream of existence from whence we came.

 
after “more snow” was added, and snow friend’s face was reconstructed

after “more snow” was added, and snow friend’s face was reconstructed

 
Jessica Liu