She stares at herself in the mirror. Bright red spiderwebs down her thighs and stretches over her calves, puddling on the tiled bathroom floor of her and James’s two-bedroom apartment. There’s a radiating, sharp pain at her center every time she breathes. She tries to limit her breaths, sipping the air. But the pain is red, sears its way from her stomach down to her thighs. The pain sings while she mutes herself. She feels trapped in that mirror, watching red drip from her thighs.
James is long gone, but there’s still not enough air in the bathroom.
She watches the red while everything around her turns blue.
It spills over the counter: throbbing dark blue.
She’s choking. She can’t breathe. She can’t think. She’s staring at her reflection. She’s staring at a girl: a silhouette of hunched shoulders, trembling arms, broken eyes. She thinks she’s mesmerized, trapped by the look in her eyes. She wonders if she reached out and touched her if she would shatter.
The blue bleeds.
It’s subtle but she can feel it, its arteries pulsing. She wants to stain this bathroom in a color other than blue. She feels numb, electric, trapped, scared, safe. There’s a feeling in her chest that’s building and it aches. She wants to hurt. Her body is not her own. Her body is on fire and it remembers the way her lips whispered NàNàNàNàNàNàNàNà, which was her slanted way of screaming NahNahNahNahNahNahNahNahNah or really just NoNoNoNoNoNoNoNo. Her body remembers what the mind tries so hard to forget.
The emotions roil inside of her, disguised by a pulsing dark blue.
A cry squeezes from her lungs, and she so desperately wants to pull the girl in the mirror out of the blue. So she forces her wooden limbs to move. Weakly, she stumbles from the bathroom and into the bedroom, leaving a thread of red in the carpet from the bathroom to the bedroom. She riffles through the drawers of her nightstand, pulls out her grandfather’s tape recorder. She just needs to remind the girl in the mirror who’s trapped in blue of what it means to be a Li. She just needs to hear her grandfather’s voice, one that has not become weakened by five-years of Alzhemiers. She just needs him to tell her what to do. That would fix everything. That would put the broken pieces back together. But even as an experienced liar, the lies sound hollow to her. Broken things rarely go back to what they were.
But she has to believe.
She cradles the tape recorder to her chest, shuffles back to the bathroom bathed in blue. She presses play and her grandfather’s voice fills the small bathroom. The blue recedes a little. She feels triumphant.
“Grace, the first thing you must never forget is our address. What is our address-” She’s reaching for the razor blade in the medicine cabinet when the tape recorder slips from her grasp and shatters on the ground, tape unfurling, modernistic garbles and nonsense spilling out into the blue-tinted air of the bathroom.
She collapses to the ground. An animal-like groan reverberates through the bathroom. She’s on her hands and knees, fingers trembling. She’s trying to put the pieces back together but this time she doesn’t have Scotch-tape. She feels like screaming and dimly, she hears a wailing in the background. The tape recorder is silent now.
What is our address?
中国, 湖北市, 广水市, 太平乡… She knows this. She has to know this. She has written this address thousands of times as a child under the watchful eye of her grandfather. 中国, 湖北市, 广水市… She can’t remember. She can’t remember it at all. She doesn’t know what the address is.
The wailing in the background is getting louder. She grabs the silver razor on the floor. 中国, 湖北… She carves the characters into her arm, trying to remember the thousands of times she has copied this exact address.
What’s the address?
The wailing in the background crescendos and she feels breathless. She digs the razor in deeper, willing the red to bleed into blue, too much to bleed into just right. The wailing turns into a bubbling laughter and she feels her shoulders shaking. She can’t help but feel. After all, isn’t that what all artists do? Use their paintings to explain the emotions? Feel? Is this the culmination of her suffering?
中国, 湖北… She can’t remember. She lies down on the floor and for the first time, lets herself cry. Her shoulders shake with the exertion of the unfamiliar expression of emotion. She makes a snow angel in the broken shards of her grandfather’s tape recorder, moving her arms and legs up and down, up and down. She can’t remember. Somewhere, in a hospital bed miles away from her, her grandfather can’t remember either.
The bathroom is no longer in blue but stained in red.
The walls are no longer breathing.
Is this what womanhood was supposed to be? Is she a woman now?
Thank you for reading the final part of Becoming Woman by our columnist Amanda Chen! Stay tuned for more works by Amanda in the future and read more about her here. Stay tuned for future literary works by Amanda and our other writers.