Nothing for Something
In the book of fairytales that I’ve had since I was a little girl is a story called Hans in Luck. It’s about an artless young man who spends years as a hard-working apprentice and receives a big lump of gold as payment. On his way home to his family, carrying the gold wearies him, and a horseback rider suggests Hans exchange the gold for his steed. The horse bucks Hans off, and a sly farmer convinces him to trade the horse for an old cow. The cow kicks Hans over when he tries to milk her, so a butcher gets Hans to give up the cow for his pig. And so on. Eventually, Hans is left with a heavy grindstone used for knife sharpening, which falls to the bottom of the well in the center of his village when he leans over to quench his thirst. At each trade, he feels like the luckiest man in the world, and after losing the stone, he feels the luckiest of all. He finishes the journey home on light feet, whistling a jaunty tune, easy and free. Unshackled.
On the Lunar New Year this past February, I sent a photo to my family of origin’s group text. It showed friends gathered around my dining table making good luck dumplings, and my mother said she couldn’t tell if my daughter’s best friend – a nonbinary child who was once Sam and is now Salem – was a boy or a girl. I explained that they are a they. I recollected the turquoise dress they wore on the first day of school last fall. How they captured the eye like a jewel. She said in the Filipino village where she grew up in the 1940s, there was a lesbian who wore men’s clothing and short hair, and everyone accepted her. My brother chimed in that he remembered our maternal grandmother making a joke about his being feminine when we were young. She basically said I was a fag in Filipino, he wrote. You laughed, Ma.
I immediately blocked both of their numbers on my phone for the rest of the day, because the endings to stories that start like this are almost always the same. A long-held memory surfacing like a sea serpent, poised to coil around and drag us all down to the bottom of the ocean. Text messages rippling back and forth, an undercurrent of discontent sometimes giving way to vitriol, the tide rising and my spirit growing heavy and dark like ink from a squid.
I sent my sister a text about how our brother had so much baggage that he needed to hire a Sherpa, not because I don’t care, but because bearing witness to every beef sinks me. I mean, the beefs. Taken together, they make a whole cow, one that won’t give milk. My own weights rattle dully like gastroliths at the bottom of a glass jar. The boy who didn’t love me enough. The snares of motherhood. My terminal life.
But imagine releasing it. All of it. The things that snag and drag, that throw and kick and squeal, that sharpen instead of soften us. Trading towards lightness. Letting the stones fall.
