From a Distance: Stories in Second Person

02. Enough

A teenage boy travels to China to meet his estranged mother.

***

It’s something that lurks on the far edge of the horizon, something you should recall but can’t, somehow. You reach for it, but always come up short. 

You should remember.

But you don’t.

The warmth leaves your cheeks under the attack of the brutal air conditioning, and your head is light and dizzy from the airplane. The potted plants smile from their places, tucked away neatly in the corner of a lounge. A woman teeters by on high heels, a whiff of strong perfume clinging to her handbag. Resisting the urge to gag, you hurry on, just another in the crowd teeming with millions of other breathing forms. All different, you recall, all unique. A million walking stories.

Only, chances are, no one’s ever heard them.

The woman at the desk is harried and distraught by some earlier mix-up, quickly thunks her stamp down and hands it back to you, already turning to greet the next passenger. Customs, people jostling through the lines, baggage claim, a crowd surging up through to grab their bags first and swing out the exit. It’s not polite to cut, so you wait patiently for them to leave, but the stream seems endless. Only more people plunge forward, a jumble of arms and sweaty faces and mouths that curse and grumble beneath their breaths like a coming storm.

Finally, you can’t take it any more. Sauntering forward, your height affording you several extra inches, you snatch at your things and march away. The crowd sways and rises beneath you like a tidal wave, and you wade through to the exit. Without checking the tag, the woman waves you through impatiently and you join the masses. There is no grace in the movement of these people, only hurry hurry hurry and quick quick quick. 

Freedom looms up ahead of you in the form of a thick glass pane stretching from the floor to the ceilings, and your pace quickens, then slows. What’s there to hurry for? There’s no-one loitering on the curb, willing to inhale the toxic exhaust of other cars just to meet you. There’s no chauffeur clutching a placard at the doorway, waving and shouting.

There’s just you.

Alone.

Insignificance, you realize, that’s part of the memory that you lost. That’s the feeling you tried to identify on the plane, the one that bothered you like a forgotten face until the plane juddered to a halt and threw all your thoughts against the window. Insignificance. Just a little detail in the grander tapestry that is the world, just the old rocking chair in your old living room that will break and be replaced with a new one someday.

You push back the hair plastered to your face with sweat as the sun beams down on you, flooding down the sidewalk, which you can only glimpse fragments of between the sandaled feet. For a second, you stand still, allowing the people to move around you, tilting your face to the greyish sky. 

What to do?

You turn to ask the taxi driver smoking out his window where the metro station is, but hesitate. The ability to speak the language fluently would be helpful, but you only know a few common terms, and, even when you try to sound them out, no one can listen through your thick accent, coated across your voice like a sticky liquid. Even those that understand will simply write you off as one of those dumb Americans who come because they’ve got money to burn and too much time to spend.

The taxi line crawls slowly, the atmosphere strangling you like the scent of an unwashed bathroom. You begin to wish you were more insignificant as the staring starts--now out of the airport, foreigners are more conspicuous. Casually, you slip the hood of your jacket over your conspicuously blonde head. Passing by a glass window, you sigh. There’s no way to mask your strangeness.