the blueshift journal

The soft thud creaks as my bedroom door rubs against the wood floor in closing; the friction a friend to plan my rebellion. Feet shuffle until they abruptly stop and discard with tired bodies onto beds—everything is quiet, though the beatings of my heart pulses threaten to disrupt the tranquil silence in our small, sleepy town that seems to always be this way. I see myself through the illuminating clock, the tick-tock only annexing my uncomfortable insomnia in a town I have called a house for the past 16 years. I am waiting for the second hand to tick 5—that is when it is silent enough to flee.

It is silent now.

I escape outside onto the balcony, accompanied by my French homework; we share the space with early rain and dew, like old friends in wistful situations.

 

Her name is Amélie; Amélie by the ports on the border of France. I meet her through strings of glue bonding together her school photo and her “About Me”, through her A4 autobiography sheet that sticks out the way pen-pals should from my own binder; a reminder that we are 9 hours apart, in broken language fragments available only à la carte; a reminder that our existle ences do not dictate America’s inability to use the metric system.

I see her France only through glossy textbook pages, bleeding with years of history from the students before me, conjugations and nasal sounds through unfamiliar lips that echo memories of Goliath in l’Arc de Triomphe. She sees l'Amérique [America] through golden manes and pupils as tinted as the veins underneath pale wrists, the color of the Marseilles deep and Parisian blues; 2 I, however, prefer my champagne with late night rain, on the balcony, rather than passed down through the genetics of family.

I want to tell her my hair is brown. My eyes, too. My skin, the flush of salted caramel, of sweet bonbons that seem to represent Tarte Tatin more than the beach sunshine.

I want to tell her she writes English better than me.

 

Her name is Amélie, the letters washed with the midnight drizzles of the Golden State, inked with my shaky hands and chasing the drops of rain until they are not so sharp no more. They are well loved by the sea—still salted with my grandfather’s tears and the screams of my grandmother 50 years before, when they drowned in their own demise of love like woes. It trickles onto my skin, and I taste the salt in the rain, and am taken back to yore before the language of love, before the infinitives, before Amélie. I remember my grandfather—his crinkled laughs and bless-ed smiles that I face only in wrinkled photographs, in the same fraying hues that tint my own skin; they are stained with sisters of the same sea that reach my skin in little droplets of reminiscence. I am always too young to understand my grandfather’s death, how he fled his home to find a different haven that he could permanently own, yet my blood never fails to run as cold as the sea of my grandfather’s demise when I hear about how our family reached this land. My grandfather is but a mere memory that continues to ghost my life in a foreign land that I am unsure whether to be blissed or angry he chose to move to. I remember little of my grandfather’s homeland that I can never call my own; it seems farther to me than the French history I purse my lips to speak that I will never be able to understand. I live in no land but the little patch of individual solace on my rooftop balcony, the insomnia of 3 am highs that never seem to align with the time zones of this country I do not belong in. 3 I pick up my pen and write again.

My French leaks of 2-year-language requirements and Mandarin roots, phrases I can no longer speak in a mother tongue that has now become obsolete. My French teacher had told me to tell her of my family—my father, my mother, my sister—but that is to share a part of me with Amélie that is too complex for me to write in French. My French is raw with immaturity; My English is rough with overuse, so, I begin to write in a language I have tried so hard to forget.

 

I tell Amélie of my father, and his big hands but bigger soul, though both are calloused with memories that seem much too old for the raven haired playground king who heard his father would not be there to make him breakfast anymore. My father’s fingers are rough with softness, his bones strong as he wakes at the crack of dawn each morning to steam the billows of bread, so my stomach growls at school do not haunt me back to the attacks of his homeland—the low rumblings of the steel metal before it aimed to shoot. My father moved to this new country by ship, by sea—that is how he met my mother, through the love tails of the water that both washed away from pain, as well as splashed it.

 

I tell Amélie of my mother, the 4 tones of the petit 5-foot woman who left a red mark on my cheek for a week when I stopped speaking my native tongue. Her eyes are always wrinkled, the black pupils an azure abyss. I have seen them in yellow when she learned she could have more than one child in this new nation. I have seen them in green when her throat could not gutter the messanger of her new home. I have seen them in red the first time she caught me becoming friends with the rain at midnight. I have seen them in blue and disappear when my grandparents 4 did as well. My mother wears slippers in the home for fear of becoming cold—I do not tell her that the warmth of the California sun can never outcompete the cold chilliness of the ocean. I tell Amélie of the better version of me—2 years my junior, but with bright eyes the same sheen as the California sun—I know Amélie would like her. She is much too light to understand that we are children of the aquamarine; we will always swim under the water in this nation where we have no niche. But, she does not seem to care—in fact, the first time our family went to the beach, she swam so far into the ocean we thought she had gone searching for her grandparents. I am often unsure if we are even related at all: she speaks perfect stresses and emphasis on words my lips strain to understand; she understands only broken Mandarin pieces I struggle to transform into her language.

 

My strokes and characters splatter into ghostful faces slipping away; ink blots falling in love with the rain that has made itself an enemy of my grandfather. I write Amélie in Mandarin, though I am sure to provide French translations where I know how, because Google Translate has always done the same for me in desperate times.

 

I meet Amélie through the marines of her city on the borders of France, the same Adam’s ale that sprinkles onto my inky strokes of nostalgia. Her name is Amélie, the letters washed with the midnight drizzles of the Golden State, though I am now unsure if they are softened by the golden downpours or the rain of my own tears.