broken pens

twenty, chinese, queer. a place for my poetry.

[grey-twilight]

it’s the little things, you know. whenever i went to therapy i always entered the hospital alone. maybe some part of me liked the privacy, but my mom never even asked if i wanted her to wait in there with me. just dropped me at the entrance and drove off.

when you’re stripped down to the bone and emerge to a waiting room of unknown faces, something inside you breaks a little. can you want something and not want it at the same time?

[grey-twilight]

when i was thirteen years old, my friends called me “mom” for the first time.

it was a joke. light-hearted. something to call me in class to make me laugh, something to playfully call me in the middle of faux-arguments so that i would walk over and break them up and good-naturedly say “now now, kids.”

for my sixteenth birthday, my friends bought me a mug that said “best mom ever”.

(my best friend, whose birthday party i shared, got the counterpart, “best dad ever”. i always wondered if that meant something.)

i still use it, today. the printed heart has since rubbed off but the mug is still the same sturdy light blue porcelain as it was the day i got it.

six months after my nineteenth birthday, i am a legal adult. i am in university.

i don’t know what i’m doing.

one of my friends is in trouble. they asked me for help.

too long have I been selfish. i may never have kids of my own, but i will live up to the promise i made at age thirteen.

[grey-twilight]

i’m sorry.

i am so tired.

i don’t know how to fix this.

but i have to. for your sake, if not mine.

i am so tired.

[grey-twilight]

how to platonically tell someone that you would die for them, no literally, they are such an important person in your life that it makes your chest ache but you don’t know how to convey that beyond a heart emoji and a desperate need to reach through the screen and hug them close

[grey-twilight]

forgiveness is a weird thing.

i forgave you long ago. it was hard, at times, but i did it.

did you ever forgive yourself?

did you ever know there was anything that needed forgiving?

[grey-twilight]

sometimes the distance between us feels insurmountable.

sometimes i don’t know what to do.

always i wish i tried harder. 

i don’t want “i love you” to become an empty word. 

[grey-twilight]

i love you so much.

i just want you to be safe.

[grey-twilight]

do not be so hard on your past self.

do not scream and shout and strike her. do not bemoan her mistakes. do not hate her. she already does enough of that to herself.

do not be impatient with her as she figures things out. as she defends the wrong things, regurgitates old lies that some part of her already knows are wrong -- just wait. this is not to say that you ignore her mistakes -- but allow yourself to forgive her. she was mistaken. she was trying. she was doing the best she could with what little she had. 

she is young and foolish, sometimes infuriating, and she is bowed deep beneath a burden that she has not yet learnt to carry. that she has not yet learnt to recognize. she is in pain, even if she does not know it. do not scoff at her ignorance. help her carry that weight, and ask for nothing in return.

do not kick her when she is down. she may be curled on the carpet with her hands over her ears repeating the old, cruel lies she has been taught, but resist the urge to do further harm. she is already hurting herself enough for the both of you.

do not be so hard on your past self. instead, wrap an arm around her skinny shoulders and pull her close. smooth back her hair and wipe the tears off her cheeks and tell her it’s going to be okay. because in the end, you are here, after all.

[grey-twilight]

later, at my mother’s request,

i’ll pack a dress, drab and grey.

but then at night, with none to see,

off go the skirts

and on goes the collared shirt

and, despite the tight tie around my neck,

i have never before breathed so freely.

m.j.z.

[grey-twilight]

i run a hand down my breasts caress the soft curve of my body.

who first saw my body and called it “girl” deemed it “she” forced it into “ladylike” clothes and shaped my identity around it ?

i cannot help but wonder what i would have called myself had i never been forced  into the category of “girl”. 

                  (would i have been happier?)

m. j. z. questioning

[grey-twilight]

i long, deeply and wistfully, to write about what I went through, however impossible it seems. why? i'm still not sure. catharsis, closure? some twisted bid for attention, as the uglier parts of my mind suggest? perhaps for a tangible record, written when i am mostly clear-headed, that what happened to me in those days was real. that I didn't imagine it, that it wasn't an act, that it really, truly happened to me. i don't know who i'm trying to prove it to. maybe i'm only trying to prove it to myself.

m. j. z. who am i

[grey-twilight]

many, many years later, i would go to france. i would stand at the foot of the notre-dame de paris and stare up in awe at the intricately carved figures and flowers, weaving lifelike up the looming stone walls. i would hear the bells toll, once, twice, three times, like a massive heartbeat. i would enter the doors into the dim gloom, broken only by the sunlight filtered through vibrant stained glass. i have never before seen such glass as this. the colours are innumerable. the church is too big and i am too small, humbled at the threshold of this mighty house of God. 

m. j. z. do you hear me

[grey-twilight]

foreign is a word that’s hard and soft at once. it’s a prickle on the tongue like the spices you never learned how to withstand.

(you were stuck in a restaurant in xi’an once where bland noodles were something only foreigners ate, and you had to choke down a bowl full of fiery seasoning and try not to throw it up on the sidewalk outside.)

foreign is a lisping stumble. it’s what your mother calls your chinese accent, too high and too strained with thick, clumsy tongue, flubbing sibilants and intonation until you have to question whether you can even pronounce your own name.

(chinese characters are foreign to you. the english words you handle so easily fall to pieces when you try to translate.)

foreign is green with envy, green like the snake of your asian zodiac that always fit you better than your western one.

foreign is black and white piano keys, fingers fumbling, too slow, given up by eighth grade while all your other chinese friends play on.

foreign is a white man asking, “how long have you lived in canada? your english is so good!”

(you are a writer, a lover of letters, mispronouncing all the words in your english novels because your parents have never said them aloud.)

(you don’t tell him this, and only say you were born in toronto.)

m. j. z. foreign

[grey-twilight]

weijia is a name that fits yet doesn’t you’ve never really known what it means and in chinese characters the words are ink blots, like the brushstrokes on that scroll of chinese calligraphy that you never learnt how to read.

weijia is a name your laozu gave you, but it’s not the name on your birth certificate (that one’s in roman letters) you’ve never learnt to write it and you fear that once your parents and their generation are gone that your name will disappear with them.

weijia is a name from your father’s family, but it breaks tradition rupturing the long line of orderly names from generations past, stretching back forever like how you are born across the world from the homeland and the first word you learn to write is in english, not chinese.

m. j. z. what’s in a name