A Letter to Her
Helen Liu
Dear grandma, Some days you are a feather floating in the breeze. A giddy smile lifts your wrinkled cheeks, soft chuckles fall from your lips, a childish light brightens your eyes. The smallest things amuse you: a brightly colored flyer in the mail, the rhythmic clicking of a pen, the pale little succulent placed in your room. The house is like your own little wonderland, filled with tiny, endless treasures that delight you to no end. On these days I will lift my head from my laptop to find you turning some small trinket in your hand, grinning to yourself and murmuring words I cannot decipher. Part of me is relieved that you are happy and unburdened, relieved that the shadowy worries that plague your mind have loosened their hold, if only for a little while. Another part of me cannot help but pity. Pity that someone who’s been through eighty-seven years of hardship after hardship is, in the end, reduced to playing with buttons like a five year old child; that someone so strong (you must’ve been) now seems so small. On these days you point to a peppercorn in the dish we just ate and ask if it’s some sort of bug; on these days you call us over to look at your newspapers, saying you saw us in its blackand-white pictures. You are enraptured by a clueless bliss, a sweetscented fog, your mundane surroundings warped into a delightful utopia. I am not mature enough; I truly do not know if I am happier or sorrier for you. And I am not sure why, but neither of those emotions feel right. Other days you are a branch trembling in the wind. You wander uneasily from room to room, brow creased and hands fidgeting, feet shuffling slow and unsure. Every five minutes you ask me where my father, your son, is; every five minutes I answer 14
