Memories Feel Like Circles
The first circle I remember vividly was orange.
It was the nights when I was a toddler of five, my tiny hands that scribbled on walls and pulled my mother’s long hair, holding a thin story book. Me and my mother would lie down on the bed laid on the floor, a blanket covering my chest in the Mumbai summers, and she’d read for me. My arms, fair without the blemish of the sun and small like the branches of a young tree, around her shifting waist; once even feeling the weight of my growing sister under her belly. The first circle was the orange-coloured chip that the protagonist, Tanu shared and ate. The second was a black orbit soaring across the yellow walls as my mother drove a brush into the heart of it; creating the solar system for me to stare and be mesmerized by. Those are circles I remember vividly.
Reading Ocean Vuong’s ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’ against the rainy storms of my grandmother’s balcony made me feel like a circle. The letters of Little Dog to his mother: the way she made his mouth blaze under the weight of her palms. The way he felt the sinews of her muscles shifting underneath his tender fingers as she pushed soft relaxation out of her mouth after a tiring day. The way she looked at her customers at the nail-salon and cursed in Vietnamese as a lady told her about her horse dying. ‘I was about to bring flowers to her daughter’s grave!’ she lashed out in incredulousness. And of course, the way she would re-paint the bike of her son after it was scratched badly with her pink nail-polish.
“They perch among us, on windowsills and chain-link fences, clotheslines still blurred from the just-hung weight of clothes, the hood of a faded blue Chevy, their wings folding slowly, as if being put away, before snapping once, into flight. It only takes a single night of frost to kill off a generation. To live then, is a matter of time.”
The monarch butterflies that migrate remind me of Little Dog’s mother’s own story. The picture of a seventeen-year-old girl running away from her marriage and into the town of Saigon in war-torn Vietnam; where she found both her baby growing within and her love, an American soldier. Her name was Lan, meaning orchid in Vietnamese; and Little Dog’s mother, Rose. The image of a woman on the crossroad of a dirty street, a blue scarf around herself and her baby; cradling her close and giving each other warmth is vivid. For a moment, they’re monarchs of the wind; not in the midst of the fire of war that tears families and nations apart, they’re just a mother and daughter.
“Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not the winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fire-proof.”
There was his grandmother’s memories that held him firmly too. The picture of Lan snoring deeply on the floor and not being awakened by any single sound around her. Little Dog and Lan drinking jasmine tea with rice together (“it tasted the way you’d imagine mashed flowers would taste: bitter and dry, with a bright, sweet aftertaste.”). Lan holding her daughter, Rose as she frantically knocked and cursed at the door of where her sister’s former boyfriend would live; cajoling her, pleading her to come back into the car. Lan, whose grey hairs Little Dog would have to remove with a tweezer, tiny strands falling all over the wooden floor of their house. Lan, whose ashes are now scattered on the grounds of Saigon as dancers in drag bring in the happiness for the last time.
(“In Saigon, the sound of music and children playing this late in the night is a sign of death: or rather, a sign of a community attempting to heal. Drag queens are unicorns. Unicorns stamping on a graveyard.”)
“Help me, Little Dog.” She pressed my hands to her chest. “Help me stay young, get this snow off my life: get it all off my life.” […] The room filled and refilled with our voices as the snow fell from her head, the hardwood around my knees whitening as the past unfolded around us.
And there was the tobacco fields where Little Dog worked, and Trevor; the very first time love touched his teenage heart. Two teenagers filled with the words out of society’s mouth; hate for themselves and love for themselves clouding their minds and beds. Little Dog danced in his mother’s dress as a child, and as a lover in front of Trevor; their hands and lips meeting unmistakably towards themselves. They came undone in each other’s arms and each other’s skins; blood-warm, fair skin to softened, melting milk chocolate. They burned in love; they burned in denial; they burned in acceptance; they burned in the sheer intensity and velocity that was the body and the desire to love, be loved and feel loved.
“Did you ever feel colored-in when a boy found you with his mouth? What if the body, at its best, is only longing for body? The blood racing to the heart only to be sent back out, filling the routes, the once empty channels, the miles it takes to take us toward each other. Why did I feel more myself while reaching for him, my hand midair, than I did having touched him?”
Yes, the entirety of the book, the characters, Ocean’s writing: all feel like different circles. The circle of Little Dog’s eyes as he witnesses the tulips becoming holy under the morning lights. The circle of the heroin-laced fentanyl pills that took Trevor’s life. The circle reflection of the river moon where Trevor and Little Dog absolved and cleansed their love. The circle of his eyes as he loomed over the other, eyes tender and caressing his thin form. The circle of his mother’s blown eyes as she screamed and became calm under her mother’s soft voice. The circle of Lan’s mouth as she uttered continual stories of war and Vietnam. The circle of Little Dog’s eyes as he wore his mother’s white dress and rode on his tiny bike. The circle of Rose’s mouth as she relaxed under her mother’s touch. The circle of a baby’s mouth in a bar crying loudly as she sees soldiers cutting a monkey’s brain open as it writhed below their marauding fingers and weapons. The circle of English and Vietnamese and Hartford and Saigon and America and Vietnam and mothers and sons and daughter and fathers.
After all, this world: our earth where we are briefly gorgeous, is also a circle.
