the in-between

Emily Liu
Emily Liu
Jul 28, 2017 · 8 min read

Sometimes, the easiest way to forgive is to forget.

I can vividly think up that piercing screech of my brain laughing at the rest of my own self. I think up this piercing scream and I imagine myself in a modern art museum. The walls are grey but the lights are just so bright, and I’m standing there examining this painting. It’s on this grand canvas slathered with oil paints of different tones of colors in different places, with the different strokes in different lengths, with different brushes in different directions. And somehow, this mess of a color scheme all adds up to what I recognize as a gruesome battle of my head versus my heart.

One is telling me to forgive, the other is telling me to forget, because both know there is no in-between. No ideal in-between. Not one without that piercing screech of my brain laughing at the rest of my self.

There is a set type of items that humans are attracted to. You know how dads generally like sprinkler systems that are self-timed and can cover an entire field. Colleges like 4.0 GPAs. Boys like blonde chicks with long legs, and Californians like kale and avocados.

My mother likes houses. My mother likes nice big pretty houses because she believes they are a sign for success. My mother likes nice big pretty houses because only when she is in ownership of a nice big pretty house will she ever let herself start living. She is so fond, no, she is so obsessed with this idea that Perfection must be achieved. And she believes that having her name signed on a paper for a nice big pretty house is one of those last deciding factors towards Perfection.

And that’s exactly what happened. From 38353 Fitzgerald Circle to 4257 Fareham Court to 1514 Magnolia Street.

This journey from circle to court to street has been my mother’s journey towards Perfection, and it has been her run away from all things bad. She chooses to show the world not her head, heart, nor her in-between, because she is constantly running, and never settling. Never in the time continuum is she anything more than just a blur. My mother never finishes anything off, and runs away from old problems into new problems, until she finds a potential ideal solution.

We have resided from dollhouse to dollhouse, filled with doll people and doll furniture. The windows are always shining and have matching curtains and shutters; pillows are perfectly placed; the tiles are perfectly symmetrical. This type of life is what society tells us Perfection is — with the backyard barbeques, the wine sipping, the holiday family vacations — and this is what my mother has brainwashed herself to believe as well.

One night, I found my mother in my room examining one of my paintings. It was this very depressing piece, telling the story of a man and a woman who just found out their son had taken his life. The two were standing within a background of colors flowing down the paper crying for them. The mother was holding onto the father with her hand clawing on suit, and the father was holding the mother on the crook of her back and clenching her golden brown hair. The hair was beautiful… Not in any other parts of the picture did I show sunlight, except reflecting off of that hair, and I had textured the paint to exaggerate every single strand and the calculated placed highlights. With his fingers woven through her hair, they were one.

“I see hope,” My mother told me. “This is definitely sad, but it’s not just any sad drawing about death, is it? This… you… this has a purpose, and it isn’t to make people sad when they see it.”

“I get it,” She said.

I hated hearing those words. I hated hearing my mother tell me she understood me. I hated that my mother understood me, because what she really meant was that I understood her.

And I hated that. I hate it because it feels like those words are the looming choking pollution to a city that could be so alive and so beautiful and so Perfect. I hate that she needs me in her life.

My mother likes me because she saw in my teenage self the ability to understand things that none of her friends, or the rest of our family, the same way as she does. She needs me with her.

Yet, I make it so hard on her to love me, which is something I understand. Of course I understand. I know I’m a hard person to love — I have an issue with it too.

I make it so goddamn hard to love me… so hard that it hurts.

People tell me that the most net beneficial way of going on with life is to always take control of things. Don’t let that bothersome thing bother you. Forget. Move on. Be smart about things. Follow your head. That’s what my mother did. She decided to forget. That’s what my entire family did. They decided to forget. When you forget, you don’t need to forgive, right?

One unforgivable thing happened at Fitzgerald Circle one night. It’s one that every one of us in this family was supposed to forget.

My mother was argueing with my father over a bunch of things: how he shouldn’t be taking my older brother out to the movies to have fun… how he was treating her mother (my grandmother) unfairly… probably one or two things on the growing stash of alcohol on this shelf in the garage…

The typical.

I think he was drunk. I hope he was drunk. My mother was crying and yelling. She cries because she wishes she loved him like she did ten years ago. Then, my father started smashing things around him. He threw plates, that my grandparents had hauled all the way from Alaska when they first came to the United States, and had broken chips of the tiled floor. Hell, he even broke a bottle of vinegar.

I remember when he pulled together all the curtains that night, and locked every door of our small house. And I remember amidst all that mayhem…

So, I live in this wonderful small city in the Bay Area of California, and I never really experienced what “bad weather” was like. I never had to hide in bathtubs for tornadoes, or seek shelter underground during hurricanes. Yet, I know that same feeling so well. The moment where the screaming around you is just so loud, it’s more than just sound waves. It every single sense — it’s the taste of bitterness, the smell of the sour fucking vinegar, the sound of the screaming and the heavy air closing in on me, the sight of blackness and inverted colors as I was shutting my eyes SO TIGHTLY to MAKE IT ALL GO AWAY, and the feeling — the physical feeling of colors, but this time bad colors, because colors are typically supposed to be beautiful and nice, but they really weren’t — of everything around me punching me. It wasn’t this sharp pain like needles all over my body, or a slap, it was just like… it was just pain. It was pain, and it was the pain of not being able to do anything.

There was screams coming from everywhere, and amidst that I remember starting to scream too.

Because my father had pinned my mother to a wall and choked her and she could hardly breathe and she just had this little chuckle like an I can’t believe this is happening chuckle, you don’t mean this chuckle, that damn nervous laughter of her’s and he asked her who she thought she was and she just gave up and was crying and crying and crying and he was holding this kitchen knife up against her throat and

And we still use that same kitchen knife.

Now, I don’t remember exactly what happened after that, or how it all ended. I just remember you gathered my two brothers and I around and we all agreed to pick up all the pieces of broken glass. We slept with the windows open that night so some of the stench of the vinegar would wash out. And we all promised to never let our grandparents know because we knew just how much it would break my grandmother’s heart if she found out about her missing china.

My mother slipped into bed with me that night. I don’t remember who started crying first, but we were both in the course of time crying. Crying, for every single reason out there.

And you told me, “Who needs him?”

“I don’t.”

“We don’t.”

“You don’t need him.”

“You have me.”

I guess I fell asleep, eventually. That’s when I first came to realize my mother needed me. From all these years, she had finally found someone who just gets her.

And I’m a pain in the ass, stressed, depressed, not doing her best girl.

Sometimes, the easiest way to forgive is to forget. When selling that house on Fitzgerald Circle, people had asked what had happened with that crack in the tile in our kitchen, and my mother always said she just dropped some heavy object. She said it with no emotion, a perfect poker face, that she probably thought she wasn’t even lying. The way my family treats it; it’s like it never even happened.

Good for them. Good for them that some stupid thing that happened ten years ago never got in the way of what this dollhouse family is now. Good for them, because I know that only because they have all forgotten have they have been able to move on. Move on to having those weekend backyard barbeques and wine sipping and holiday vacations. Good for them, because they don’t experience that same attack of panic, that sudden random 2 PM or 2 AM flashbacks of fear, and that same feeling of loss of control. Good for them for taking the utilitarian route and not letting stupid shit from a good decade ago keep them up at night.

It’s self-destructive to be inable to let things go. The battle with myself has broken me down. I just don’t have the strength, or perhaps I am too strong, to give in to either my head or my heart. Forever, I will be stuck in this in-between. I will be stuck in this in-between that society knows so well but doesn’t accept. People will always prey on me and call out this weakness of mine, while in truth, everybody has this weakness. I just don’t hide it.

I’m tired of hiding. I’m tired of hiding, like my mother. I am tired of hiding on this stupid Magnolia Street in this stupid dollhouse with it’s stupid barbeques and disgusting wine sipping and fake smiles on family vacation photos. Forever, I choose to live in this No Man’s Land and stay in my ugly colored in-between.

After all, we are human, aren’t we. We need both head and heart.

Just let us live.

    Emily Liu

    Written by

    Emily Liu

    angsty teen writer, artist, high school speech and debater | Co-founder NPO YLS and Whistleblower Magazine for Youth | Founder P.ART Lit Zine