Victoria Chang

Dear Memory

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An elegy reflects on the loss of a loved one. What form can express the loss of something you never knew but knew existed? Lands you never knew? People? Can one experience such a loss? The last definition of absence is the nonexistence or lack of. See how the of hangs there like someone about to jump off a balcony?

Maybe all of our memories are tied to the memories of others. Maybe my memories are tied to Mother’s memories, and Mother’s memories are like objects in a mirror—I see them, but I can’t ever reach them.

The cost of being so lucky is that you never learn how to acknowledge pain. Because you’re always lucky, you should always appreciate being alive, what you have. Nothing should ever be wrong, go wrong. The problem is that the space between how you really feel and luck is always shame.

Maybe our desire for the past grows after the decay of our present. When the present is more than we can hold, it turns into history.

Maybe memories are not to be forgotten but also not exactly to be remembered. Maybe that glorious, lumbering moose that stops us for a moment isn’t death after all. Maybe it’s memory, which is the exit wound of joy. 

Shame never has a loud clang. The worst part of shame is how silent it is.

That while my parents may have maintained silence as a form of survival, silence had a heartbeat, grew up, and became the third sibling.

In this moment, your imagined happiness covers my grief like an eyelid.

Saying things others want to hear is easy for an immigrant’s child because, for an immigrant’s child, language is theater. We are always performing.

I wonder what it would have been like to grow up in a family where everyone spoke the same language. The only language we had wholly in common was silence.

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