Shattered Pixels, Shared Oxygen
Dear stranger. Ancestor I never knew. Friend I never had. A kinship of only coincidence.
I build with you this altar of sentences.
What do I get to want for you but all the beautiful things. All the spectacular lived-in geometries.
For you to argue with me, fight with me. Whether it is voyeuristic to grieve you in public, a form of theft. Whether it is a duty of the mad. Duty of the alive.
For you to witness this burning hand holding your loved ones in your incense absence. Everything on fire. Everything so ready and close.
Today I will not bury my wide, wide desire inside a Sun Fresh bun, steamy and chubby like we once were. My desire for a chance (there is always a fraction of a decibel of a chance) you might hold that desire with me.
thank you for loving me thank you for loving me thank you for loving me
No, no, nothing serious like a zhongzi. That’s too much work to unravel, too many sticky fingers, I don’t want you to fuss like that. No fancy outfits.
Dear ancestor. Older sister from another set of parents. From the same set of feelings. Yuenfen without yuenfen. The ordinariness of kin.
What do I get to offer you but an epistolary from the cleaves and orange peels of disappointment. I did not meet you through an impulsive page of a diary stitched together per second with a thin green string. I met you because I saw you through the silky eye of the needle and stained my fingers with thread.
I build with you a space to rage with the rest of us, and at your bidding. Older sister, dearer.
I want to tell you about what’s happened. Neither you nor I led each other anywhere. We both knew where we were going. Here in this away it was me and then ah-yi spinning each other via torque across the aisles. We were in front of the checkout stand, the place to buy lotto—to return used tissue paper, to look indifferent, both sputtering switches of backward merry-go-rounds, halting convenience stores. Dear language. Dear stanza we can’t return to.
A howling wrench of watching us
/ dear guma / dear yieyie / dear yingying / dear ah-yi / dear jiujiu / dear poh-poh / dear queer / dear autistic / dear crazy / dear suicidal / dear psychotic / dear bipolar / dear friend /
be too afraid to leave our homes. And then when we speak, they want us to be nanoseconds, to be pencils. Ah-yi sings pink strings in the air, clouds that made them recoil. Echolalia of survival and ritual. I yell at the worker who yelled at ah-yi and dip into the ground.
dear sister / dear / dis / dear / re / dear / orientation
What do I have but this witness,
Then my voice was a sudden visor, shielding her from the bright light. Then I had this voice: sharp, electricity, cyclone. These moments—we barely acknowledge each other / we don’t acknowledge each other—are all we have.
to get her, to not get her.
But they can be enough. They would have to be for now.
An inhale of transient connections, November, cool air, 25% of the way through—I wonder what toothpicks, what knives, what keys, what medicines there are to offer one another. This dangerous makeshift bathroom of dreaming what you couldn’t have. Dear friend among friends.
I don’t want you to be alone. I become only five when I say this, hands barely holding chopstick, wanting pebbles, wanting the plastic peach, drawing a picture of you. Crayon. Wallpaper. Messy. Dear playmate. don’t want to be alone
I know, deep down, there is an accounting to be done. There are eyes I cannot look at. And yet I choose yours. Dear fellow procrastinator, how have you been?
***
Solidarity between the living and dead does not emerge fully sprung from the world’s perception of shared experiences and affiliations. Such solidarity must instead be an intentional conversation rooted in respect. Grief is rooted in respect, or it is not grief. Grief cannot be taken, possessed, whitewashed, or cleaned of the gnarly unfiltered mildew television dust between skin and walls. This eulogy will always be problematic, unspeakable in its tenuous, strained connection, never attached to a name.
You might otherwise say:
Yes,
diaspora
gender
madness
sensation
shared cultural roots,
maybe. But
no. No time.
Spines of textbooks make some deaths sensation and others static. In writing you, I grab hold of the railings of in-between, the soft arm of unknowing. You can ask me to leave. To leave you alone, to undisturb you. And I will heed. I will pry myself way.
What would it mean for the living to atone for our callousness, our greed? To offer something as remedy for the way our noses grazed your throat, tricked you so you can no longer speak. We can only ask, again and again, if we have permission to listen to you now. I can only ask you, without hunger, without whim, again and again.
…I know, it wasn’t really my responsibility. But I still wish I could have known how. I wish I could have had what it takes. I wish, y’know? You don’t have to forgive or shun me. That’s too much to ask of a stranger. I am sitting here quietly on the grass, in the rain, hearing the clouds pass and crow chatter. The sky facing us is rainstorm that looks back on the summers of fires. Burnt palm of god. The other side is refraction, a partition, a way to fold all that we have forgotten, away. A way.
Maybe all we can really do is just hang out and sit. Here, want to see what I got you? It’s still hot.
To communion with those no longer here and to ask them to rage, grieve, witness, and heal with us means that we can never forget their presence in the room. It means asking the room to grow to hold them with us. Accommodating the dead is disability justice, too. It means asking us why we built a room that only gets smaller and smaller. It means a poetics of altars: an altering of clause and unweathering of causation so that someone else might sit comfortably. It means a sense of humility toward these lapses in time. What would it mean for us to listen to these other audiences, these other speakers, to trace our fingers across the ridges of silence? What do we ask of absence when we breathe beside her our elemental rage, joy, and sadness?
To extend our hand—subject to the air, our ill health, the way veins trap toxins and breadcrumbs—to those who did not see the world change the way we have feels almost heartlessly cruel. I might forget. I might doubt. Are you really with us? Do you want to be? Oh, how everything has become worse, especially, dear friend, without you. Oh, the books you could have read. Oh, how desperate this voice is, how dusty.
But maybe it is crueler to pretend that you are really gone, to pretend that we are no longer accountable to you in your absence. To pretend you are not in the same room when I hold my own hand. I accept whatever answers you have for me. Even if, in this speaking, wailing, unknotting, you reject me. Call out my hypocrisy. Laugh at the way I burrow my head into my chest.
I won’t be deferential. You have been here in the room, eavesdropping. I adore this cheekiness; I want to laugh with you. Through death and the violence of perception you met me and are meeting me. We are having this conversation, finally, and I am grateful. Large hard jewel between the palm of lifelines and love-lines. You respond.
Language cannot intercept or surveil this text message. Letters refuse to corrode the madness of grief. The connection sputters. You receive it. I flip the coin and ask if you have eaten. I sip on this cup of water. Dearest dreamer.
***
I build with you this balm, all the way down, up, sideways, everywhere, gone.
Jane Shi is a poet, writer, and organizer living on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish), and səlil̓ilw̓ətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples. Her debut poetry collection is echolalia echolalia (Brick Books, 2024). She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated. Photo by Joy Gyamfi.
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