Miniature

• One is returning to the ruins of its own kind. 

(dedicated to Ms. Chou and the high school campus that has been torn down)

The girl next to Renn started to laugh; slowly toward crescendo their seat batch trembled in the turbulence of alien amusement. Renn turned to Ots, paused shortly and asked about his holiday plans. Routines were listed in a light tone. Christmas with family. New Year’s Eve with friends. Renn found herself grinning, wordless, as the theater sconce dimmed and the room awaited the film, the perfect distraction to project them upon a tilted plateau crisscrossed by flat exchanges of silence. Transitional moments as such divide a continuous period of life into sheer units of a narrative, something Renn manufactured and re-coordinated until a certain threshold of transition as she remembered seemed no longer valid. Objects became tilted when Renn thought of homecoming, or the reference system became tilted. Either way she would have to stare at a self through curious angles estranged from who she customarily was; or who she really was, Renn speculated. Going on a movie date with Ots was one of those decisions she recently learned to improvise, trivial yet twisted, designed as an escape from indolence and therefore perfunctory, yet operationalized with some hope for a change. They didn’t talk during the film, and parted ways soon afterward.

Remembering is instinctive for someone who regrets often. Getting back in touch with old friends felt like an autopsy to explain the broken corpse of a dead child, bit by bit yielded from one’s signature awkwardness in adolescence. From the dust of reunion plans Renn knew she was near home. Not a single zephyr of thought. Not a single question. Her mind was stuffed with the chat off the record with a source she almost failed to keep in touch with. She started packing for the home trip two days ago, and the day before she left the spare keys with a trustable colleague who wouldn’t sneak into her mess. Constant eye contact signals trustability; constant talking signals the opposite. A blunt rejection signals trustability; an equivocal pledge signals the opposite. She thought about the keys, an empty bedroom and the colleague’s brief note “your apartment is safe with me” as the plane slowly taxied toward the terminal. 

Now what? Asked the source before they had to wrap up the evening. Renn carried forward the rephrased question one last time, inured and undisturbed. The source, affluent in chicanery, handled the interview with some sort of prosaic confidence, still unwilling to repudiate factual errors on the webpage. The editor was perspicacious enough to redirect their attention to other threads of the story, and in that tea break, Renn was teased innocuously that her “indifferent look was intimidating sometimes” by a colleague who she had barely, had close contact with. That question then popped out like a knee-jerk. Now what.

A casual commentary is worth a million pondering. Renn pictured her indifferent look while swiping off backstage apps and joining the queue along the aisle. Ones with cascade feed inviting pulls to refresh, ones with unread and muted messages, pinned emails and time-sensitive action-needed calls, auto-replies and newsletters, then the one with new-match confetti from a guy who commented “cool headgear” under her profile and she stopped there, as if to rebel against the itching comment of her indifference she replied, hi, has anyone told you that you look like Nathan Fielder. That was Ots, their contact an incidental product of Renn’s annoyance of being misinterpreted and Ots’ innocent interest in this stranger, which Renn thought was a bit unfair, so she swiped off the chat right after her reply. The last window left was her own notes. For two years she had been noting down fleeting flashbacks to start an email thread with Elean, a friend from high school, so the friendship could hang in there maybe a bit longer through miniature sparkling constituents of a shared history. A history soon to be obliviated. Renn remembered as a kid she used to mark the start and the end of a stroke with dots. Then she would connect those dots with solid lines, creating characters with swollen joints and abrupt ends. There, calligraphy assignments could be a puzzle-like dotting game. Her father would rip up her notebook and demand a decent rework of those assignments, definitely not in an entertaining manner. The home trip is another rework too late to be submitted, solely for the sake of discipline so she would understand once more that the labor of rebellion pays off when the disciplinary coerce arrives.

There were other horrible tricks I was horribly good at. Renn settled at the table while typing the message to Ots, two days after their first exchange at the airport, followed by a flat and lumpless chat which Renn was too skillful to enjoy. Films. Poems. Hikes. Concerts and recent exhibits in town. Secret cafés. Things Renn used to relax her toes of identities on but at that point no more than some degraded exoskeleton, crushed and dispersed around a vast, distant edge. They went on for a while until Renn noticed Ots pushing further into politics, sometimes into her past, either way with foreseen blocks of judgmental cues. She followed the lead and generously shared more till both were satiated with their perfect alignment on those issues, to Renn a plain case of homophily but to Ots, a visible achievement, so he suggested meeting up for a coffee. Renn said she’s currently out of town. When will you be back? Before the holidays if there’s nothing much to be fixed. They went on talking about their jobs. Their skillsets and the way people fit into these functional segments of various classes, feeling entitled or frustrated as they resolve themselves into a dying generation. Speaking of dying, Renn interrupted, there was this fake-death game where my cousin and I would take turns to perform the process of dying, the other kneeling aside watching. All staged in the living room of our gran’s. The noise of parents and relatives from the other room made our performance even more grotesque. The horrible trick of renouncing a core is what I’ve learned these years. What for? Ots didn’t take her seriously. It’s also why I work in the media, where you don’t need an ego to report those of others. Renn didn’t take the question either. Elean appeared out of nowhere in a scarlet pullover. I wish professionalizing confessions was not one of them. Ots replied instantly. Renn watched the screen light up and out and imagined it as a candle she mentally blew off. She waved at Elean.

Elean looked as good as ever, vibrant, cognizant of people and reassured about herself. Orien should arrive by now, Elean said. I haven’t met him for years. Renn wanted to finish the expresso. What’s he working on lately? An office job nine-to-five in town. We barely chatted either. One day he texted me that he was moving back here. He probably knew that I would be around for a while so we met and went for a drink. Renn didn’t know what to ask. Not quite aligns with what I’d pictured about him but fair enough, we weren’t really acquainted I suppose. Renn said. Nothing much to reveal from that drink. Elean asserted. But I see how things would unfold. Those gorgeous expressions on her face polished the statements indeed. He would pitch about the most progressive theories and settle into a conservative route earlier than both of us. What’s wrong with a conservative route? Renn inquired and laughed with subtle truculence. Were this in high school she would not end her questioning right there. She would have to know what else they have against conservatives apart from their brutal intuition. Elean would exaggeratedly palm her forehead. Intuition is good enough. Positioning oneself ideologically isn’t a more rational calculation than siding with a sports team. I didn’t say it’s a calculation. I don’t like it simply because my parents live like this, and they’re miserable. That would come out of Renn. As for Elean - We’re all miserable, but in an undignified way.

Orien was a nice friend whom Renn would trust with her keys. How invariably late the key man was then, both girls having to stare at the traffic, the conversation being paused, someone secretly picturing the conservative route. Get married and sucked into a family. Sustain and pass along the sophistication to the young. Subscribe to mineral supplements that prevent osteoporosis. Cope with some amount of pain. The exquisite type of pain that can be soothed by a clocking therapist, the only amiable source of comfort nowadays who would have one’s righteous choice validated and the vacuous ramification justified. Disgrace would be swallowed. The shame of ostracism would be cleaned. The ephemeral moment of sorrow would be decorational for an after-party converse. Now what? Here comes that question again, Renn thought. Enough about Orien. How’re you doing? Renn unpaused. On that night we went out drinking I broke up with my ex-girlfriend, Elean poked around her backpack, you know what happened since then. Renn’s phone lit up. Another message from Ots. An image. Nothing to preview. Shall we call him? I already am. Elean straightened up holding her phone with the other hand massaging her scalenes, slightly frowning. 

A beautiful human being. That was the phrase top on mind when Elean first met Orien eight years ago. Elean’s also very pretty but she’s more pronounced in terms of her oddness. A prime number, unbreakable yet alone; refusing to club together through casual factorization of social norms. Orien was at the other extreme too human to be reduced into abstraction; the beauty of his kind came with all other agreeable facets of his character–never too fervid nor too inexorable, conveniently attentive and considerate, pliable to views from his opinionated friends but affirmed about his core self–such that Elean would feel slightly insulted, not by him but by herself now suddenly a conciliatory mediator softly whispering from inside “let’s make an ersatz out of this”. Elean resented the immutable gap, but she liked talking to Orien and risking what she didn’t know was a confluent stream of awareness. Awareness of who she was before and of what her words could be beyond speeches among friends. They met at a birthday party and started talking to each other. The first exchange of keywords was pivotal–either you share the context or you don’t–Elean couldn’t remember what context she thought they shared, but she knew then there was a deviation, a miniature one to be followed by a lot more. When they made fun of Heine that “Lotus Flower” was no more than a faint illusion poetized by antiquated romanticists, Elean pretended to be one of those progressive minds far ahead of what her peers were just about to pick up. She was in fact, not ahead nor behind, merely deviated from the majority. She grew up slowly understanding how hard yet possible it was to discard the preference for a fashionable peculiarity, so she could be at peace with the beauty, the oddness, or whatever anti-romanticism perplex she was into. Orien didn’t answer her call and finally appeared about an hour later with a fruity-scented candle kit. The momentary shock on his face seamlessly transited into a sophisticated expression that Elean could not read. There they are, on their way to visit Ms. Aydin, their literature teacher from high school.

Renn remembered being decisive about her boundaries, and being intolerant of even just minimal ambiguity. There wouldn’t be a loose end in conversations, and she would team up with Elean getting down to the very bottom of every inquiry. Her knowing Elean started from a delicate equilibrium where both took the other as a rival rare to find, and they piqued themselves on being a pair of alternatives coinciding in the way they thought, but diverging in the way they behaved, conjugated. Renn wasn’t interested in their panel on romanticism. She once broke in and contended that there were plenty of other things to work on apart from reproducing a contemporary discourse, and discourses were gran’s pork plates, some undone and some burnt already. It became clear later that the opposition between Orien and Elean wasn’t as perfect as the one between Orien and Renn, one universally approachable and the other completely self-absorbed. Elean tried to dip in both and she was happy until it was too obvious an unzippable pack. Are you still writing? Ms. Aydin served her young guests water and fresh bagels. Barely. Freelancing makes writing impossible. Renn passed the red mug to Elean. Renn noticed the nice weather while Elean was at a loss for how embarrassingly wordless the three of them were, the three who used to write endlessly about their impetuous existential rants and yet had grown to be some discrete dumb objects, solely existing. Breakups cost little mental energy if Renn was clear about the code of conduct and if she had to. The same technique she applied in writing. Use precise language instead of rhetoric. Act rather than interpret. Count on the force of expulsion. What’s costly was coping with the aftermath of a void, reemerging from the mundanity she was uncomfortable with. I wish we had outcried more when we had the privilege. Orien added from the other end of the table. Renn wondered how Elean handled her breakups, and she wouldn’t ask. A cracked friendship still counts, she thought. One walks away until it’s far enough to make a scanning comparison of how differently things work out for them. What does a shared context even mean among the three of them? Writing was effortless when Renn thought she had the bird’s-eys view–or at least she aspired to frame one that could connect isolated dots in hindsight–until she realized she was surrounded only by things uncertain. How could one write when there’s a blob of everything?

Renn would gaze outward from a window when she needed a break from the stillness inside. It’s a normal cloudy day with periodic sunlight. But there was no window to gaze out of during the movie with Ots. The movie was about a struggling mother who tried and failed and tried again to move away from her husband. The demand for motherhood from this family was unbearable for this young lady. “To live is to be eaten by her own wrath”, she described those demands as “imperious placement for birthing people”. Yes, “birthing people” rather than “pregnant women” because she was liberal enough to welcome every crowd of minorities, but not faithful enough to unconditionally hold onto a grounded unit. The mother walked out of the frame after she gave birth to her second kid, and the aerial shot began to track the course of a random passenger, from the remote suburban hospital to a dinner table with a congregation of happy people, cheering and toasting, and the offscreen narrator going: “with erroneous confidence I had been telling you that I fell in love because of that moment, which after all these years turned out to be an artificial milestone, a backward solicitation depending on in what context you would like to interpret it… part of my maneuver of your so-called SENTIMENTAL EDUCATION (and give me a fucking break please Flaubert) was attributed to this undebatable premise that one has to love another for some reason, such that we’d be able to prove, inductively, that there is a core within every act, every syllable–every mediating component between us. But what if there isn’t?”

Such a gimmick of romanticism in disguise. Renn looked aside and saw the face of Ots being lit up by the vivid closing scene. Ots thought the story was a cliché of contemporary feminism striving again and again for some form of freedom that women cannot afford yet. Men cannot afford that either. He added. The only shift was to reclaim the right of pretending. Renn typed that line and replaced the period with a parenthesized question mark. Then she removed the parenthesis and left a naked question mark even though she was not asking. Renn pocketed her phone and didn’t read any message that night. On the tram back to her apartment, Renn couldn’t move her eyes away from a baby’s tiny hands, those floral fresh fingertips dangling and swinging in the cold air, as the tram snaked into a crowded residential area. Floods of people in. A few drops out. The rest fenced around the baby’s unbitten nails and cornless palms. Sitting aside, she thought, what about being this bruiseless kid from now on? What would happen after all when such integration into a forged normality exfoliates the protective shell from her, now a monolayer unformatted grown-up who Elean would no longer befriend, and eventually, dare not to recognize?

Orien seemed to be the same old friend again when Renn agreed to “start something else aside from a continuing state of despondency”, as she wrote privately the night three of them concluded a month-long cold war before the graduation. No one should be taking the responsibility, Elean argued, and the aim was not to pronounce a condescending sentence to free the others from a dogmatic hunt for certitude. Certitude of what? Orien asked. Renn’s gaze was fixed on the nutrition facts of light eggnog. Total fat, nine grams. Saturated fat, five grams. Trans fat, zero gram. Cholesterol, sixty-five milligrams. Sodium, seventy milligrams. Total carbohydrate, twenty grams. Total sugars, twenty grams. As if those were crucial exhibits Renn read aloud. Of the de facto policy that we do not ask for a return. That thought slid through her mind, masked in an equivalently loud thought of terror, that an insect, the infant of an insect, every miniature piece of negligible something ready to be deleted by an effortless snap, also had a face as she did. Not necessarily with humanoid facial features but able to leave a stare. An expression of sheer arrogance and forgiveness delivered to whoever leaned close enough, investigating the object to be desired and destroyed. At that very moment, Renn felt the stare from that miniature face. She looked at Orien and Elean, if only she could blink-photo this moment so there would be a constant thereafter which she would not approach or get away from. She had to ask what Orien would fill in. Certitude of a response. Orien said. That’s nice. Renn said. They moved to the cashier with drinks full-armed next to a stroller equipped with a young couple, the belt soon occupied by a parading matrix of groceries. Yogurt boxes compartmented with jam, sliced gouda, interfold paper towels, dewing broccoli wrapped in plastic films, pre-seasoned t-bones, sushi gift basket, all marching toward the check-out end where a young man was, peacefully and neutrally, searching for his wallet all over his pockets attached. 

That was one of those days. Renn texted Ots. I wasn’t sure what he meant or what I agreed on, but there came the moment of prophecy that we’d soon part ways. A self-fulfilling one. Ots wrote. The oven dinged and Ms. Aydin stood up to fetch puffs and apricot tarts. Renn saw the table being temporality stacked by three disarranged Tetris blocks. Elean being the I-shape stick best for a deep empty column but excessively long for an expanse. Orien, a nice square box, and herself, the parallelogram one with an undesirable orientation. Back in high school Ms. Aydin organized a few rounds of extracurricular debates where these three competitive minds would not make a team. One polarizing prompt was “render good for evil or render evil for evil”. Renn was alone with a large crowd on the tit-for-tat team and she knew it wasn’t the noble one to go with. But there was something more important than adhering to the high ground. Elean didn’t want to share the voice with Renn either, yet neither of them had the time to prepare a good enough argument for the mental sovereignty they hadn’t yet claimed. Elean went for the divine choice that she knew would be unattainable except in this debate, but she didn’t mind aiming for a certain extreme and hypothesizing in fantasies, or the privilege of middle-class high schoolers. Orien, the well-prepared pupil with abundant arguments of why altruism is a “sound alternative” in economics and that people should take it out of the pure moral context, impressed the class with his maverick proposition and a seemingly neutral positioning. The debate was concluded with homemade pastries from Ms. Aydin, who read and graded every piece of their writings, learned the pivoting ideologies of those soon-to-be adults, and understood how swiftly the freshness of a young belief would wear out. Let’s watch the film before Christmas. Renn messaged Ots, leaned forward for one more tart and took tiny bites while chewing on those debates, the noise, the sweetness of unresolved battles that she thought were a rebellion.