1:27
The phone rang —
Bright, harmless, ordinary.
I answered with a smile,
didn’t realize it would turn into
a longlasting nightmare.
Your voice —
calm. Careful.
Too careful.
And just like that,
My summer shattered.
Crushed,
Like glass under a careless heel
All my plans scattered across the floor,
Gone.
“Why can’t I go back to China!”
“Why do you always say everything at the last second?!”
The words burned in my throat.
I wanted to yell, I wanted to scream,
But anger dissolved into salt
And all that came out
was tears
followed by tears.
“It is for your future” she said, like it’s nothing,
“It will help you when you’re older”
I didn’t care,
Future?
What is a future
without a present I can survive?
A summer trapped in America,
A mouse scratching under the house,
unable to escape —
Small, furious, unheard.
No crowded dinners.
No laughter echoing off familiar walls.
No slipping into my own bed, that craves for my existence.
“I hate you!”
The words leapt out —
Wild, reckless, sharp.
My blood rushed.
My chest burned.
Salty tears rolling down my cheeks.
Then —
Silence.
The call ended.
One minute and twenty-seven seconds.
But inside me
it stretched —
long as a year.
Long as the ocean.
Long as the space
between what you call love
and what I feel as loss.
Jessie Yuan
What The Stone Knows
Death is not the opposite of life,
but its most intimate echo,
the hollow in the tree where the owl nests,
the fallen log returning its green to the moss,
the slow fade of crimson from the evening sky until
only indigo remains,
deep and complete.
To be alive is to be the trembling gold
of the last leaf in a September wind,
holding both the memory of spring and
the certainty of release.
Life is the impossible green
that pushes through cracks in urban stone,
the silent agreement between root and rain,
the breath you just took
that was once a storm over a distant ocean.
Death is the patient gardener,
turning the compost of days
to the palette of beginnings.
It is the soft grey of dawn
before color remembers itself,
the quiet between the notes
that makes the music possible.
To be alive is to stand at the river’s edge,
knowing your reflection is made of borrowed water,
that the light upon your face
is flowing away,
that every heartbeat is a conversation
with everything that has ever lived.
Death is the soil’s open hand.
Life is the seed’s stubborn secret.
One is the deep brown of acceptance,
the other the vibrant, fleeting cyan of becoming.
And when the last light leaves your eyes,
it does not vanish.
It joins the lingering warmth in the stone after sunset,
becomes part of the gentle gradient
where day meets night,
part of the landscape,
a color woven back into a tapestry so vast
your absence is only a different kind of presence,
a silence that lets the crickets sing clearer,
a space where new roots may yet dream upward.
To have lived is to have been, for a time,
a specific shade,
a unique hue never seen before,
never to be repeated.
And to die is to finally understand
how necessary it is
to return your color to the rain,
so the world may go on painting with
every possible variation of light.
Chenyu Wu