Prologue
Dear T,
I told the Sun about us, lawn clippings staining the hem of my shirt green as I sat atop the hillside we used to wander. She burns my corneas with her stare, and the embers smell a little bit of home. I am the daughter of the Sun. My body was hardened from clay, and from the crackling tongues of forest fires, my eyes were crafted from charred aspen wood.
My childhood was measured through the splintering of shillings and the discordant whistling of bombs in the air, with the loud dissonance of a bullet breaking through a rifle. My mother learns to grit her teeth through the glass she walks on, and I learn to swallow until I can no longer feel the sting of canines on my tongue. Deep within my throat lies coal – I swallowed it years ago, and while the youth has been lost to time, the petroleum grease that lines the enamel of my teeth remains.
I love with the passion of the Sun. Perhaps this is why you look at me, regret glassy in your eyes like a farmer before he kills his prized lamb, knowing the same hand he once fed her grain with will become the hand that holds a butcher’s knife.
I told the Sun about us, and she scoffed at me with the disdain of a bittered widow.
Do you know how the Sun burns?
It is the constant, mechanical process of nuclear fission. A star is made up of hydrogen, and throughout the billions of years in its life, it will gradually burn this hydrogen to convert it to helium. Physicists will call it science, the same way I will call it love; is it strange the names we give to self-destruction, knowing that in the end, our fate remains the same? I glow with the strength of the Sun so that you may bask in my warmth for a few minutes, relishing the blanket I give to your skin on a chilly day, watching our love scatter across the breaking of water as dawn gives way to morning.
But if you stare too long, your retinas will begin to smoke; if you come too close, your fingertips turn raw flesh red when you graze my skin. You will get used to the warmth of my hand in yours, just as one day, you will learn to embrace the emptiness of the air that I leave behind.
Linger in the liminal of my living room for one day longer as I pray for the heavens and gods and deities above to freeze the passing of time. I love you too much to make you stay forever, for the venom in my mouth and the burning of my skin will one day become too much to bear. I kiss you with my lips as light as dove’s wings, for I am afraid if I stay one second more, my teeth will sink and pierce.
I told the Sun about us and she gazed at me with an inexplicable distance, a deer caught in headlights knowing that by tomorrow, she will be nothing but carrion for the crows.
You and I hunger for different things. I will press my fingerprints into your skin, as if I can find a home between the indent of my thumb and your wrist; you are a faithless man clinging to the last chance he has, going against ration and reason for me to stay. You track me with the gaze of a starving lion, and there is a calculating glint in your eyes as I watch my reflection against your iris. Accepting your love is the same as swallowing another lump of coal, even as I feel it tear my esophagus apart as it squeezes and settles in my gallbladder.
You have done nothing but take – used your skeleton hands to pick out my ribs one by one, and they snap under the weight of your careless fingers. My blood will seep into my skin, and you will take that too. You take and take until I forget everything that I am, everything that I know, until the only thing I smell is the scent of your cologne and the only thing I see is the brightness of your glow.
With love,
Han Qianqian
