Written by 悦子yuezi
Issue Date: 2025/03/20
Note
Please note that this work is completely fictional and has no connection to my own life.
This work was originally written in Chinese, and has been drastically reshaped in its translation into English. Therefore, I would like to present it as my first attempt at creative writing in English.
Extra Reminder: English is not my first language (it's not even my first foreign language), so please excuse any spelling and grammatical errors that may occur.
An Old Photograph
「The end of summer finds me searching for happiness within reach. 」
「在夏日的尽头，我试图寻找现世的幸福。 」
When summer was nearing its close, my mother proposed meeting me. I ultimately agreed, driven by a peculiar sense that this encounter would feel alien. Two summers prior, she had moved out of our home in City A and flown to City B, trading the eternal spring of the south for the wind-whipped north. During those years, she returned to City A intermittently before finally uprooting the life she'd built there over two decades, transplanting herself permanently to the frigid north.
Once she called to ask if I'd started wearing sweaters. Standing there in my T-shirt and light jacket, I suddenly grasped the chasm between us.
She had drifted far away, like a kite that would never return, landing in an unfamiliar land of snow. Meanwhile, I remained behind, sifting through summer's remains alone.
For two years, I've replayed the fragmented images of her in my mind - discontinuous film strips, sometimes silent, sometimes with sound; sometimes yellowed, sometimes startlingly fresh. Though she passed forty long ago, in my memory she remains in her early thirties: slender, with flowing hair. Even after she cut it short years ago, I can still recall that image with a mere blink. Yet these memories persist, frozen at specific moments in time.
Once, while rummaging through old photographs, I found one taken before my birth. At twenty-something, she wore enormous round glasses, her voluminous curls cascading freely. That snapshot captures what I consider her most beautiful moment in my mental archive, though it belongs to a time before my existence - a stolen glimpse of the past that has nonetheless become my memory. The photo's yellowed edges crumble like autumn leaves, obscuring the lake behind her. It resembles a time capsule, preserving a complete image long past its expiration date.
This memory ambushed me unexpectedly at the subway entrance. Summer hadn't fully surrendered yet; my cropped jeans clung damply as ice cubes dissolved in my drink. A sudden, formless fear took root in my chest.
When the text message arrived, I knew she was leaving me - both physically and emotionally. The message contained perhaps a thousand words: her reasons for leaving, the grievances she couldn't bear, or what my father called her "flimsy excuses." All I retained was the essential truth: Mother was leaving. My body reacted first - vision blurring with unshed tears. I refused to cry before my father, fearing it would wound him. The grief felt like peeling off congealed adhesive, painful but temporary if endured stoically. My psyche, however, erected immediate defenses, spinning a thick cocoon around my heart to numb the pain. Thus the severance became mere background noise, like losing a long-worn accessory. To this day, I'm uncertain if those walls have crumbled enough to let me embrace the void.
Her absence bred defiance. I restricted her involvement; she tried prying open my defenses with money and clumsy displays of affection. Occasional breakthroughs changed little. Building islands and bridges between us, I often wonder if we ever truly shared common ground. It was then I realized I might never have known her soul.
She never revealed her innermost self. After her departure, I often pondered her adequacy as a mother. By material measures, she qualified. Does betrayal factor into maternal evaluation? Yet truth remains elusive as life's own mysteries. Initially swayed by my father's narrative of her chasing vanity and wealth, I gradually understood that derailments are rarely one person's fault.
Those hundreds of letters I discovered - were they fraudulent if love isn't absolute? Loving two people isn't betrayal, just burdensome love that bruises bystanders. I dare not expolre deeper.
She exists now as fragmented identities: wife, mother, and herself. The first two fade; the third emerges dominant. Stripped of titles, we're simply two women. I imagine our parallel existences - independent souls pursuing love and purpose, unshackled by duty.
Yet mystery persists. Her inner world remains sealed - first love's bloom, life's weathering storms, all inaccessible. I mourn our shared history as mother-daughter, now reduced to guarded friends behind mutual walls. Facing not a mother's life, but an impenetrable forty-year narrative of a woman.
Do I see her whole? Two versions coexist: the ordinary woman and the mother. Though overlapping conceptually, they're distinct in her. Temporal fragments - one eternally preserved in that yellowed photo's youthful innocence, the other blurred behind frosted glass where cropped hair marks time's passage.
I wish her happiness, yet resent the sentiment. Split between daughter and woman, I long to bifurcate through time - be both child and contemporary. From this lakeshore, I shout across decades, imagining myself as the photographer who captured that moment when lake winds tousled her curls and scattered her laughter.
How does one hold happiness within their reach? We chase answers like raindrops seeking the ocean, losing purpose mid-flight. Becoming the flood itself, we engulf newcomers even as we're consumed.
The sun sinks blood-red. In this stifling summer twilight, I wait in foreign anticipation, sweat tracing salt lines on my skin.