mother deerest

My headphones successfully block all the construction noise of Washington Heights outside, but not the voices living in my head. They’re a chorus of songs I’ve never heard before in languages I don’t speak. They speak of people whose names are foreign to me, perhaps picked out of random pages from Nai Nai’s old telephone book. They show me stories of rickshaws and markets open only on Sundays and laughter shared over Chinese New Year meals.

These voices grow too loud, a deafening cacophony that renders me paralyzed. When they do, the accompanying images aren’t the sepia-tinted, nostalgia-infused family album pictures of a warm dinner table or a newborn baby’s first time coming home. It’s black-and-white and marred with static lines, haphazard and crackling, transporting me into a world that exists only in my head, that feels too real to be plain imagination. Invisible monsters gnaw on my emotions and turn me into a hollow person until it chooses to subside. They always come with a sharp stab in my stomach. Always freaks my boyfriend out whenever I petrify and stop blinking for a couple seconds.

These horrendous horrors started nearly a year ago, becoming wilder as I’m nearing my twenty-eighth birthday on the next sunrise. Every day they come and go whenever they want, oftentimes as a rude awakening in the middle of my sleep. Midnights are filled with banshee screeches and stabbing pain under the skin of my stomach. Under those circumstances, there’s only one thing I could do: grab my tin of graphite chalks and art paper. Moonlight illuminates my tiny desk and guides my fingers as the images pounce out of my head and spill onto the sheets. No one believes me when I say I’m not an artist, telling me the sketches strung up around this corner of our small brownstone beg to differ. People call me ridiculous when I say my hands take a life of its own once my fingers are wrapped around those chalks. I never mean it as a metaphor.

Pushing off my desk, I pull off my headphones and gaze at the hand-drawn enigmas strewn across the walls, as if watching me. Some are fantastical and dark. Like my most recent, where the black graphite shrouds the paper like dense plumes of smoke. But jagged tendrils make it unmistakably recognizable as fire. Flames shoot upward, licking up fourteen finless koi. Or this one, an emerald deer without its front legs prancing among tall wild grass next to two headless tigers conjoined by their rears submerged halfway in black water.

Others are more lifelike—a busy farmer’s market, a congested intersection, or a warung with its curtains drawn. But there’s always an unsettling aura emanating from the disorderly lines of these realistic drawings. The market stalls are empty, cars lie overturned across the busy streets, and a broken plank obstructs the only entrance of the warung.

None of these are the Philly streets I grew up on; I recognize them as Jakarta from the pictures Papa showed me, where he and Mama came from. The city where Papa’s favorite nasi goreng was, where Mama gave birth to me. The city that rises the same time the sun does but doesn’t sleep when the moon is out. That bustles with life and burning passion.

The city where Mama’s soul lives on even though her body doesn’t.

Who knows her even though her child doesn’t, because the city killed her first in the wake of its darkest moment for our people.

Continue reading on HaluHalo Journal, originally published 2023.