By Gabrielle Wincherhern
Winner of The Aetna Creative Nonfiction Award
On some level, you always thought love was going to be the thing that saved you.
Maybe it started with the fairy tales, the movies. The Princess and the Pauper. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Barbie and the Diamond Castle. The Princess and the Frog. Love was the healer. Love was the prize. Love was the hero, and you were hungry for salvation.
And for the first few years of your life, that hero was your grandma.
Laolao, you call her. Your mother’s mother. You have a memory of your parents leaving the house for a long time, setting you three kids in front of the TV, and coming back after dark with her. She has short gray hair cut like a boy’s and wrinkled, coppery skin, and at first, you’re wary of her. But it doesn’t take you long to warm up to her. She can’t quite pronounce your sister’s and brother’s names, and your name you don’t even remember her saying at all—she only calls you xiao san—“small three”—because you’re the youngest of three children. She can’t read—she stopped going to school when she was seven, something you won’t learn for many years.
But there is so much she can do. She cooks for the six of you—your siblings and your parents and her. She sweeps. She takes care of the garden. She gets your older brother and sister on to the elementary school bus. She takes walks with you and sits with you on the porch swing on the days you don’t go to preschool. She jokes about you and your sister snoring. She sings parodies of Chinese songs to you, changing the lyrics to be about you instead of the little rabbit they originally center around, and you try to teach her English as she dresses you for preschool in the mornings. When you’re six, you bring home a sunflower sprout, and she’s the one who plants it in the garden and waters it until it towers over you.
She is the most peaceful memory you have from your childhood; Laolao sitting with you, rocking back and forth on the porch swing. Around you, the peach tree your parents planted blooms its pink blossoms as Laolao sings to you in broken Mandarin that you understand perfectly. You don’t know it yet, but you’ll never understand her this well again.
She leaves when you’re six. It is the only car ride you remember taking with her—your mother mentioned she got carsick very easily, and it’s a while before she throws up into a bag. She says nothing, hugs you before she boards the plane, and is gone. The summer after she leaves, a hurricane sweeps through, stripping the sunflower she grew down to a dead stalk. You won’t see her for another four years.
☙❦❧
Outside of your grandma, the rest of your family isn’t much for heroics. In the stories you escape to, love is everything, but in your household, love is nothing. And maybe it was always that way, right from the start. As far as you can remember, your parents have never liked each other.
Your mother speaks of their marriage only in facts. Fact: we got married in 1997. Fact: we met in Flushing. Fact: we were engaged after a month. He wanted us to move in together and I said no, not until we get married. Fact: I didn’t want to stay here. My friend told me if I found a husband and had kids, I wouldn’t be so homesick. Fact: I agreed because at the time he was going to college, and I thought that meant he would be a reliable husband and father.
Fact: your father never finishes college.
Fact: your father has never held down a job for very long.
Fact: your mother’s parents never even met him before they got married.
Fact: your paternal grandparents look down on your mother’s side for being farm folk.
Fact: you tell your mom you don’t mind if she divorces your dad — you might even prefer it.
Opinion: based off all this, there is no reason to believe in love.
When you’re eight, they fight again and your dad leaves (because he always does), and you remember your mom sinking down against the cabinets on the kitchen floor, sobbing to you and your siblings, What am I going to do? Tell me, what am I going to do with him?
None of you ever figure that out.
But then again, none of you ever figure out what to do with each other.
☙❦❧
Your brother, the oldest of you three, is eleven when Lao lao goes back home, and your parents decide he’s old enough to look after you and your sister. He doesn’t. He mostly ignores the two of you and gets into trouble at school instead. Your mom holds endless phone conversations and goes to countless meetings with his teachers and principal, until finally she gives up and moves all of you to another district altogether, a richer area where the school gets more funding, where everyone is more competitive and academic, where everyone’s parents work at Yale and everyone goes to Ivies, hoping the change of scenery might help.
It doesn’t. It doesn’t help any of you.
For the next few years, everything is foggy. You go to school. You go home. You go to church. You go home again. You go almost nowhere else.
A couple years in, your mother changes jobs. She comes home more too. She yells at your brother. She yells at your sister. She yells at you. Unlovable unlovable you, who doesn’t practice violin or piano enough, whose voice and grades aren’t high enough, who doesn’t like math enough, who doesn’t get off her computer enough, who isn’t skinny enough, who isn’t happy enough, who doesn’t act or look like a girl enough, who makes her ragged, worn-down mom so mad her mom has no choice but to scream and scream and scream. You don’t sleep much. You’re friendless. You hate being at school and you hate being at home and you hate being. You move through your assignments and schoolwork on autopilot, and the rest of your time you spend drowning yourself in sleep deprivation and video games.
Out of the three of you, you do the best in the new school environment, and also, because of this, you are the one who is most left behind. Your sister screams and starves herself and bangs her head on the table and clings to you and your brother silently passes through all of you, blurring himself in a drug-induced haze, and your mother prays every night asking Yesu, Yesu, where did she go wrong, she gave up everything for her children and they’re failing her, and in the midst of it all you are independent and needless. You are the youngest and the most responsible, the smartest, the pride of the family, all of their hopes pinned on you, the one who’s going to go to the best school and make enough for the rest of the family to not have to worry about anything. You are all of these, and also still not enough.
☙❦❧
Your mom tells you how when she first became pregnant with you, it was only a few months or so after your sister was born and they had already had one boy and one girl and they thought maybe that was all they needed, but she heard your heartbeat and decided to keep you.
One day after a fight when you’re eleven you ask her “Do you wish you aborted me?”
She looks past you and says, I don’t know.
☙❦❧
Later, as a consolation prize, she will come out of her room and tell you, But I won’t regret it if you study well and keep playing piano and violin well.
Of course. You’ve known this almost all your life. No one will love you just because. Why would they? No one owes it to you—you have to be good. You hadn’t put it into words until then, but you must’ve learned it long before, taught to you however many times you were locked in that dark basement for reasons you can’t remember, sitting on the steps as close to the door as you could get, sobbing and begging to be let back in, to at least be allowed to turn the light on. You hadn’t practiced piano again, or you’d gotten into a fight with your sister, or—you really can’t remember what you’d done or hadn’t done All you remember are the tears, the fear, your mother screaming at you from the other side of the door to turn the light off. You’ve always been working to please your mother, your hardworking mother who gave up everything, her youth and her able-bodiedness and her time and stayed in a country she doesn’t even like for her children. You’ve always been working to avoid that basement, to see happiness brighten up your mother’s weary face with the idea that her daughter could be good enough. So you keep it up—your grades, your violin playing, your piano—all of it.
But like a drug, the effects get smaller and smaller the more you do it. You keep playing violin and piano, keep performing well in school, and sometimes your mom smiles and says, Good job! but after a while her smiles fade and she says it more like Good job instead of Good job! and it stops feeling real and shrinks underneath all of her screams and eventually it stops mattering how well you do in anything. The both of you feel nothing at all.
☙❦❧
“She doesn’t love me,” you tell your older brother. It is the worst night of your life, and you are hiding away from your mother the showrunner as far as you can. “She loves the idea of me.”
“Isn’t that still something?” he replies.
You know it’s not.
☙❦❧
“I don’t think I love my family,” you say at church.
One of the church boys scoffs at you dismissively.
“I mean it,” you say. “I genuinely don’t like being around them.”
“We all genuinely don’t like being around our family sometimes,” he says.
Never, was what you meant to say. I never like being around them. But it’s not something you’ll realize. Until you leave home years later and the fist constantly clenched around your heart finally disappears. Until you go back home once again.
☙❦❧
Love was what made life worth living.
This was picked up between the lines of everything. The movies and shows you watched. The books you read. Bible verses.
And at eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, trapped in between the walls of your loveless home and inside the body of someone you were increasingly growing to despise, you really needed something worth living for.
You just needed someone to love you. If someone could love you, that could prove that you were enough.
☙❦❧
Enter Jesus.
Or rather—enter your youth pastor, your youth group, and by extension, Jesus.
You’re fourteen when the church finally hires a new youth pastor—PD.
You think he’s weird.
Your New England church is primarily made up of Chinese immigrants and their kids. He’s a Korean-American from the Midwest. He’s smart—fresh out of grad school from an Ivy—and for the life of you, you can’t figure out why he would choose to be a youth pastor at your church when he could probably be someplace else a thousand times cooler. But instead he’s here where he doesn’t belong, where he doesn’t owe anyone anything, and he wants to be.
Aside from your sister and grandma, he is the closest thing to a loving family figure you have. He tells the youth group that you all are simultaneously broken and healed, that yes, all of you are depraved and horrible and sinful people, but that’s not where the story has to end. You smash mirrors and piece them back together in a cross, and for the first time, you feel like maybe you can belong somewhere.
He loves all of you. He takes you all to lunch, listens to you all, in ways your parents would never do for you.
“Gabby,” he says one time. You’re getting lunch together in Milford, the city you used to live in, at a restaurant where the porch looks out over the sparkling water, boats docked. Beautiful place. Shame you never got to see it while you still lived here. “You come from a broken home.”
Broken? Your absent brother and father and your all-too present mother and your dependent sister flash through your mind. You shrug and reply, “That’s just how it is.”
☙❦❧
At fifteen you realize that youth group is the only place where you feel that you can speak, be listened to, be loved. You’re willing to give up anything, everything for it, bury any part of yourself that needs to be buried for it, like the buoyant feeling that filled you when a pretty girl at summer camp hugged you goodbye. Your mom taught you well—when someone sacrifices for you or loves you, no sacrifice you make for them in return is too small.
Your friend, younger than you by a handful of years, comes to you crying about her overbearing mom, her crushing loneliness. You tell yourself, This is what it was for. God let me go through these hard things so I could help others go through them.
It’s not until years later that you wonder why God would make anyone go through all this bullshit in the first place.
☙❦❧
Levi, who grew up going to church with you, whose nose you pinched and held a tissue over when he had a nosebleed once, who asked the pastor if you could come to the boys’ lunch, who you promised to draw as Captain America once, drifts away. One of the last memories you have of him is a question he asks. He’s not even there, someone else reads out his question, but it goes: “Isn’t it manipulative of God to have bad things happen to us to bring us closer to Him?”
“No,” says PD. “Because He’s God.”
At the time it felt right to you, but now you aren’t so sure anymore. In practice, really, how is it different from your mom demanding everything you have and then some before she’ll love you?
Levi stops coming to church. You see him one more time after that, and then never again.
☙❦❧
At seventeen, Jesus’ love is no longer enough for you.
Quarantine, PD would probably say, has hardened your hearts against God, and you’re inclined to agree, but not to do anything about it.
Jesus is a hard hero to have. You go to church twice a week, you think about what a horrible, vile person you are, and how there is nothing good in you, and you berate yourself for feelings and wants that you can’t control, but they tell you if you keep trying forever and forever for the rest of your life, you can almost be like him, like someone who is good.
It’s supposed to be unconditional, they promise that Jesus’ love is always unconditional, and if you don’t feel it that’s on you, but goddamn does the love feel like it comes with strings. So God loves you but He’ll still sit by and watch as everything goes wrong in your life when he could change it all with the snap of His fingers? What kind of a hero is that?
You’ve gone most of your life trying to find heroes to love and be loved by with no return, and you’re sick and tired of it, of pouring yourself into a faceless, half-imagined somebody. You’re sick of waiting around for miracles, for salvation to fall into your lap.
You want more.
☙❦❧
For a while, you think maybe you can make more happen. You start looking for a new hero, and at first you think maybe you’ve found him.
You’re seventeen when you confess to someone for the first time and get rejected and to deal with it you spend ten months telling yourself that it’s fine because you’re not worthy of love and even if by some miracle, he did love you back, you wouldn’t have been able to handle it anyway. Knowing you, even if you were in a relationship, you’d just fuck it all up. You’re better off on your own, where you can’t hurt anybody. Love you earn, and you’ve earned nothing. Woe to whoever came along who you liked and decided they wanted you, unlovable you.
And then someone does come.
He’s a stranger, but oddly familiar. He’s funny and he’s smart and he’s afraid of eye contact but still looks at you anyway. He invites you to Cookies and Coloring, and at the end of it you trade creations. He grins at you hopefully, waiting for your reaction to him. Was that cool? Did that make me cool? You give him an orange, a peach, seaweed. You text him whenever you get food you can share, turning it into an excuse to see each other, to take a walk together and just talk. Every time he smiles at you, something seizes and stops and cracks in you, like dawn splitting open the sky inside your chest.
It’s on one of these walks he says, “So are we just gonna meet when one of us has food, or—what should our next excuse be?”
You turn towards him. “Is ‘I like you and I want to see you again’ not a good excuse?”
He smiles to himself, repeating it. “No, that’s a good one.”
You walk him back to his dorm and he closes with, “See you whenever one of us has food. Or, you know.” He grins, and something in you jumps again. “‘I like you and I want to see you again.’”
Again turns out to be at a dance, the two of you go and talk to almost no one else besides each other and leave early and after that he wants to talk. It should be a giddy thing, and honestly you should’ve seen this coming—neither of you are exactly subtle—but you’re not prepared for the wave of fear that rises to the surface and bursts out of you. You have no reason to believe that real love ever works out. All you have to go on are your parents’ marriage and TV show romances, and also threaded through it all like some kind of liana-ish parasitic root system is the impossibility that anyone could ever like you that way, you must’ve tricked him into thinking you were good enough for him to like you.
“I’m scared,” you confess, and he does everything right, he listens to you and he doesn’t hesitate to sit next to you when you ask.
“I’m not gonna force you into anything,” he says quietly. “If you don’t want to be in a relationship, then that’s fine.”
“That’s the thing, though. I do want it.” The words come out clumsily, tripping over themselves, like birds just learning how to fly. You’re not used to letting yourself want things. You’re not allowed to be happy. Even the thought is terrifying. “It would be easier if I didn’t. I just—I just don’t know what that means. I don’t know what being in a relationship means.”
“I think it means I like you, and you like me, and we’re just putting a label on what’s already there.” You’re quiet. And when he offers his hand to you, you take it.
And maybe it is just a label. But for the next week, that label grabs you in an iron fist and drags you down and you’re nervous and quiet and you’re trying, so badly, not to scare him off, not to make him think that you’re too weird, trying not to do anything that you think might make him change his mind. You retreat into a hermit crab shell the next few times you see him, but then another time for reasons you’re not sure—you spent all night beforehand with your friends, maybe that’s the confidence boost you needed—the fist opens and you crawl out, bearing yourself to the world. You barely know him, but you trust him. You choose it. You choose him.
Not that it does.
A month in, he sits you down and says, “I think I need some time.”
You halfway expected this, never really thought someone would stay, never really let go of believing that no one could ever love you. Still, you trusted him. Still want to trust him. You nod numbly along to everything he says, every cliche, and he hits pretty much all of them—it’s not you, it’s me; I had fun; I still want to be friends, after some time. And I know everyone says that, and that it’s cliche, but I mean it. He looks away at first, but drags his gaze up to meet yours, as if he figures he owes you that. You even fist-bump him when he’s done. You don’t blame him. You can’t hate him for ending things with you because honestly, who wouldn’t?
“I guess that’s it, then,” you say.
He echoes you. “I guess so.”
When he leaves, you go get dinner.
He doesn’t give you a clear answer for why he’s leaving. But as far as you can tell, he leaves when he realizes being with you isn’t the signal of a perfect life that he wants it to be. I just thought I was supposed to have a girlfriend, he says. Being with you isn’t going to save him. Nothing is going to save him, you want to tell him. Something you’d learned a few years earlier. Sometimes all you have to do is learn to live cracked open. But you could be there, and you could be broken and together, if he’d let you, if he wanted, and wouldn’t that be enough? He’s too busy drowning in his sorrows to reply, spews you up one night when he’s had too much to drink, (something about how he misses you and wishes he didn’t mess things up), and you crack and ask to see him, and even after that he still won’t answer if he wants to see you or not, still won’t look you in the eyes if he can get away with it, still won’t call.
It sucks you into a whirlpool for a long long time. You flip-flop around in it, finding new shades of sorrow and rage every time you roll over. You see flashes of him everywhere—in the light poles, down paths you used to walk together, when someone says the phrase “sick.”
You pick at the pain like a scab. You’ll go a little while without seeing him, thinking you’re fine, and then something will happen—you’ll catch a glimpse of him, you’ll see his name in the school newspaper, and it’ll send you spiraling all over again. You’ll get angry, decide, fuck it and fuck him, you’re never going to talk to him again—and then something will happen, you’ll see him and he’ll give you a tiny smile, and you’ll crack and change your mind and send him a text and ask to see him and he’ll say yes and that you two should get lunch sometime and then nothing will change again. You keep repeating the patterns, trapped in a loop, still scrabbling for a hold onto the sand, trying to catch onto something that’s already fallen apart. It’s all messed up and you’re pissed off at him and you miss him violently and you go crazy trying to figure out if he still feels the same way or if he’s moved on and forgotten you like you halfway think he should’ve from the moment you met and you tell yourself he’s not worth it and you’re over him until you see him again and you’d forgive him for everything if he’d just talk to you. But he won’t.
The pea plant in your dorm shrivels up and dies, and it’s been too long since it first started dying before you finally crack and throw it away. You don’t know when things are beyond repair. You don’t know when to let things go.
You don’t know how to sit with it. It takes you so much, too much time. He was every color, and somehow now you have to accept your world with a little more gray. Eventually you realize of course this is the way. You can’t put a timer on healing. It always takes longer to put things together than it does for them to fall apart. The website you used once to pirate a show with him (you still can’t watch it without tearing up) becomes filled with malware, tainted, and doesn’t everything?
You see him one more time at the dining hall. You’re listening to music, he avoids eye contact, and you let him get away with it. The app glitches, the player pausing at 3:31 on a song that’s 3 minutes and 32 seconds long—one second away from ending, hanging on to that last note in perpetuity—until finally, you’re the one who has to close it out.
☙❦❧
In Evolutionary Biology, they talk about how fossils become embedded in rock layers and then buried underneath new rock layers. But the fossils are still there—all you have to do is dig.
Layer after layer, day after day stacks on top of you.
You feel like an outdated rock layer, too quick to grow around certain people, and then they go ahead and rip their fossils out of you, because they were never dead, they were alive and they were always going to leave. New layers grow in over the old, sure, until they’re all out of sight, but you’ve still got the imprints. You are the ginkgo tree, adapted to circumstances that were ripped away from you in a heartbeat. Still you struggle to change. Still you can feel the imprint of their fossils in you. You don’t know how to reshape yourself without them.
☙❦❧
It’s three AM and you’re crying because you miss everyone you don’t see anymore and because where other people settle into their interests and little loves, you bury pieces of yourself in people and you come apart when they leave you. Who are you if even the people you love choose to leave you?
You think about this over and over, and once again you let your mind devour you alive.
☙❦❧
So, there—your shot at love (or something, you don’t think you actually were in love with him, but how are you to know?) Being together didn’t save him, and it didn’t save you. At least now you know what you were missing, you suppose. Now it’s just a who you’re missing, and you’d give a lot to have him back, but whatever.
Maybe relationships just aren’t for you. You’re done with love, or anything even resembling it. For a while, at least. No fairy tale ending for you. That kind of love is no hero. But by now you know it’s not just that kind of love that hangs around. Maybe you can get your happy ending some other way. Maybe it’s not too late for love to still save you.
☙❦❧
And afterwards, you stop trying so hard to claw out scraps of love for yourself from barren deserts.
You stop going to church. Your youth pastor stops coming to see you—you guess without going to church, you’re not good enough for him to visit you anymore. It’s probably not true. He has other priorities now, that’s all. But it’s hard not to feel that way when you see him posting photos on Instagram of other youth group graduates he visits, and not you. So it goes. You get used to living without trying to wring love out from wherever you can.
But you find it in small pieces, in unexpected ways. You have a sleepover with some high school friends at a beach house over the summer and stay up until 3 AM talking about religion and love and anything, everything else. You go to bed, with your own bedroom for the first time, and you get maybe four hours of sleep but wake up in the morning feeling so lucky to be near the ocean and to be with friends.
You find yourself less tolerant of the lack of love you’d been given before. Your home becomes increasingly more suffocating. One night you argue with your sister, and neither of you talk to the other for two weeks. You finally do outside on the deck, surrounded by blinking fireflies and also mosquitoes and you realize your house has never been home.
Then again, nowhere really has. Seahorse you. You are the heir to a fallen dynasty, kingdoms that no longer exist. You have nowhere to go.
Other people live in the world; you merely exist in it. Other people are from the world; you’re just of it.
But you keep at it. What else can you do? You change strategies, dig your feet into the sand rather than keep drifting, and somehow you still manage to float just on the outside of everything.
All the while, you marvel at the little loves all the people around you carry. Leo rambles about stars and trees and records. Stormy loves sharks and Star Wars. Victor laughs unrestrainedly, unashamedly, letting it take over him completely, stopping on the stairwell and hunching over and leaning against the wall. They are all wonderful and lovely in the bits of beauty they carry around with them. You’ve got nothing, nothing to anchor you, just half-baked ideas and half-abandoned interests and a cloud of hopelessness hanging over your head that gets heavier every day—but it’s good to know other people are different.
Maybe one day, you can be like them.
☙❦❧
And then there are those midnight conversations.
how are you
Who knows
Probably depressed or something
i get you
hard getting out of bed today
I just feel so unfulfilled and have no drive
pd would probably say that lack of fulfillment is a sign of needing to turn to God
He would
im not pd tho so im gonna say sometimes everything just feels empty and meaningless for no reason
you just gotta stick it out i guess
I think that’s just it though
There is no meaning or reason for anything really. We make that all for ourselves
That is, unless God is real and then there’s the answer, but I find myself more doubtful by the day.
Not really sure anymore
i dunno either
but if all the meaning and reason in the world is just something we make then i think we can make something beautiful
That’s why I cook I guess
I just need to pull myself together and maybe I can make something beautiful out of it
you can still make something beautiful even when you’re broken
☙❦❧
“The circle of life is actually a triangle.”
You start laughing.
“No, no, hear me out, okay—” you can hear her grinning on the other side.
“It’s three AM,” you say finally. “It’s three AM, and you’re calling me to tell me that the circle of life is a triangle?”
She is, and you don’t agree with anything she’s saying but you’re too tired to actually coherently form an argument against it, and somehow both of you start talking about your attachment styles before she tells you to get some sleep and ends the call.
Some other night your other friend calls you at 1 AM just because you asked him to, even though he’s so tired his voice creaks like an old tree in the wind. You both laugh when he speaks, and then you tell him everything is shitty (it is, but also it literally is) and he laughs and you laugh and you’re both tired and cynical of a God and higher meaning you’re no longer sure you believe in.
“I miss you,” you say, apropos of nothing.
“Thank you,” he says. “What do I do with that?” and you both laugh again. What do you do with that indeed. “But I miss you too.”
Everything feels broken and empty beyond belief. But these small moments feel like a balm over it all, something to keep you going for just a little bit longer.
☙❦❧
You still don’t know who you are. You’re still not saved.
But you’re done standing in places and in front of people who have already proven they can’t or won’t love you, waiting for them to drop it into your hands anyway. Maybe you were always seeking salvation in the wrong people, in the wrong things. Maybe love will save you. Maybe love won’t. But you’re convinced now you can find pieces of it if you try.
You’ll start with the little loves. It’s too much to expect bigger ones, but little loves, you can have those. You’ll hold those close to your chests. You’ll build off those until you can find it in yourself to be more.
You think of standing on the deck with your brother, looking at the late summer fireflies that you hadn’t realized were there all those years, those blinking flashing spots of hope. You remember watching the light symphony together, talking to him for the first time in years, and you hope that broken things can be fixed again someday. But until then you’ll be alright, or at least, keep trying to be.
For now you’ll cling to late-night phone calls and studying in the library with your friends and the way the people around you fill in the spaces in the world in all their little ways and you cross your fingers that maybe someday you’ll patch up enough of the holes in yourself to fill in your own nooks and crannies in the world and for loud music and laughter to always feel like enough.