Take the A Train
On Boston’s coldest night since 1957, I walked out of the symphony hall and waited in the Back Bay station as always. I didn’t do it on purpose. I was just in need of music and I wasn’t scared to die in the cold. When the train roared past my face I heard my hair snapping like thunder; frosts were growing terribly along my spine like an incurable disease. Your breath, interwoven with the distant sound of siren, was hanging in the pale heat that the street lamps had casted onto the floor, as thin as a shaft of wind. I couldn’t read the signs well. Indeed, I had never taken the train before, and I never knew when to get off until you suddenly sprang up from your seat like a perfidy, with your instrument scratching the arm rests all over, tickling and cracking like a wind chime as we sprinted desperately out the door. Fuck, you crammed all the mess between your lips, blowing out white smoke into the night, gasping. Backlit, your voice amorous and filled with moon, fuck, you panted, that was fun. I tasted spice in my throat. When the train fled away you loved touching each block of the carriage as if stroking a young girl’s back. Under the blizzard, the whole universe of stars fell and crashed into your eyes, and it was almost the only bright thing in the dark.
Lansdowne
When I was in New York last summer, I shared an apartment with A and X in the center of Brooklyn. Each morning X toasted a whole plate of plain bagels and wrote screenplays for her gig. The sound of a silver knife striking the burned-over bagel crust was like rain pattering against the streets. There was a huge window in my room, facing right at my bedside. Every day at night, the lamps across the street would burn dimly along the leaves of the camphor tree, which spreaded its branches in all directions. Sometimes when A came into my room and read my poetry, I looked outside the window and got sentimental. Soaked by the warmth, the leaves ripened, and you could see in them veins and veins of brown stems like stretch marks on a mother’s belly, pulsating with life. He always pulled my arm behind his ear, as if searching for something. His hair was wet, soft like a river. I’m checking your heart beats, he said. I asked him, do you do that to everyone or is it just me? He said he was just scared that one day it would stop beating. I looked away towards the window again: The gold in the tree flickered in the air like crisp cicadas wings rubbing against one another. Fuck, I thought to myself, this is so beautiful. I really don’t wanna die.
Boston Landing
Mom moved to Singapore alone when I was eleven. She got a new part-time job at Singapore National Academy of Science, with a better salary and a brand new apartment. When I visited her again after a whole year, her cheeks shrank against her bones like flowers. She cut a grapefruit in her hand and handed one slice to me. I saw the white in her hair. When I was a kid, she used to cut the fruits into thinner stripes, but the tropical season had changed the way she held her knife, forever. I took a bite. The juice inside the pulp crackled relentlessly through my tongue. It was such an acid smell, sour in a way that it would bite you. Mom, the soreness at the back of my throat condensed into tears, please don’t leave me with dad. I don’t like Shanghai anymore.
He likes to drink, we all know that, and he almost loves it, if he could tell the difference. When he got wasted mom drove him back to home in her SUV, tiny edges of alcohol swam across the distance between us until we all got drowned in dead silence. He was drunk in a way that was both safe and hurtful. Mom said that at least he didn’t break things. You know how some dads smash bowls and photos when they are mad, right? She said it as if something bad could be healed by telling something worse. I thought in my head, he broke things too. But he broke things in metaphors, like how he broke all of his promises. But after all that mess he woke up with his beddings filled with floral scents, and he took a shower with soap, left the house and bought me my favorite ice cream without even giving me a chance to say no. I like you dad. I don’t love you because you have never said that to me, so I don’t know what it is. For me, love is the sweet of frozen cranberries dripping along my lungs like a letter, love is your blood running inside my body and pushing my heart alive. For him, love is me having mom’s eyes and your nose, so they don't have a choice but to always be together on my face until the day I lost it.
I scrunched the berries with my teeth. Their flesh scattered across my drool and made a shape: No. No, no, no. Endless lines of Nos covered with honey, pressing marks into my stomach, cold, helpless, screaming in pain.
Newtonville
The second time I went to BSO with you, you were running a bit late because of a friend’s dinner. When we hugged each other your neck smelled like a fire.
West Newton
June, Iowa city. Erin Sherry printed my essays and put them in the workshop. A white girl read along my lines with gum in her mouth, “bouquets of lights were smuggled through these antiquated fissures like a confession.” This is pretty, she said, but I think you should learn to use less metaphors.
I secretly kept a journal in middle school. Everyday at dusk, I would lie down on the fake grass of the playground and write under the monsoon season. Today, I wrote, I played F sharp minor scales for Mrs. Xu. She got mad at me and hit me with her bow. The hair of the bow whipping into my arms, like the twigs of a willow tree fondling sparsely the chest of a city. I showed it to Hans during evening study hours. She gave me a look and said, Rain it is not healthy to romanticize everything. She stretched her hands entirely to play with my hair. It was raining outside. Sometimes it occurred to me that language is like a drug addiction. I used to write about a girl in my French class that I had liked for a long time. Today, I wrote, she smelled like April. She dropped her glance like how the cherry blossoms at the front yard fell deeply into the dirt. Other times when she got into a huge argument with her best friend, I wrote, her words cut through the other girl’s heart and sputtered like broken butterflies. Metaphors pierced through the back of my waist and all of a sudden I felt a provocative sense of excitement rising from my spine. One time after another, the more I wrote the more madly I was in love. The more I wrote the more I couldn’t stop. I melted into my notes. It was still raining terribly and I was shaking. I was so scared that one day she would be less beautiful. I was so scared that one day we would forget each other.
Auburndale
Rain, he said, let's take the train back. Imagine instead of telling your grandchildren that you took a Uber back every Saturday after the concert, you said you took the train.
Out of all the people that I’ve known, he was the only one that constantly reminded me of my future. Whenever we ended up playing jazz, he almost begged me to stop. Please, he said, I was having too much fun. I secretly thought about his words: about how we still have so much time, when things could still be too much. Buried in my closet, I always felt like I couldn't wear anything too pretty because I wanted to save some for the future. Then I thought, is there even any more future for us to take? Kneeling among a pile of silk dresses, I feel like a foggy island filled with soft ocean waves. Each breath you took was one step further from where I was. Almost like a habit, I couldn’t afford to take anything from you. Do you want milkshakes? No. Do you like the piece? No. Do you want to take a solo? No. No, no, no. The cuts of the N and curves of the O rusted into my lips. Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be. The sound of “yes,” as clean as a young girl’s secret, tore apart my vocal chords and made a wound from within.
Each Saturday night on the train, he shared one airpod with me and we listened to jazz in silence. The sounds of automobiles were like roses being burnt alive. As the train drove past the city, waves and waves of lands were stretched into phantoms. Sometimes when I looked out the window, his right face was mirrored in the glass and blocked the view. The full moon lit up the room and painted his hair all golden. But most of the time, I was haunted by a terrible surge of memories as the train traversed fiercely along the track. I couldn't help but think about my parents, my childhood, and all the decisions that I had regretted making throughout my life. Under the street lamps I saw my dad sinking his teeth into his breath, yelling, his face distorted into a mere abstraction: Don’t you dare say one more word in front of me! I gulped involuntarily; the full moon shrank into an ellipse and started to thaw. I saw mom’s lips flicking like a recording of an old love song, streams of syllables oozed out of her body but I couldn’t catch any. I saw Melody crying the day I left school; we almost never talked but she said she wished that the Americas could treat me better. Her tears, round and salty, embroidered across my palms like a string of ascending insects rising in the dark. I saw summer, lucid slip dresses grew along girls’ shoulders, sketching the lines of their chests. Half-diminished seventh chords cut apart my hands. Rain, why do you always have to hurt yourself? Why do you always take something evil out of something good? Mrs. Huang held a stack of freshly-printed papers in her arms in front of me, heat waves rose quietly from each written letter and dimmed her eyes. I knew you could do better, she said, you didn’t fail literature, it was literature that had failed you. I heard the sound of a disaster, but I couldn’t stop thinking. The notebooks of Kafka and Camus stacked up on my bed. I laughed hysterically reading the former but cried my heart out for the latter. Jing, my favorite teacher, thousands of moons fell under her thin nails as dusk bursted all over the hallway, and fondly she pressed those moons deeply into my skin.
Rain, he hugged me under the roof, it was always a blast. I melted into his arms like a dead star. His touch, soft like a season, pouring all over my body like a tragedy. A sense of fatality suddenly gripped me. Only at that instant could I afford to forget about my life. Only at that instant did it occur to me that I was so young, and I felt so beautiful.
Natick Center
Natick whimpered in the wind. I tightened my scarf, each step on the snow felt like glass in my skin. It was only six stops for the ride, but I felt like I had lived my life.
By Rain Hou
Rain is a music composer as well as a writer. She likes summer, alpacas, and jellycat stuffed animals. She just graduated from Walnut Hill School for the arts, and will be attending Columbia University and Juilliard School of Music as a college freshman. Her works can be found in Scholastic Art & Writing Award, as well as Young Authors’s Competition.