Time is Running Down the Road and the Moon is in a Bowl

The meaning of life is to be trapped in a palindrome, a self-contained, nothingness-stretching-into-infinity-on-both-ends palindrome.

I used to think too old was better than too young. Old people know things. You read it in the folds of their knuckle skin, a hundred deckled pages, a hundred dumpling folds. I couldn’t wait to be old and wise like my nainai, who had so many wrinkles that every time she smiled her face would blossom like a firework.

Standing outside the Din Tai Fung in the Santa Anita mall, remembering when a box of xiaolongbao was ten dollars, I realize how overwhelmingly wrong I was to think so. The restaurant patrons laugh, fetal hands lifting lacquered chopsticks to whitened teeth while steam pools in their nostrils. They are small, self-contained dumplings, and yet they are brimming with their own designs and desires. They are sealed inside squeegeed walls drawn with bamboo motifs, like a to-go box. The meaning of life is to be trapped in boxes.

I still remember the first time I met Chess. I’d just graduated salutatorian (Pomp and Circumstance hanging from my ears like drops of diamond even weeks after the ceremony) and believed myself a formally-inducted member of the cult of adulthood. I had a little under six months of Delayed Entry left to wile away.

Chess was an old dog, the kind that looks like hair that gets stuck in the shower drain, a salt-and-pepper fur coat balanced on wire armature legs. The lady at the humane society was saying something about how old dogs are always the last to be adopted. I held my hand out. An offering of time. Time is something you have to parcel out in little increments—a few seconds for him, an hour for her—while still remembering to leave some for yourself. The meaning of life is having an eye for proportion.

All it took was one slobbery lick, and she was mine.

—

The foil lays golden and crinkled, giving the impression of varicose veins around the ears. I pull off the red elastic ribbon and unearth the rabbit inside. I press my nose against its nose and inhale. I breathe in a memory; cheeks droop with fat once more, and a dissonant memory swims through the vestibule of my nostrils and into the pharynx, where it begins to make its way down the tunnel of my throat. I bite into the ear. The memory blossoms on my palate: I’m walking the concourse of an airport terminal I don’t recognize, tugging along a pale purple suitcase, silver bracelet blinking in the sun. It’s stunningly mundane, a scene straight out of a Hopper painting. The chocolate in my mouth melts; the warmth on my face fades; the meaning of life is forgetting how to remember.

—

There are five grams of pork, sixteen grams of dough, and eighteen folds in each xiaolongbao. I become all twenty-one grams with one bite, my tongue blistering with scalding soup, the inside of my mouth suddenly tasting like sunlight. I swallow, and with an excited clink of my chopsticks, take twenty-one more to my boiled tongue. The meaning of life is getting burnt by your meal and swallowing it anyway.

—

My birthday often coincides with the Chinese Lantern Festival, during which we eat soup with peanut or sesame-filled rice balls called yuanxiao. If you’ve ever eaten yuanxiao, then you know that it does not like change. It’s slippery as an egg yolk and twice as theatrical, a belly of smooth, pale rice dermis stretched over a core of molten black sesame. To take a bite is to create a crime scene; the babe bursts into glooping sobs, tears like glittering black sand. Nainai called it “spider seed soup.”

Since my discharge, I’ve tried, every year, without fail, to like yuanxiao. Every year, I set the table, boil the water, field the frozen troops as I have so many times. When they start to float, I turn off the heat. Then, I sit down at the otherwise empty dinner table and watch steam curl as it cools. 

Invariably, the mission is a complete and fruitless failure; cadavers spike the sea with unctuous black blood, and my chopsticks clatter onto the floor with a sound somewhere between explosion and scream. A retreat is called. The still-warm bowl gets scrubbed, the spoon stashed among others, the crying skin tossed. The meaning of life is having a least-favorite food.

—

There is a crack in everything, Leonard Cohen once sang. That’s how the light gets in.

I remember when Chess died. She’d had trouble swallowing her food in the end, so I’d sit down with her and break up little bits of kibble to put on her tongue, and her eyes would roll, rheumy and unseeing and glazed like mancala beads. We’d lie down together and watch entire seasons of the BBC’s Sherlock in one sitting, and she’d bark anytime a gun went off for the first two seasons. By the third, the barking stopped. By the fourth, the breathing. 

After I buried her, I watched Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and cried. We’d known each other for two months. Maybe three. The meaning of life is irrelevant.

—

If I could get a message to myself nineteen years ago today, I would tell her this: You’re on a bridge over a river, and you’re looking downstream. You watch the foam and silt float past, blowing, shifting, spilling over the banks, and you trace the path of leaves and debris as they pirouette on the backs of eddies and golden bass. But no matter what you do, you feel like you can’t turn around. Can’t center in your eye the mountain from which your stream of consciousness issues forth, can’t turn your back to those receding brassy crests and gaze up at the sun as it climbs above the mountain peak and enlightens the water. No, you and I, we watch the river. Our oh-so-perfect metaphors. The meaning of life is up there, on that peak.

Probably.

—

Tonight, I turn sixty-four—the age Nainai had been when she died. The moon has been poached from the sky, a smooth, scarless skein stretched over the site of excision. I turn, steam from the soup waving at me with undulating fingers. The clock has stopped its timekeeping for the night to beam down at me. 

“Where is the moon?” I want to ask. I look down. My watch marches on through the snowdrifts of time. “Are you the moon?” 

But I am ill-trained in the art of interrogation; words are not shotgun cartridges; my tongue stumbles on their tails.

 The faces of time are silent. But they point my gaze to the window, a spartan construction through which a rabbit plops into my bowl and snuggles beneath the silvery film of my yuanxiao. I stir the soup, and the rabbit becomes a man gawping fearfully up at me, then a mancala bead, then the moon, and then I am eight again, listening to Nainai’s crackly, pearl-lustered voice play a record of my favorite silly stories: in his lunar palace, Jade Rabbit pounds herbs for the gods’ elixirs of immortality; he is guardian of time and pestle; he listens to our past, our futures, our favorite foods. Nainai sneaks me a piece of White Rabbit candy when my parents aren’t watching, which I chew slowly and appreciatively. I look out through the window to see Jade Rabbit pulsing with approval.

Without warning, the faces of time leap from their places and onto the windowsill. They look over the edge of the bridge; they look across the traffic river, sparkling like a string of pearls; they look at their mountain, pointing like a church spire into a sky where a scarless skein stretches. They turn to one another, nod, and step over the ledge at a run. 

I watch time race the river in a corridor stitched from night. The farther they run, the closer they get to kissing the sky, the more they fade into each other and that skein, until finally the window becomes a painting and sighs. I lift the moon to my lips with shaking fingers. The plastic spoon clicks against my teeth. I bite into the moon, my mouth flooding with sweet, steaming tar.

—

On my sixty-fourth birthday, I realize three things: time is running down the road; the moon is in a bowl; to live is to be trapped in a palindrome. A self-contained, nothingness-stretching-into-infinity-on-both-ends palindrome.

Then, I swallow.

Caroline Li is a freshman double majoring in English and Psychology at USC. Her work has been recognized by The Alliance for Young Artists and Writers, The Lorian Hemingway Short Story Competition, and Elegant Literature. She’s currently a staff writer for Descent Magazine at USC. You can find Caroline on Instagram here.