In a folk tale, a lizard pursued by hunters leaps to safety across a chasm filled with fog. In these mountains, fog looks thick as pelt, white as foam on the crests of waves in an ocean of air. The lizard taunts them, says, you could just swim across, if you really want to get me. They dive in. And fall to their deaths at the rocky bottom. It is not a sea after all. 

And the lizard? It isn’t cold-hearted but true to its own nature. We can chuckle at the cleverness of the lizard, the stupidity of the hunters. 

We could say the lizard was cunning but cold-hearted. But what did it risk at all, being more familiar with the wilderness, having the capacity to regenerate a mangled body part?

And for the hunters, the desire to close the gap, to win, to capture: was this worth such reckless dying for? It was only a lizard. Should they not have known better? 

In his poem “The New World,” poet Kaveh Akbar writes that the soul is such “a thirsty/ antelope nervously lapping up/ water from a pool/ in the hunter’s backyard.”

What is the object of our longing, that for which we feel we would give up all, or perish? 

Language is inadequate for describing such a longing but also filled with possibility—the limitless naming of that which we are unable to satisfy.

What is the ineffable, the thing we most ardently want to say, but cannot?

We scour the space between loss and forgiveness, between faith and floundering, the spasms of doubt, the seizures of the ecstatic. 

I am just shy of thirty when I accept a fellowship to study for my doctoral degree in Chicago. It is the year before an earthquake nearly levels my home city six thousand miles on the other side of the world, an earthquake that rips the entire length of firewall in our newly built but not yet paid for home, for which we will now have to take out a second reconstruction loan. 

At the fellowship panel interview, a man who works for the Ministry of Education looks up from the folder with my CV and documents in it and asks, But how do you think you’re going to do this with three young children? The women on the panel shut him down. 

That should not be relevant. And yet the question has been asked. It wisps in the air, just enough to let you know it could obscure the view.

In the months that follow, some colleagues ask similar questions. Are you really going to do it? What they mean is, Are you really going to leave your children, sacrifice them for your (career, education, personal development, __ )? 

One of them says, Mark my words. One day this will have a (bad, deleterious, negative, __ ) effect on them. I try to focus on the positive, though inside, I am already reeling, something in me falling to the bottom. 

When I leave for my extended fellowship, my daughters’ two grandmothers care for them. The oldest is twelve, the middle one nine, the youngest four. Their father also leaves soon after, to take a  job in another province far from our city. I return home for a month each summer, and the third  time, their father says I have changed, I have become unrecognizable to him. What I feel is this. I am  coming more into possession of my own voice, discovering what I can do— what I want to do— with words. When he asks if I would give up my writing for him, I hear a death knell.

I am not there for medal-pinning programs at school, not there to make school lunches, do school pick-ups and PTA meetings. Not there when the youngest accidentally cracks a classmate’s tooth in  rambunctious play, not there for the middle daughter’s confirmation, not there when the oldest  starts to smoke, not there when there is some kind of altercation between her and her father so awful the latter picks up a guitar and nearly hits her with it, as the two other girls hide under the bathroom sink. At least, this is the report I get from my mother, sobbing on the phone in a long-distance call. 

What is it that floods silence before sound, that follows the body after it leaves a room? 

Six years from the start of the fellowship which first took me away from home, I am hired by a university in the south. My first marriage has fallen apart. I no longer have a physical home in the city where I grew up and no longer have claim to any property. But in building a new life elsewhere, I dearly want to include my daughters. All but my eldest eventually join me. 

I have also remarried and bear another daughter who is twelve years younger than her next older sister. This daughter, and my firstborn, don’t get the chance to put their arms around each other until 2015. At that time, they are fourteen and thirty-five respectively. The hotel where we stay was built in the 1900s. My maternal grandfather worked there briefly as a cook, when he was in his twenties. We eat things we don’t normally eat for breakfast in our Virginia home— red rice and fried milkfish, red rice and dried venison, pickled papaya and carrot on the side. Slices of cold dragonfruit. Cups of brewed Benguet coffee.

It rains almost the whole time during our visit. The city in which I grew up is five thousand feet above sea level. It is temperate all year round. But it is what most might describe as cold, especially  those living in the lowlands where it is almost always sweltering even in the shade. Tourists get excited about wearing sweaters and knitted hats, attire they would have no need for unless they went to a mall with an indoor ice-skating rink. 

When I was growing up, the houses built in my home city did not have insulation. No double-hung  windows, no heaters or thermostats. Cinderblock walls between wooden siding. Cracks through which lizards skittered. Bungalow style, corrugated iron roofing. Though it was designed as a hill station for the American colonial government, these were the most typical materials. Fog wound through the trees, and the long monsoon season could test one’s stamina. I am sure much of this is now filtered through the lens of nostalgia, but I can also assert that all of it is true. 

The word estrange comes from the French estrangier, meaning to alienate (15th century), and from the  Latin extraneare, to treat as a stranger; or foreign, from without. (Etymonline) It is the coldness of not speaking, not-interacting. In the dictionary it means to turn away in feeling or affection, make unfriendly or hostile, alienate the affections of.

It’s been about five years since my firstborn stopped speaking to me and stopped communicating with her siblings here. This is a choice an individual can make, that she has made. I also understand this is not the kind of circumstance that can be forced to a resolution. In addition, any language I stumble toward in trying to give this absence form, can only address parts of it. In the beginning, distance is named as one of the trauma-configuring factors. Distance is also a way to protect one from further trauma. Periodically, I ask myself: how much of this distance am I responsible for? But even that isn’t— can’t be— all of the story. 

In Nox, Canadian writer Anne Carson creates an accordion text with fragments of her brother’s life. Scrapbooked on the right side of the scroll: photographs, a few old letters, typed-up words and phrases, postcards. On the left, Carson works through a translation of poet Catullus’ poem 101, an  elegy for the Roman poet’s own brother. Both poets are in their own way trying to supplicate an absence that is mute, that cannot be made to speak. 

A few hours before I give birth to my first child, I wake to the sensation of cold spreading up my back and down my legs. I am confused and think I have wet myself, like a child who is toilet trained but has had an “accident.” Though I’ve read books about childbirth, I am unprepared for this sensation which is caused by the breaking of my water. I make my way to the bathroom, then find a mop. This is how they find me, mopping the trail of fluid from bedroom to kitchen to bathroom, before someone calls a taxi and we are off to the hospital. 

Looking over the work I’ve done in my own poems, I am unsurprised to see that the myth of Persephone is a motif that recurs. I don’t identify with her so much as I do with her mother, Demeter. The going underground, the seduction (according to many sources), the deceit or trickery that must have been involved so the hungry girl puts six pomegranate seeds into her mouth, which seals the length of her stay in the nether world— I don’t feel I can inhabit that story as if it were my  own. 

But the story of the mother who scours the countryside in her search, and in her fury and sorrow sheathes everything in ice and snow until her daughter’s return— that story, I can more than imagine.

In the mute whiteness of such a winter, the foliage bristles. Ponds and rivers freeze over. Demeter knows that eventually, spring will come. Under sheets like glass, golden bodies of koi slowly undulate.