A Minty Whiff on a Yellow Wave

"But close friends?! Like, a friend I can tell anything without feeling ashamed or inferior? No, I don't have such a one.”

Back home in my Water Lily Land, my father had many friends. They used to come to our house, hang out for a long time, and talk about many things. I didn’t understand the subject of topics, they were just words and sounds to me, but I can now remember their curved bodies trilling with laughter. They liked to drink a lot of tea. Their faces were always bright like happy cats, cheerful like blue periwinkles. My mother rarely joined them. Once, while I was playing on the porch, I saw her enter the living room, and immediately a stream of air-steam swept across the faces of my father and his friends. Her steps and roughly tousled hair made her like a 19th-century steam engine entering a steadily flowing river in the late 20th century. 

Born in a remote village immediately after British colonization, my mother, Lotus, grew up imbued with the idea of colonial wisdom. Lotus went to college to study English literature and later became an English teacher at a junior high school in the capital, while girls her age from her village lagged far behind in the race for social status. She mastered defining good and bad, and how to control the bad. She never approved of my extravagant activities, which she saw as lacking proper girlish behavior. For her, a girl should behave in a traditionally feminine way in both appearance and actions, be religious, and obey family norms, rules, and regulations.

When I was nine, I went with my friends to a local New Year’s festival without informing her, and even my father had no idea. There was an open-air film screening and many fun activities, and they kept me there until late at night. The rule Lotus set for returning home was clear: it had to be before sunset. Whether it was 5:30 or 7:15 p.m., no children were allowed outside after sunset. On that adventurous night, I went alone without my older sister or brother and stayed until 2 a.m. At that time, mobile phones had not yet reached Water Lily Land, and Lotus had no idea of my level of curiosity or of my range of mobility. When I got back home, at first, she was terrified, but later her fear turned into intense anger. She beat me until dawn, ending with a scream, saying that she had punished me to teach me the lesson of not being disobedient again in my life.

A bright yellow light seeps through the cracks in the wooden wall of my room. It's a one-room wooden apartment in a three-story house, built during the time when this Cornflower Land was colonized by the Soviet Union. It has an oldy-goldy-woody smell that drifts in through the small window into my room every day. The window brings in bright yellow light in the summer, rain in the autumn, and snow in the winter from the backyard. However, a minty whiff is always there, mild and mute.

This city in Cornflower Land isn’t a big metropolis either. Everyone knows everyone, sees each other at the supermarket, the bus stop, the gym, or the pub, but no one really takes the initiative to talk or become friends. Maybe they secretly talk to each other with special devices, like VR glasses, where only the wearers know what they see or consume. Maybe they’ve lost the longing for friendship. Maybe I know nothing. I just feel like these days have become heavy and empty. And I’ve lost all my energy to go to the office, sit, and talk like a parrot to the customer. Wearing a headset, logging into the office’s designated CRM system, and then receiving phone calls or emails and talking to them in a friendly manner as if you are their super friend—but all communications are scripted, even the smile you put in your voice to satisfy the customer. The other side is probably amazed by your friendly voice but never knows that words, tones, and smiles are completely scripted and strictly followed. If anyone does more or less than that, they will be terminated with very short notice. Twentieth-century Kafka had already experienced all these insecurities and insanity, which later critics framed as Kafkaesque. But has it brought any change to 21st-century clerical jobs?

The minty whiff pulls me back to a dreadful memory—the same dream I had three nights in a row during my childhood. I can still remember how scared I was after having the same dream on the second night. On the third night, I burst into tears at the thought of sleeping again. Yes, my mother slept with me that night. She held me in her arms and sang a lullaby, something she usually didn’t do. But the same dream, with the same strange details, grabbed me in my sleep again. I can remember every detail of that night. I woke up immediately and began to moan with all the strength my nine-year-old body could muster. My loud, plaintive cry jarred my mother’s sleep, and she stared distractedly at my face, dazed. Her eyes looked crooked; her face and eyebrows were lined with wrinkles. 

That dream landed again last night after almost two and a half decades!

My body feels dried out, and my stomach itches. I take a long draught from the water bottle by my bedside, prop a pillow under my back to shift my posture from lying down to sitting and keep my legs bent vertically. Now I can clearly see the yellow light on the cracked wall. Whether it's the yellow color or not, my mind keeps replaying the same thought about the recurring dream, like it's been spinning slowly on a never-ending roller-coaster. 

I really want to talk to my mother. I really want to ask her, why does this fucking nightmare keep coming back into my life? Again and again... why? I left Lotus in Water Lily Land five years ago because we were becoming unbearable to each other, day by day. We lost our ability to praise one another. Instead, we silently held onto grudges, resentment, anger, anxiety, and an obsession with humiliating each other. But now, I want to talk to her. I want to listen to her. I want to ask her why this old woman with that face keeps returning to my dream. Or does she think, somehow, that I'm obsessed with this scornful face from my childhood?

The yellow lights have become diffuse and dull, gradually transforming into the color from my dream. The shadow of the yellow light is indistinct, and playful in its liminality. ‘Is it spooky?' or 'Does it penetrate my thoughts through my dry skin?' I asked myself, ghastly.

 I tilt my face up directly at the pale-yellow light on the wall, and I am astounded to see the entire room flooded with the same dense, faint yellow. The light fills every corner of the room — the wooden floor, the brown couch, the dark blue cooking pot, the white ceiling — everywhere. It feels like a yellow river with slow, steady waves. When I turn my body to the right, away from the cracked wall, I am startled to see an old lady coming out from the curve of a yellow wave, that looks very similar to Katsushika Hokusai’s seventeenth-century painting, The Great Wave. And from the neck of that wave, her body rose up, just like in my dream. She looks exactly like the old woman in my dream, wearing the same light-blue sari, with the end covering her head in the same way, obscuring her face. First, I notice her sharp nose, then her cheek, and finally her eyes, which are filled with hate and anger. She stares directly into my eyes while her lips move in multiple directions, as if bluntly pronouncing some sacred words. In that moment, that unbearable fear returns, crawling under my skin and spinning around me, relentless. 

The crooked skin on both sides of her eyes has become more explicit as soon as she approaches me. Within a few moves, I found out the face is no longer unfamiliar. They are the same curved eyes I saw on my mother’s face when she punished me for breaking her rules about coming home. My trembling body slowly regains control, my blood settling into a steadier rhythm. Outside, beyond my window, the vibrant green of summer leaves drifts by. I hear my phone ringing—it's a WhatsApp call from Lotus.

 Lotus is calling from Water Lily Land. I stare at her profile picture for a moment, her face looking as enchanting as cornflower in the wild, as if she had never been the old woman from my dream.

I ignore the call and move from my bed to the window. I place my hands on the windowsill. Outside is filled with the summer breeze; the willow leaves sway in the wind, showing their finely-serrated bright silver-green tops and turning their grayish-green undersides back and forth.