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I would prefer to think not, that I believed my vows, that I believed everyone who ever stood at an altar suffered from a case of the nerves, that I never could have undertaken such a solemn obligation as marriage so cavalierly. I would prefer to believe that I am better than that. The truth, of course, is more complicated. Maybe I married Jake because I couldn’t believe it was a coincidence that we’d ended up in the same area code, if not the same ZIP code. Maybe I married him because he engendered no feeling in me stronger than a cup of warm milk. If numbness was what I sought, marriage to Jake was one way to find it.
Whatever it was, by the time I walked up the aisle, train trailing and my grandmother’s veil firmly pinned in place, I had accepted what the fates had in store for me without, I thought, too much of a quibble. Yes, with Jake I could be both numb to the world and completely anonymous. I changed my name, and then for the first time, I felt I could breathe again. Liss Miller disappeared right before my eyes, replaced by Liss Larkin. I might not have known who she was, but neither did anyone else.
What do we know that we don’t know we know?
Of course, Nao Kao looked for me.
I like to read books to my nieces over Zoom on Sunday mornings, as they’re readying for bed and the week ahead. It’s a nice end to their weekend, and good English practice for little girls whose friends and schools and lives are otherwise conducted in Chinese. They are smart girls and their favorite book for several years wasThe Brain Is Kind of a Big Deal.Is it ever. What it can repress, repackage, and reveal is the mystery and essence of life. When I told my therapist that I had not consciously thought of Nao Kao in the nearly two decades that had passed, she gave me a funny look, a look that said maybe I was not being entirely truthful with either of us.
“How is it possible that you obliterated from your mind one of the most consequential relationships of your life?” Stacy asked me once too often.
The question, the entire theme, was beginning to annoy me.
“I wish I could explain it, Stacy. To you, so that you would stop asking, but more importantly to be able to explain it to myself.” Or Nao Kao, I added silently. Though he’d never prodded, I could only assume he must have the same question Stacy did.
“In hindsight, I can recognize that subconsciously, I never erased him. In hindsight, I realize that every time I aimed my camera and heard a faint voice remind me about the importance of not centering the subject, of checking the lighting, it was him. But that’s the subconscious.”
Stacy nodded thoughtfully and moved like she might respond, but I wasn’t finished.
“I’m no neuroscientist. I don’t know how our gray matter does what it does. But I do know that I could not have possibly spent years – years, Stacy, years! – working toward my doctorate in the same classrooms where he and I had spent so many hours together if I had not entirely eliminated all traces of him from conscious thought.”
She looked at me more seriously.
“You win,” she said quietly.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
After what seemedlike a year, text bubbles bouncing, stopping, starting again, the words never quite making their way pinging through space and onto my computer, Nao Kao replied to the news I had waited almost two decades to share.
“I don’t know what to say.” If anything bubbled beneath the surface of his utterly unshakable calm, he wasn’t showing it. His equanimity would have irritated me had I expected anything different.
“It’s ok. You don’t have to say anything.”
“I’m sorry. I probably should have written it into an email. Or, better yet, just kept it to myself. Some stories are better left untold, and if ever that was the case, I imagine it is now. It’s okay if you’re mad.”
“Or you can just pretend I never said anything. Telling you now is probably selfish, right? Like what’s the point, who does that?”
I was obviously rambling, texts pouring forth from my fingers blindly, my sight streaked with tears, my heart pounding. I couldn’t believe I had ever thought that this was the right thing to do. Or, as I had just texted Nao Kao, who does that? Liss Larkin, that’s who, and whatever it said about me, it was difficult to imagine him ever wanting anything more to do with me, as a friend or as a colleague.
I saw him beginning to type again, gave him time to consider his words. Looked at the time, and realized I had caught him at the beginning of his work day. Selfish, like I said. Whatever meetings and tasks were on his mind fifteen minutes ago were now most likely consigned to a to-do list for another day.
Text bubbles starting, three dots bouncing. Text bubbles stopping. I waited, trying to give him time to process in two minutes what I’d had two decades to digest. After waiting to see that whatever thought had begun to formulate itself in his head was not one he was prepared to share, I started again.
“It’s like this, Nao Kao. All this time, you’ve never said that you were angry, never said that you were hurt. But none of this made any sense. You were – and likely still are – one of the smartest people I’ve ever known. Surely you knew there was more than met the eye to what happened. And if we weren’t becoming friends again – I think we are, I hope we are –”
I did not know of another word to describe someone with whom so much life had been shared these past few months, but I let it go. Whatever we were, in the past or at the moment, needed no label.
“I just felt increasingly that I was lying to you to try to explain away the past with some vague whitewash of an explanation. So, I’ll apologize again, for everything. Especially how I just dumped this on you in the middle of your Wednesday morning.”
“Liss. Please. You don’t need to apologize to me.”
“I might not have known exactly what happened, but I understood enough, understood we didn’t have many options. For you to have gone through this by yourself, though, that is devastating.”
As I knew he would, Nao Kao understood intuitively. At the end of the day, there was a single option available to me, and I had taken it.
“What can I say, Nao Kao? There was a piper to be paid. A story as old as time, right?” I tried to remember what resentment felt like, but one of the small mercies of life is the way time can smooth even the deepest wounds until the sharp edge of memory is cottony soft. Whatever resentment had once found its home within me had long flown. I bore no grudge against Nao Kao, none.
“Maybe. But the memory of you stayed with me for a very long time.”
