Smog: Working through Heartbreak in Beijing

The grieving never stops.  That much I can tell you.
With certainty.

It hits you when you see their name…
on an old email, a saved text message, in archived news articles, a pen they owned…

or get a whiff of their scent…
on an old nightgown, hinted at by flowers, or carried by the wind.

I am back in China.  My own version of hell.
And yet, it is where I remember my mother the most.  It is where I am loneliest.

There is nothing but grey outside my window.  The pollution trapping me indoors where the air is stale and dry.  I want to flee – to breathe… but there is nowhere to go.  I am imprisoned by the concrete smog that erases everything but her absence.  Everything but the pain.

I was here the last time she was alive for my birthday.  Away from her.  She was an ocean away while I was here for a long, homogenous month of work that has blurred into a black hole.  I don’t recall what “news” we covered then – at the end of the day, it all merges into vacuous memory.  All I remember is that it was the last time my mother was alive on my birthday – and I wasn’t with her.

I sat in front of a small café on a side-street off the Forbidden City to treat myself to coffee and a bowl of noodles.  For long life, and all that traditional Chinese birthday malarkey.   What I got was dull caffeine in tepid milk, and a spoonful of instant noodles drowning in tasteless broth.  There was one prawn in the bowl – that I remember clearly.  It was the only splash of colour in an otherwise dismal dish.

My mother kept me company as I ate.  I rang her on the phone.  Across oceans just to chit-chat.  It’s the clearest memory I have of ever doing that.  Ringing my mother just to chat.  I could hear the sadness in her voice – the sadness she felt because she instinctively knew her daughter was in pain.  There were no words for it then – this “pain.”  I was just suffocating in grey, and surrounded by loneliness.  I cried like I hadn’t cried in ages.  A solitary figure huddled on a dirty sidewalk, shivering in an old coat, sipping stale coffee and flat soup while an unintelligible world whirled all around.  I held on to my mother’s voice then like a lifeline.

She was my lifeline.
And now, she is gone.

I cannot tell you what it’s like to be back in China – a place my mother has never been – but where each crowded corner reverberates with her overwhelming absence.

I am an orphan now.  And China, at this moment – with its pollution, its noise, its cold hidden heartbeat, and its muted impersonal character – is my own version of hell.