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There’s someone in my bed.
It was quiet, yet the soft, lofty sounds of someone else’s sleeping breaths felt like they echoed through my skull. Furthermore, there was a light in the room, almost as if a torch had been lit, from a smooth, finely cut hole in the wall, pouring in moonlight.
I lifted my bed’s covers.
It was that scholar boy, Huo Huan, the one whose family asked for my hand in marriage, the one who had no life skills.
I remembered earlier as I undressed for bed, when I felt suddenly paranoid, as if being watched.
A sickening feeling blossomed within me and I ran out of bed to alert one of my family’s servants.
He was shaken awake, and revealed his thief’s tool.
It was vile, despicable, and most importantly, it was from a Taoist.
An immortal hermit, even.
My mind was full of thoughts of He Xiangu, my father Wu, and my various books of study. The conversation happening regarding Huan and his escapades escaped my mind, listless, and I made no effort to speak or show reaction.
As he made his way to exit, both of our minds were focused on that chisel, from the way he made sure to get it back.
A servant informed me that he had taken my fenghuang hairpin as well.
Violated.
“This robber’s tool… get rid of it,” I said.
“But it was our matchmaker!” he said with a chuckle, and wore it around his waist like a belt, already looking proud of his treasure.
I snatched it from his side, shoving it into a fold of fabric in my clothes. “No.”
“No?”
I scowled. “You stole something from me. And now, I unto you.” I made a move as if to break it.
I never did.
I was to be married to him.
I had no feelings for him other than disgust.
After the fiasco with our mothers, how else could I even begin to feel except for the start of something awful? Already, the embarrassment made me want to rot away into mush for the bugs to eat at the thought of what had been said. She made me feel violated. Yet, I paid my respects to her. Most of my time was spent alone and lost in thought.
I kept thinking about the chisel.
I kept thinking about the hermit it was received from.
I keep thinking…
I needed to get out of here.
When he was born, I felt nothing.
When he cried, I felt nothing.
When he suckled at my breast, cooing, entirely dependent on me, I felt nothing.
I entrusted my son to a nurse.
I couldn’t bear to look at him.
A mother was supposed to feel warmth and love for their child.
I felt a hollow space chiseled out of my heart.
I would carve out a hole in the room I was shut in to look at the moonlight sometimes. To feel the night’s air on my skin. To see the reflected light shining upon leaves and water.
The bamboo looked beautiful.
I was given freedom, but the family’s definition of freedom meant nothing to me.
If it was truly freedom, I would be long gone, blood full of metal, mind free of any inhibitions that kept me chained to the earth. Flying into a new world, a world where I could do whatever I wanted and go wherever I wanted to go, to be living for myself and no one else.
I did not want to stay.
I did not want to be on this earth, if it meant being stuck here.
I read my books on taoist immortals until the words blended together and my brain felt numb.
As my body’s strength waned and my hunger, once roaring and violent, became quelled and meek, I felt closer to He Xiang than ever before.
Huo Huang checked up on me many times.
He was loving towards me, as much as I hated it.
It didn’t matter. I felt little towards him other than feeling violated. What word could describe a boy who fell in love at first sight with one he had never met other than “foolish?”
It was always an idealized version of myself in his mind.
I knew what I needed to do, and how to do it.
The thought of being dead never made me feel more alive.
“We’ve been fortunate and loving in our relationship for eight years up to this point,” I rehearsed.
“Now it seems that we will be parting for a long time, with only a short while left together, but there’s nothing to be done about it!”
The words felt vile on the tongue, fake and insincere, but I felt giddy.
The chisel was mine.
I tied my hair into loops, using the chisel as a makeshift hairpin.
Not unlike what he had stolen from me.
Was it an immortal’s path to abandon their family?
Leaving behind a lover and a child, was I not unlike my father?
It didn’t matter.
I was getting what I wanted.
And I understood.
As they buried bamboo, I walked along the clouds.