Susan L. Lin
Paved roadways run across my body like a complex system of exposed veins and arteries. Over the years, they’ve carried you from one milestone in life to the next.
By bus or by car.
On bike or on foot.
But our relationship, as it currently stands, is unsustainable. None of this will last forever.
1994: The first time you ever saw snow. Microscopic flakes fell from the sky and melted as soon as they touched your tongue. They melted as soon as they touched me, too.
There’s no way to sugarcoat the truth of what I’m about to say.
I’m drowning. That writing has been on the wall for decades.
You already know. You’ve been watching, wide-eyed, since you were a small child.
1997: A rare ice storm left all of us shivering. School canceled for the day, your parents’ raised voices shaking frozen water from the tree branches outside. By then, you were used to their shouting matches. But that night, you heard glass shattering for the first time. The model ship your uncle once constructed was no longer safe inside its bottle-home.
When the water finally claims every surface of my body, inch by rising inch, I’ll sink further below sea level.
Meanwhile, the ones who remain will slowly adapt the only way they know how.
1999: Your mother drove you to your new school in a Chrysler minivan so old it had racked up more miles than you ever will. She was behind on car payments and your father’s last child support check bounced, but you knew you weren’t supposed to know about that. You also knew that when the two of them fled their homeland after the Vietnam War, this wasn’t exactly the sanctuary they’d been hoping for. In the hallways between classes, everyone joked the world would end on New Year’s Eve. You secretly hoped they were right.
It may take time for evolution to do its thing.
You won’t even notice the changes at first.
But then, as the overflowing bayou envelops you, you’ll realize you’re more than prepared to ride the waves.
2001: The world didn’t end, but middle school did. One week later, the flood Allison left in her wake pulled me under for days. You watched the water creep up to the doorstep, the taste of calamity on your lips.
Survival mode will kick in. Probably sooner than you think.
One day, you’ll discover in amazement that you’ve begun taking on boat-like properties: You have rudders where your ears once were. Your arms are beginning to look suspiciously like oars.
2005: You moved an hour away after graduation, the equivalent of leaving my kneecap for my ribcage. What came next? An Ivy League university. The cheerleading squad. A white boyfriend who bought you beautiful jewelry and always made you laugh. Everything the media had conditioned you to want since you were born. But even then, new storms kept coming ashore.
You’ll adapt, you realize. You’ll evolve. Maybe you’ll sprout sails that billow in the wind like a pair of wings. You’ve always wished you could fly.
But you’re all fools if you think any of this is a viable solution.
2011: I was parched for most of that summer, my normally dewy epidermis brittle and flaky. You went west in search of a graduate degree while fires blazed all around us.
In the future, if you return to visit me, you’ll think how wonderful it must feel to be a submarine. After all, they can still get close to all the familiar landmarks you remember from your childhood.
Look, there’s the state park where you used to hike with your dad, back when you still spoke to him! And isn’t that the pizza parlor you used to frequent with your friends after your parents’ ugly divorce? Oh, and let’s not forget the mall where you were window shopping when you found out you got a full ride to one of the top universities in the country.
It will all be underwater by then, of course, and none of the boats on the surface will see what’s lurking beneath.
2017: Harvey knocked, then forced his way in when I wouldn’t open the door. That was the first time I thought the future might be arriving even more quickly than advertised. You watched in horror from the West Coast, where the weather was bone-dry. Where, in mere seconds, wildfires ate away at trees my brothers and sisters spent years cultivating. And that white boyfriend, the one you married, the one who made you laugh? It turns out he made you cry, too.
The future doesn’t have to be this way.
Our final forms aren’t set in stone. The window is shrinking, but there’s still time to carve out a different tomorrow.
2021: Uri arrived in middle of a global pandemic. My skin no longer glowed. My body literally freezing. So many left powerless. The only accessory your ex gave you that you still wore was a silk ribbon wrap bracelet threaded through an anchor charm, the word unsinkable stamped on the aluminum. It was on your wrist when you finally made contact with your mother two thousand miles away, crying tears of joy with the knowledge that you were both still alive on this planet together, at least for another day.
