Julia Hao

Can you wear down a memory? Return to it too many times until there’s nothing to return to. Do you understand that you can always come home? You already know how this will end. This wet cut. This open wound. When I was seven years old I was coming around to the idea of not crying anymore. “Malaki ka na,” Daddy said. You’re grown now. And whenever I felt the need to cry I would often keep swallowing the lump in my throat. Call it a mass. Call it something holier. Quietly, I wipe away my tears. But I had always been a sensitive kid. To cry now is to cry with shame. Did you know you could inherit that? The shame?

And I believe this comes from my mother. When she formed me in her womb, we were already a cathedral of shame. What could her mother say? To be a mother is to be a monster, but you never bite the fingers that fed you. What we do is look at our bodies and see how they share the same outline, even though a body without love is a body without shape. So when I inherit violence, what shape does that take? What, then, is a memory without a vignette? What if a vignette is all there is? In this body, everything has a price. To have a name is to have a bullet ready to be red. And a bullet without a body is a mother without a daughter. So just say that you never wanted me and that your mother never wanted you. Say that we are nothing but shame burning in a body. Then swallow me whole and quietly wipe away your tears. In the room where nobody looks, teach me how to hold my desire the way you held me in that one memory. No life beyond the vignette. Teach me to hold desire like there is no shame coming to wear it down. In the room where nobody returns to, show me where I can keep my desire. Help me turn it into memory. Open this when you need me the most.

Julia Hao is an undergraduate at Ateneo de Manila University majoring in creative writing, with a minor in gender studies. Her literary works and art have been published by the University of the Philippines’ Likhaan journal, Gantala Press, Novice Magazine PH, HEIGHTS Ateneo, the GUIDON, manywor(l)ds, and en*gendered. She is also the Founding President of Spaces for Women’s Art and Narratives (SWAN). For more, you can linger in her Instagram, @juliaavhao.