Storytime Tapestry Newsletter

The newsletter devoted to spreading love and cultural awareness around the world.

Jan 20, 2007

Wonders of the Orient – A Jastine Leng Column

The Mechanical Rabbit

Jastine Leng

Don’t go another way along the boundary

Until you see the scarlet division

Don’t abandon the longing for fantasy

Until you hold enough sensation

I could hardly understand why Eric passed me the above note in music class. Anyway, my heart was, at that moment, crawled with withered vines of fear, dank and drab. I dashed him a look out of the corner of my eye. “Will he know what I am thinking about now?”

For the whole summer he has been like a ghost, visiting my dream every night. I grew nervous yet blank. In the day I did a variety of things to drive away his shadow: I pressed my eyes on pages of enigmas; I played boring yet employing PC games; I even ran long the tracks, my arms and legs out of control, my feet striking the ground robotically. But when darkness dropped I felt so helpless; he came to me the moment I shut my eyelids. My dream had been obscure and cozy, though I could neither see his handsome face nor grasp any detail. He was like a thin plastic string, wrapping around me tighter and tighter until I was totally suffocated. I awoke in the icy midnight, gulping for breath and sitting as a ramrod until dawn.

One brick of my pyramid began to wobble and the rest would soon collapse. I realized that my life has become smelly because of him; I was not quite myself and I had long ago lost my bearings. I’d rather not have met him, but I knew he would surface at the twist of my fate, just as being shot by a poisonous arrow in the heart when I was wandering in the wildness.

Nonetheless, I had always hoped to see him. I felt more and more like a victim of a nasty masquerade.

At that time, I often looked back at Cathie. Thinking of her, in the hot, stingy air of June, was like sipping a fresh cup of green tea.

Sunshine spilled down on her face at a delicate angle, her pupils manifesting a patch of crystal clearness, vivid and tranquil. I once had the same stare, I believed.

Her eyes encountering mine, she smiled and stuck out her tongue. I locked my gaze upon her unflinchingly, asking, “Why are your eyes always full of brightness? Can you lend me some? Sunshine makes feel dissolved.”

She grinned, shy and sweet. “Yes, we can make a deal on the sine qua non of a piece of your possession.”

I was stunned. “What?”

She fixed her eyes attentively on me. “A story,” she murmured, “I simply want your story.”

“I don’t have any story, sorry.” I shrugged.

“You do have.” Cathie waved her forefinger in the air, as if it were a wand. “Everyone has his own stories when he created problems on problems.”

Then Cathie told me her story. She had been in horrible relationship with a strange guy. Not only did he like to dance around the problems, he also feared commitment.

“Here’s a snapshot of him: twenty, goes to Rice University, charming, intelligent, rather good-looking, good natured, and a staunch Christian.” Cathie said.

And a sketch of herself: twenty, also goes to Rice, beautiful with large black eyes, half-Chinese-half-American, artistic, in control, sharp, witty, and atheistic.

I realized the moment Cathie finished her words that they never seemed to mesh correctly. Yet, the old adage goes that love works in mysterious ways...even if it is one-sided. She had been head-over-heels in love. She had been so in love that she actually had been becoming more Christian day by day. He wanted to share the joys of believing in God with her. Thinking that becoming a convert might make him love her, she had been losing herself to something she might not truly believe in. the worse part was that he knew she loved him. There was no beating around the bush anymore. Even still, he did not commit to anything. It had been over a year and his true intentions were still not on the table. Sure, he had said that he liked her, dropping bits and pieces of signals like cookie crumbs. But where was the action? He continued to lead her by the nose in this hopeless circular pen. It had been over a year now. She was tired. I was tired. I was tired of listening to her moan on the other side of the continent. She could not step off of this merry-go-round. His friends were screaming for him to stop this ride.

“So who is the problem here? Who is responsible for my pain?” Cathie asked me suddenly. “He surely takes part in this emotional mess. It seems that he is only using me to make himself feel needed, or wanted. I always consider myself to be a contemporary girl, like you do. We get things done in our own way. We dress how we want to, talk when we want to, go where we want to, and, most importantly, think how we want to. But when it comes to romance...doesn’t every girl, deep inside, want the thrill of being chased? So now, the roles are reversed. I have been chasing that mechanical rabbit around the race. It’s impossible to sink my teeth into that thing. Because, well, it’s mechanical. So, at the end of the race, I am dead tired, disappointed, and hungry.”

Cathie gave a shallow sigh and went on. “I didn’t intend to present my story in black and white. He has his reasons. He might be insecure. He might be very religious. He’s just not ready? On the other side of the fence, I am looking a bit lost and just as responsible for my pain. I found comfort in consistency although this consistency was heartbreaking. Danger holds in the immutable. Remember Yeat’s Easter 1916? A poem about the Easter Rebellion in Ireland. It rings true of the human need to hold on the something, anything. Whatever, we are at this standstill. I could continue to pine. Or I could do something about it. I had approached him multiple times. I gave him time to answer. The result was a vague, twisty response that guaranteed no stable relationship in the near future. Finally I screamed and let it go.”

“Are you enjoying the drama? If it hurt that much, why didn’t you just stop the problems in time? ” I dared to ask her.

“That is just what I want to convey to you.”

I felt my head had been soaked in an icy torrent: Why did we continue to torture ourselves when we, for the most part, knew the result? Had acceptance been so difficult? Actually I had been creating my own problems. I could just throw up my arms to Eric and say, “<curse word> this, I’m out of here.” But, too easily, I tended to become the problem. And this problem could affect everyone else, causing others to be negative, biased, and just as stubborn. Cathie gave me just one example of drama running wild in the city. And I needn’t follow her. If I could get my head out of the sand, I knew I could move on just like the hundreds, thousands, millions of people out there in the world doing the same thing. Cathie had moved on, too. She could see that the beauty of pain was just, in the end, a paper flower. It looks pretty but smells like nothing. If we see it as beauty, then it will always plague us. We are all too obsessed with the beautiful. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. And that’s the way life goes. If you can’t hold on, why not let it go?

 Jastine Leng

 ghoul_pink_fantasy@yahoo.com