Weihui Lu

Chrysalis

On a moving train, a crowded Friday afternoon. It is summer: she in a white tank top, faded pink capris, ponytail. Flirting with her reflection in the window, she is alternately surprised by her beauty and disappointed with a lack of it. Today the balance tipped towards a smile.

A pale face glides over the sweltering urban landscape. Dark eyes of ungaugable size, widening, drawing smaller and farther away. Light mascara on graffiti brick. Small coral mouth tucked in at corners imprinted on wooden slats, splintering. Wisps of dark hair curling down-soft over ear, the unpierced lobe, the plaques falling behind, infinitesimally small and then smaller.

The man two feet away, behind the hand-printed pole, his eyes straining away from hers. He looks like a perfect replica of the half-forgotten elementary school teacher who had taught her backgammon and half of her current corpulent vocabulary, who, after graduation, had presented her with a leatherbound set and his phone number (which she lost in the subsequent summer to kitchen redecoration).

His face is as smooth as his skull, twenty years younger than memory's unflattering portrait. He is still bald. He is shorter than what she remembers, but she has grown. Is it him? Does he remember her? Is that why, for the next half hour, he stares unabashed?

She thinks of liver-spotted hands that had once lingered after a handshake, of the first lessons in handshakes – squeeze hard, let the other palm know of your confidence – and lets out a breath she does not know she was holding when he steps out, carried away by his own lack of motion. Turning away indifferent. A hand on silken collarbone that collapses the act. A tiny pink tutu, naked legs, shivering in an empty classroom before a presentation on the life of a famous ice skater.

What we see in strangers

She stood with her weight displaced equally to each leg, hips at equilibrium. Pinstriped capris, studded belt, studded eyebrow. Even the mouth pierced. Yet only her face, wordlessly, stated the truth. It is useless to describe the tone of diluted mercury that composed her irises, the angle and pathway of the lines that stroked her cheeks. In them there was a faded beauty, true – but if her features were a mask, as faces often are, it was a mask made striking by its confession of edges and dimension, its acknowledgment of the skin beneath.

She never looked up. Leaning lightly against the pillar, she remained statuesque even as the train arrived in its gust of rattling track and tepid wind. Her cropped brown hair whipped up, its gray underside exposed in streaks. It settled across her eyes; her hand did not rise in reply. As if even her own body were an element of the external sphere, which she was merely visiting, or perhaps wrongly imprisoned in – the resignation was both condescending and weary. As if a clear vision is worthless when there is nothing of interest to see.

I could not name her. No word sufficiently elusive, allusive. She was no mother, no wife. Her eyes said she needed nothing apart from velocity. She ran from a splitting seam within herself by dodging its outward flays and patchwork. A child, beaten? Cheeks swollen from a father's fist? No; her crossed arms implied self-infliction. The circular scars on her arms resemble cigarette burns. The wrists are turned away, scars unannounced. Or perhaps a quieter mutilation: deliberately meaningless sleep deprivation, erratic eating habits, a tendency of lovers who clasp her breast in their jaws until blood tangs over teeth, too thirsty to stay until morning. And what began this, a few contemptuous glances during recess, the boy who failed to make her whole, the mother's gift of a weighted heritage?

Her legs were covered in down, unshaven but in no way neglected. The clench of her calves as she shifted was a defiant masculinity. A defiant youth. Her body seemed detached from her face by decades of distance, too resilient to show the weather – so that her eyes instead fanned forth crows feet, her cheeks and brow crosshatched with thin folds. Even as she stepped into the next train, the smudged glass sliding between us, I could not find the courage to speak. In the torpid aftermath of departure, the question passed my ears only: when did 'I am different' become 'I am broken'?

Weihui Lu has been recently published or is forthcoming in Neon, Soundzine, and the Kenyon Review. She is the Art Editor of Mimesis (www.mimesispoetry.com) and blogs at http://quietlyplease.blogspot.com