Going Back

When she returns, we mostly sit in separate rooms, faces down

into our screens. I hear her leaving him

messages on WeChat. She won’t get out of bed, sleeps with her glasses on.

There is no gentle enough way to wake someone

in this much pain. Each time, she comes to with a start, awfulness

dawning—so I let her sleep.

Without us, the hours shift. I pull cold dishes from the fridge and watch

as the heat makes them weep. She doesn’t eat.

Bedside, she hands me her phone: there, in shaky footage, her father

walks in the courtyard, leaning hard

into his cane, city wind flapping his trousers like sails around his legs,

honing the edge of our missing so sharp it sings.

After dinner, we start on the usual walk toward my elementary school

and its park, its bright machinery,

but two blocks out she stops, turns around. Huí qù ba, she decides,

and so we do, turn and go back—

to the apartment stacked with boxes, her suitcase gaping.

We both know here is not what she meant.