Six Stills, A Memoir

The following pages are excerpts of the first and fifth section from my memoir project for my Milton course. Using Milton’s writings as a guide, I analyze the “stills” of my relationship with my father, faith, and previous romantic relationships.

I. “Muddy Pool” of the Past Stills

I didn’t know how much I needed John Milton until now. My father has always been the patriarch looming over our family—commanding respect even though he never extended the same to his wife or children. He was a Buddhist but converted to Christianity when I was seven. His conversion transformed him, not in a positive light, but one that buries him in fear and arrogance. He trusts in God, and his faith translates into fear. In every conversation, or rather every filibustering sermon, he preaches about the Word of God. He preaches about his views on politics, religion, and holistic healing. Every other conversation, unrelated to faith or opposing to his beliefs, he deems trivial and inaccurate in his books, and he strikes down every of my feelings, every one of my disagreements. I cannot voice my own opinion without angering him. I cannot be sad; according to him, sadness is evil since it robs attention away from praising God’s grace. When I was younger, I used to bear it, locking up my lips, only responding in a whisper, “Okay, baba.” Until recently, my sister, brother, and I stopped saying, “Okay.” We began to speak back and to point out the flaws in his arguments and moralizing speeches. Can I speak back? Why do I feel ashamed every time I argue back? Growing up, when I would visit my friends’ homes, it would feel quite strange when their parents asked me questions because my father never did. I didn’t know how to respond to their questions or engage in small conversation.

After reading the fruitful exchanges in Paradise Lost, I noticed the absence of dialogue on my part when I interacted with my father. Karen L. Edwards describes the moment when Adam wonders about creation and the importance of dialogue: Raphael “figures out the structure of the universe as he talks with Adam (114). Like the characters in Milton’s poem, I seek dialogue. I cannot understand what my father means or come to any conclusions if he does not allow me to engage in the conversation.

***

Last summer, by the unpredictable touch of chaos, something unthinkable happened. My mother was in our dim kitchen, shades drawn to keep out the unrelenting heat radiating from the California sun, when she yelled in pain. I came into the kitchen and saw her holding wads of heavily blood-stained paper towels; she accidentally dropped a white ceramic bowl, and the sharp shards cut the base of her palm. I saw the Kyoto grapes sitting in the strainer, perfectly bulbous shaped where the nightshade peel slips off easily, on the counter—she was washing grapes for my father. I don’t have my license, so I implored my father to drive my mother to the nearest Urgent Care, but he responded, “Just put honey on it.” I pleaded, “She has an open wound—that’s not going to work.” He shot back, “Don’t talk about things you don’t understand; I’ve done my research, have you?” I kept thinking: What the hell. Can you not let your ego be the center of attention when mom is literally profusely bleeding? Eventually, my brother drove my mother to the Urgent Care. When my mother came back, I tried to talk to her about Baba’s behavior, but she told me not to worry about it. I was furious at him, but I didn’t confront him, and I still haven’t. I don’t think I will. It’s exhausting trying to reason with him.

***

As I’m reflecting on this event, I think back to what Dr. Susannah Mintz said about standing on the precipice—the space where I’m left to my own resources to decide what to do next. In that moment, my father chose himself over my mother. His decision launches me onto my precipice where I must make decisions that I’ve been trying to bury. Should I start therapy? I started going this semester. Should I learn to forgive him? I haven’t figured that one out yet. How do I stop associating faith with my father? That’s extremely difficult. When I started reading Milton, I realized, he might be someone who can help. Everyone I talk to about my father, even my own mother and siblings, cannot help to mend the emptiness in my body. I haven’t unlocked what that emptiness is yet—what missing piece is causing me so much pain. The obvious answers are my father and faith, but Milton’s lines encircle my mind: “To morrow ere fresh morning streak the east / With first approach of light, we must be ris’n” (404). He’s pushing me to look beyond the initial words on the page, to see what isn’t obvious in the light. I shouldn’t accept things at face value. He encourages me to do the labor for the truth even when it feels unattainable. As author William Makepeace Thackeray poses in Vanity Fair about Becky Sharp: “Those who like may peep down under waves that are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling” (812). Do I dare look under the “water line” for the truth? I want to find some sort of truth about my father; I have to submerge myself into the “streaming fountain” and wade through its waters (Areopagitica 952). I just don’t know what I’m looking for yet.

When I read Lycidas, I discovered that my father paralleled the shepherd or clergy who worked for “their bellies sake” and “Creep and intrude, and climb into the fold” (114-115). I felt literary goosebumps when I read those lines. In trying to feed us knowledge about faith, he was filling his own stomach with a sense of relief in doing his part as a filial Christian. The fear of God drives him toward God but away from us. Milton is more of a father figure than my own is. I’ve never had a father figure; he’s present in our house trying to influence my thoughts, but he isn’t there as a father. Milton is on the page, and he’s comforting. He’s a guide during this tumultuous time of my life. My little sister, Ava, is back home, and she contacted me to tell me about my father yelling at her for disagreeing with him. He’s a monarch in that I feel his presence even when I’m 2,819.3 miles away. I still guilty for not contacting him and not wanting to speak to him.

When I read the first couple books of Paradise Lost, Milton’s own rendition of the creation story and perhaps something more, I felt his guiding hands in the lineation, in the enjambments. He’s walking me through what I’ve been told and read, the creation story, but the nuances in his text encourage different pathways of thinking and reflecting on my life. The idea of “breaks” lingers. John Creaser speaks about Milton’s achievement of order and freedom in his lines: “Milton’s strictly disciplined verse, also enjoy the readiest freedom, for the tighter the form, the more telling is any variation, the more resilient the departure and return” (83). What I love about poetry is the discipline on part of the poet and reader—there is a duty on both to take breaks and pauses for intentionality and understanding to peek through the windows of the lines. Creaser analyzes the effect of Milton’s line breaks: “for the pause of suspension is also a pause of suspense, a moment of conjecture” (90). The line breaks force the reader into taking a moment to reflect on the meaning of a certain anticipation or separation. Creaser’s words spark my thinking of breaks in relationships and friendships. I’ve always thought about breaks in the sense that they are the impending doom of the ending of something. Just like the pauses in end-stopped lines, the pauses grant room for reflection, which is what I don’t always want to do, but I know I need. I want to be more comfortable with the idea of distance from those who hurt me.

VI. Autumn Stills

After the end of my relationship with K, I felt empty. I couldn’t escape the feeling of pain festering like an open wound refusing to close. I longed to close and lock away the pain, so I turned to my previous ex, A, as a distraction, a vessel to pour in the love that I felt for A, desperate not to lose it.

It was the first newspaper meeting of the fall semester; excitement was brewing in the air because our little, homey room tucked behind the post office was for once, crowded. We brought in extra chairs, but there were still students standing around, waiting to hear pitches and to pitch their own. Each of the editors wrote their pitches on the tri-fold whiteboard; each section written in a different color expo marker. I chose the magenta marker, and I jotted my pitches down. In the sea of faces, I recognized some, but for the most part, many were strangers. We began the meeting promptly at 9p.m. with the editors introducing themselves. Forming a semi-circle in the front of the room, we took turns pitching. As I stood, I saw movement by the doorway, and my heart dropped. I locked eyes with my ex, A, someone I had not seen in a year and a half. He stared at me, and I stared back for a couple seconds; the voices of the editors pitching turned into blurred background noise, and I couldn’t look away. My heart began protesting and pounding quickly against my will. My fight and flight response activated; I thought to myself: How am I going to pitch my articles next in front of my ex? I was already nervous; I didn’t need the extra layer of anxiety. He was one of the photographers for the newspaper, but I didn’t prepare myself for seeing him again after all this time.

Before Milton’s Satan, in the disguise of a serpent, approaches Eve to tempt her, he is bewitched by her goodness: “her heav’nly form / Angelic, but more soft, and feminine, / Her graceful innocence” (9.457-459). In a trance, he stares at Eve before he compels Eve to sin; he teeters on the edge of changing his mind, but he breaks out and his “hot Hell that always in him burns” (9.467). Satan’s pause beforehand is the calm before the chaos of expulsion; in the moment when my eyes met A’s, it was the first of many decisions that I had to make—would I let him back into my life? I gave into the temptation of familiarity.

It was the fall semester of my sophomore year when our paths crossed. Dressed for the brisk November air, I bundled up in wool socks and my beige infinity scarf. We were both part of Christian Fellowship, and after a club meeting as he was leaving to get a late-night meal at one of the dining areas on campus, I asked A, “Would you like some company?” He responded, “Sure.” I sat across from him, and we spent the night talking away; conversation flowed gently like a fountain, ripples of laughter and smiles peeked onto the surface. I think back to the lines in MacNeice’s poem: “The camels crossed the miles of sand / That stretched around the cups and plates; / The desert was their own, they planned / To portion out the stars and dates” (16-19). Like the lovers in a coffee shop, we sat at the rectangular table where we exchanged childhood stories and introduced ourselves, slowly revealing bits of our soul and desires. We quickly plunged into each other’s arms; our first kiss happened on our first date. As I look back on our relationship, much of it was physical. Desire consumed us, but it was the transient pleasure that soon diminished on his end. He told me he loved me after two weeks, and I believed him. Soon after, he ended things because he still harbored feelings for his ex.

Ironically, I had feelings for my ex, A, now. We started talking again; I broke the ice, stating that I wanted to put the past behind us, so we could work together. I needed photos for my project, and he offered to do a photoshoot with me. Old feelings were resurfacing, but I ignored the warning signs because I wasn’t feeling sad about K when I was in his company. I focused my attention on moving on and refused to wallow in my sadness. During the photoshoot, he photographed the books, and he offered to take portrait shots. Absolutely drenched in anxiety, I cloned indifference. I sat on the couch with a beige blanket draped over it, and I smiled with all my might. I could feel my hands shaking, but I held them down. I could feel him staring at me, exposed in the eye of his camera lens. I felt naked. He took many shots; he captured stills of my anxiety. As he held up his portable lighting device and his camera, he apologized, “Sorry, if the light is too bright and fixed on your eyes.” I said, “It’s fine.” But I was the antithesis of fine.      When we were dating, A would always say, “I can read your eyes; I know when you’re about to say something or when you’re thinking about something.” As I sat on the couch, I was in front of three pairs of eyes: his eyes as my ex, his eyes as a creative photographer, and the eyes of his camera. I was being watched, surveilled like Adam and Eve in the Garden. I had to create the facade that I was comfortable in front of the camera and his watchful eyes. I mistook romantic feelings for fear; I conflated desire for closeness and fear of being exposed and hurt. They are interwoven in my life. I was hurting myself thinking it was the pathway towards distracting myself from the pain of feeling empty.

After Eve has an unsettling dream where Satan enters her space and urges her to eat the forbidden fruit, she tells Adam. Adam tries to comfort Eve into believing the dream was innocuous: “That what in sleep thou didst abhor to dream, / Waking thou never wilt consent to do” (5.120-121). Our practical Adam draws the distinction between intentions: in her dreams, she has no control, but in waking, she holds the ability to make her own decisions. His matter-of-fact tone offers solace to Eve, but his answer isn’t what she needs because he didn’t live in the dream, nor does he possess the full knowledge of evil before he eats the fruit. But Milton outlines how the lines between dreams and reality become hazy when just the needed amount of desire is dusted in. Satan taps into Eve’s desire for knowledge; he unlocks her peeking curiosity and plants the seeds of temptation of partaking in the fruit.

A invited me to his Halloween party, and I originally said no, but as I thought about it some more, at 10 p.m., I texted: “What is your address?” When I say “thought,” I mean I thought about him and what he would think of me. Would he want to be with me if I was more “fun” and less serious and religious? Stressed out with schoolwork and my personal life, I chased after what I thought would make me happy and distracted. With two drinks in my system, my housemate S and I walked over to his house. Practicing indifference on the cold, moonlit walk there, I prepared myself to be aloof. I put on a disguise.

Disguises ran rampant in Paradise Lost. Satan takes on the form of the serpent, but he isn’t the only one. The angels can be read as being disguises of goodness because they are imperfect, yet they view themselves as morally righteous servants of God. In Book VIII, Adam sings praises about Eve to the Angel Raphael: “Her loveliness, so absolute she seems / And in herself complete, so well to know / Her own, that what she wills to do or say, / Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best;” (8.547-550). Adam compliments Eve’s mind and morals, rather than just her physical beauty. His words are evidence of his love for her. But Raphael is wary with his “contracted brow” after hearing Adam’s superfluous praise of Eve and warns him to not overpraise Eve: “be not diffident / Of Wisdom, she deserts thee not, if thou / Dismiss not her when most thou need’st her nigh, / By attributing overmuch to things / Less excellent” (8.562-565). In Raphael’s mind, he is worried that Adam is not exercising “Wisdom” when he elevates Eve. He believes that Adam should exert his role as the patriarch. Raphael’s disguise of goodness is unintentional because he cannot see his shortcomings as the notions of patriarchy are engraved in his thinking. But Adam does not take in Raphael’s advice and remarks, “So much delights me as those graceful acts […] From all her words and actions mixed with love” (8.601-602). We witness Adam’s refusal to accept Raphael’s advice against praising Eve. He sees past Raphael’s disguise.

The minute I stepped into his house, I felt jolted awake and sober as I walked through the unknown woods of drunk people in their costumes. The DJ was playing upbeat music, and bodies filled every inch of his house. I could barely maneuver my way through rooms without feeling suffocated. A walked up to me and S and welcomed us, letting us know that we could ask him if we needed anything. He gave me a half-hug. This was the first college party that I’ve ever been to in my life. With a camera strapped around his neck, he asked if we wanted our picture taken. We made our way to the stairwell, and he snapped a photo. I cling onto the Corona beer bottle for dear life, it was something to do with my uncomfortable hands. I didn’t feel like myself. At the end of the night, I shed my disguise and walked home.

We were in my room. We sat on the floor; he sat with his back against the wall; I sat across from him, my back against the side of my bed. Our legs stretched in front side by side, untouched. He reached his hand out to pull me up. We stood up; we almost kissed; we leaned into each other. I noticed the shape of his lips. I caught a whiff of his familiar scent, a crisp autumn evening. We pulled apart.

A couple weeks later, I knew that our quasi-friendship wasn’t working for me. The fog of distractions and disguises lifted, and I told him that I had come to a decision.

We sat on my bed, and I uttered,

 “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I don’t think we should be friends anymore because I can’t stop thinking about you.”

He smiled and looked down, responding with, “Good things?

“Yes.”

Satisfied with the ego boost, he replied, “That was unexpected.”

I inquired, “What did you think I was going to say?”

“I’m not going to say anymore because we aren’t friends. I’m not going to say.”

Many of conversations went along that path where we each struggled to protect ourselves from letting the other witness what we hid in our bodies, daring only to speak in cryptic phrases. As if we were speaking two different languages in broken cadences, I deciphered through his body language, and he read my eyes. Did he think that I would throw myself at him, agreeing to engage in a meaningless, no strings-attached relationship, purely based on sex? Somehow the conversation maneuvered to him talking about kissing some other woman, and he smiled as he said, “Sorry.” He thought I already knew. In that moment, I read his eyes, his body language. His uncontainable ego, which smiled at my pain. Aloof, he didn’t care that I didn’t want to be his friend. It wasn’t a conversation because he wouldn’t let me finish my points. He turned to leave and walked out of the apartment. I wiped my bed with an alcohol wipe, trying to wipe away the outside germs and the smell of him, woods and autumn intermingled.

My sleep was restless that night following the ending of our friendship. Tossing and turning in my sheets, my nightmares plagued me; I drifted between the state of waking and sleeping with the feeling of panic and loss pervading my body. My bed wasn’t a refuge. Rotting in my own heartbreak, I had my answer.

There were superfluous reasons why he and I didn’t work out as a couple or friends. We never had a full conversation; they were half conversations where he refused to tell me what he was thinking about or what he wanted to say. Like an art restorer, I had to paint in the missing words and to pay attention to the appearance on the canvas of his frame. His words and my projections blended.

I’ve realized that I’ve been dating men who possess familiar qualities of my father. K had his religious devotion and insecurity; A had his steadfast love for his ego, arrogance, and insecurity. I looked for the familiar. The familiar disguises itself as safety, much like Satan when he approaches Eve in the form of a harmless serpent or when the Angel Raphael tries to drill notions of patriarchy into Adam’s mind. W. Gardner Campbell argues that in Book IV, Eve tempts Satan in the pause before he tempts her. The malleability of temptation mirrors reciprocity because Eve has to “accept” the temptation for Satan’s mischievous plan to work. Eve trusts Satan in the moments before she eats the apple. I clung onto the familiarity of past relationships, and my exes tempted the desire living in my body: the want of love and attention. I was tempted to eat the fruit of fleeting intimacy. But there was a loneliness in the people I was attracted to, and two lonely bodies coming together do not bode well.