If I were Echo, I would just leave Narcissus and go elsewhere—

No you wouldn’t.

If you were Echo and you loved Narcissus, you would never leave. If you were Echo and you knew that you were forever trapped without your own voice and you loved a man too vain to see past himself, you would not leave. Where would you go?

If you were Echo and you could find it in yourself to simply leave, then you aren’t Echo. You could not even begin to understand the pain of silence and loving someone who could not truly love you. Not as you are

 

There is a little girl lurking just out the corner of your eye. She wears a pink, fluffy dress and her hair is tied into pigtails, the way mothers lovingly tame wild hair into neat little braids.

You don’t remember when she started to show up. It could have been when you moved out of your parents’ little apartment to room with your friend in an even tinier apartment. It could have been when you sneaked out one night to go clubbing, wandering around Central with nothing but rumours and faint hope clutched in your cold hands. It could even have been when you were seven, and you tried to cut your hair with child-safety scissors that made you look like a scarecrow for a month.

There is a little girl lurking just out the corner of your eye. She hardly ever speaks, and you hardly speak either. She has never done anything to you. She just stands in the distance, looking at you. Looking, looking, looking. When your eyes meet in the smudged mirror, she stares back, faintly sad.

You brush your teeth, and spit into the sink. When you raise your head, she is still there in the mirror, faintly sad. You don’t think you’ve ever seen her experience an emotion that wasn’t faint.

“If you don’t pack it up soon I’m gonna leave without you, Jesse,” your roommate calls.

You open the cabinet and face the mirror away from yourself. Yesterday’s clothes smell faintly of sweat and musk, but you put them on anyways. When you leave, you don’t bother to check the mirror again—you know her eyes are still tracking you. Looking, looking, looking at you.

The door slams shut as you leave your apartment. Your roommate, chipper as ever, asks you about your plans for the upcoming New Year. He’s flying back to his family and reuniting with his sister after the pandemic, so he’s looking forward to it very much.

In his excitement, he seems to have forgotten your far more complicated relationship with your own family.

“I think my sister is bringing her girlfriend home. Or at least I think, since she’s doing such a hush hush secret about it, but I think she will be because she keeps yammering about some special surprise that will either shock or horror our grandma,” he says, mouth and feet both moving too fast for you to catch up. Your legs are shorter than his anyways.

“You got plans, Jesse? First Lunar New Year after the pandemic, your family got anything special whipped up?”

You shrug.

“Whether I’m going back or not is really unclear,” you point out.

UNCLEAR, hisses a voice behind you. UNCLEAR!

Your roommate stops in his tracks.

“Aw, shit. I forgot. You can go back to see your sister, though, can’t you?” he asks.

SISTER, the voice whispers longingly.

You try to keep the longing out of your voice when you tell him that you can’t, because your sister is 15 and still living with your parents.

Your roommate nods slowly, and claps you on your shoulder. “That really sucks, bro.”

BRO echoes, the sound lingering around you.

“Thanks,” you reply, keeping your voice light. Even after so long, the affirmation from your friends never fails to shake you to your core.

Your roommate shrugs, and starts talking about some architectural wonder he got the chance to visit last week. You really don’t know why he decided to study in this fading city instead of his hometown, where he has everything he wants and more, but he’s never said and you’ve never asked.

You walk him to his classroom, and he waves you away with a delighted fistbump.. There is a sense of bitterness that swirls around your head whenever you look at your roommate. It is unfair to be jealous of him, but often you feel as though you are an echo of what could be; someone from a supporting family in a country where he can be who he likes.

A son.

A loved son, even.

 

The truth isn’t that you don’t know if you can go back home. The truth should be this:

You lived there eighteen years. You loved—

You loved. You love. You love(d) your parents. You love your sister.

There is nothing on earth you want more than to be able to step back into that tiny little apartment, sit in the crowded living room all cuddled up on the couch with your sister, watching terrible sitcoms. To walk in, and hear your mother berating you for staying out so late and forgetting to phone home, and hear the responding grunt of your father. You want so badly to go home. You want, want, want. It is selfish to want.

The truth should be this:

Can you go back home?

If you heave your body through that gate and step in, have you really gone home? Or has your body been possessed, your flesh moved like a puppet, spoken for you like a ventriloquist?

When the nurse handed you a form to fill in your home address, you put down your little flat with your roommate. But is that your home?

Where has your home gone?

 

Sometimes, you wonder what type of girl your sister would have grown up to be without you. Less skilled at telling lies, you assume. Or maybe worse at sneaking around.

Better at being a child, you think.

“Mom’s thrown your graduation photos out the house now,” Jenna tells you airly, “but since she’s not got any new ones to put up yet there’s a large gaping hole on the piano.”

You shrug. You never liked that photo anyway with the secondary school uniform, an itchy white dress that clung to your body in all the wrong ways. But your mother was so proud when you got that scholarship from your headmaster, so you let her plaster three whole copies in the living room.

Jenna idly stirs her drink with a straw. In the hazy reflection of her glass, you see the constant eyes of the little girl just over her shoulder. Jenna slurps up the melting mess of her ice-cream coke, and the blurry figure of the little girl disappears into a mess of pink.

She never speaks when Jen is around. But she always hangs around no matter the situation, fixating her faintly sad eyes on your darling little sister.

“She’s getting even more annoying nowadays, I don’t know how she does it. Auntie Jemma called yesterday and slid in some comments about her darling son being the best in class third year in a row and she was absolutely fuming, I tell you,” she sniffs, “and since she’s dropped the brilliant kid all she’s got left is me. Not much to brag about, the daughter flunking her classes and planning to go to art school, of all things. Skipping her tutorials every other week to talk to the disgraced son. Not that she knows about that part.”

“Your artworks are lovely, Jen.”

She throws you a stink eye over her drink. “Fat load of good your approval means. Mom doesn’t care about what you of all people thinks of my stuff.”

You pick at the end of your button up. You stole something similar from your dad’s closet once, one of his many pressed shirts you used to wear in the toilet when younger, the only room in the apartment that could be locked. You were the spitting image of your mother but in action you were your dad’s shadow. Quiet and solemn, with calculating eyes.

“Ma’s opinion isn’t the be-all and end-all of your life.”

Jenna spits out the straw she was chewing and glares at you, “Oh, of course you can say that. You’re the one who moved out the moment you could while I’m still stuck here.”

“I didn’t decide to move out, Jen. I had no choice.”

“You still got to leave.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t want to leave, Jen, do you know what I would—”

“Well then why did you? Why couldn’t you have stayed? Why couldn’t you have just fucking—I don’t know—hid it or something? Why couldn’t you have sucked it up and stayed?”

Jenna had always been a snappy child. You were the mediator of the family, the one worriedly comforting your mother and Jenna alternatively when they argued, their snide remarks flying across the room when one inevitably pissed the other off. Still, you internally wince when Jenna raises her voice. Rarely does her anger turn its focus on you.

In Jenna’s empty glass, the pink blur solidifies into a little girl again. She has pressed herself against your back, her face right next to yours. If she breathed, you could feel her ghostly breath brushing your ears.

COULDN’T, she whispers. COULDN’T COULDN’T SUCK IT UP.

COULDN’T!, she wails now. COULDN’T STAYED. COULDN’T LEAVE.

“I couldn’t have stayed, Jen.”

Jenna sniffs. She’s not crying, always more angry than sad, but there’s moisture in her eyes.

“You could have,” she insists.

“I would have been miserable.”

“I’m fucking miserable now and I’m still here.”

“You want to leave, Jen, you always have. I never wanted to leave. But Ma gave me an ultimatum, and I chose the one that wouldn’t have killed me in the end.”

A waiter comes by to collect your plates. In the distorted shine of your spoon, you see the little girl, staring at Jen. She doesn’t have the shine in her eyes like Jen, but the emotion is almost mirrored in the two girls. She raises her little hand, just a little bit, slightly reaching out, and then the image is gone, dashed by the clattering of the spoon on a plate.

Jenna flicks her hair back with a sharp nail. “Well, anyways. I can’t come by next week, I’ve got to hand in this piece of work to some competition, and I still haven’t finished the first draft. Just whoever decided to make the deadline in a holiday week I don’t know. ”

You nod.

 

This is the first Lunar New Year you’ve spent alone. Last year everybody had been cooped up in their own homes, so you think it doesn’t count. Your roommate ordered a bunch of snacks and the two of you gorged yourselves silly on the sweets, half-heartedly watching a TV show while he facetimed his family. The year before that Jenna feigned studying and dragged you to Cheung Chau with her. The cold wind blew past the two of you as you looked out at the sea, and you awkwardly shoved a red packet into her jacket pocket.

Jenna had rolled her eyes and told you that you were nineteen, not married. But then she had kept the red packet anyways, and shoved your shoulder goodnaturedly.

There was nothing there that could have let you see behind you. But you hoped the little girl had been smiling. Just a little bit. A faint smile.

The year before that, your mother was still giddy over your university acceptance, and had pranced around the family gathering telling everybody who would listen how wonderfully you had done. She made you stand in front of her, and her smile was so bright, so happy, so wide, so proud. She never got into university herself, having dropped out of school to support her younger siblings, and later marrying your father. When she was younger, she used to show you her student photos, how she won a writing competition in her district and the tiny little photo she had.

“You’re my daughter. You have my genes in you, and you’re gonna go big,” she would say, tapping your exam papers. “Whatever you do, you’re gonna be the best.”

When you left that apartment, you only took what you bought with your own money. The men’s clothes you smuggled in, the heavy books that took up most of your borrowed suitcase, and the little knick knacks your sister gifted you over the years. Then, as you walked out, you saw your mother’s tiny little photo on the piano, and you took it with you.

It’s this photo you look at now, alone in your apartment. Your roommate left last night, and the room is silent without his voice. Your mother smiles from her podium, the same way she smiled at you three years ago—so proud, so hopeful. She hasn’t spoken to you since you left, much less smiled at you like that. In the photo, she’s not even smiling at you, but you still want. Again with the wanting what you can’t have.

If you squint, it could be your own face smiling back. If you didn’t focus on the eyes, or the length of hair. Or the dress.

You didn’t bring a single dress with you when you left. The last dress you wore was at graduation, and then you handed it over to your sister as quickly as you could. But you’ve always been a resourceful person. You shed your shirt, and not looking at your bare torso, wrap a white-ish towel around your body, and jam a hat on your head. It’s a terrible imitation of your mother at her brightest, happiest.

Slowly, you walk into the toilet. When you look into the mirrored cabinet, the little girl stares back at you. But you refuse to say anything — there is nothing to be said, so she remains silent as well, just a faint mimic of a mother and her child looking at each other. You try to smile, the way your mother did in the photo. It’s strained and tense and it’s the only one you’ve got.

“I love you,” you mouth at the mirror. It seems fake even as it’s silent, and you try not to wince.

The little girl mouths the same thing back at you, also glaringly silent.

It’s the only one you’ve got. It’ll be the only one you can get.

“Come home,” you say. It’s odd and jarring, and it’s impossible.

The little girl sighs. She turns away.