The girl who turned into a fish has always loved water, seldom felt free. She would’ve lasted longer in a world with fewer responsibilities, more room to change. Sometimes, when she dreams of throwing it all away, she’ll walk along the river and stare over the edge of the railing into the curious world below. She’s drawn to its surface, which slinks riotously, in and out, like hills and hills of electric eels. There, buoys dance like sunken graves. In the water, a bag of Cheetos becomes a billowing goldfish. From the shore, she watches a wave slowly curl into a thunderclap. The girl has a lot on her mind: a list of unread emails entreating her to complete task after task, requests from her boss who still asks her to fax his documents for him. She is the eldest daughter and the keeper of dozens of terrible secrets… her phone is just a waiting room filled with people seeking comfort. And she listens, of course, as she always does, because if she didn’t, the world would fall apart. At least sometimes, that’s how it feels. Did I mention, the girl is tired as hell… of saying yes, of holding her tongue, of smiling sweetly. Under the surface, a pot of water softly boils on a stovetop. Last week, we took a walk on the west side highway when she pointed out to me two ships on the horizon. “From the wrong angle, doesn’t it seem like they’ll collide nose first, instead of quietly passing?” I nodded and didn’t think much more of it. Soon after, she started to wear long sea green dresses. She began each morning sipping seaweed broth and gargling with saltwater. Then one day, I read in the paper she’d gone missing. And I was worried, but not for too long: the next time I wandered along the water, a roiling sensation overtook my thoughts, like a geyser or the breathing of a whale. At the verge of the river, a pile of her glittering turquoise clothes spun in a frenzied heap – suddenly I heard an uncontrollable splash … I even thought I heard her musical laugh before I saw her swim far away, vanishing with the ocean suds into the throat of the horizon.

The girl who lived in Beijing lived in a world that knew her. She didn’t have a brother, and she didn’t have a sister, but her grandmother lived down the street from her in a 大高楼 that stood at attention like a soldier decorated by a million terracotta plates. If her world could be described by color, it would be green: the color of abundance and fortune… if by sound: the swinging and swaying of voices in her mother tongue that ricocheted off the tin roofs and cracked sidewalks. Despite all the things she could hold all at once in her hands, she still longed for things such as different worlds and currencies, though she never had to ache for stability or the idea of a singular home. Chinese was still her first language and very early on, she learned to love ancient Chinese poetry, which sometimes brought her to tears – that is, the comprehension did, not the black hole of forced translation. For lunch, the girl would bring 菠萝包 and sometimes 五花肉 to school and no one pinched their noses and no one asked her what she was eating… On the street, no one ever told the girl to go back to where she came from (which was three blocks to the left), in fact, no one ever recognized her… she never stuck out terribly in a Beijing crowd. Last week while rifling through her grandfather’s old journal she could read every word. That’s how she learned, in particular, his heaviness. If you’re wondering what her downfall was, the girl was just as restless… if not even more than you’d expect. I’m not sure if she wrote poetry, but she saw poetry in everything: water pouring into the lip of a 泡菜坛子 sealing away vegetables, air, time; and the slowness of tea leaves spilling inside a porcelain cup. If you’ve ever asked her directions on the street, you’d know she grew up speaking with a Beijing accent and the “ars” and “ers” curled in and out of her voice like the curves of a painted 西葫芦. Because she never left, there were so many things she simply did not forget: how to write her mother’s name, recounting all 24 solar months, knowing exactly when the mid-autumn festival fell each year… Of course there were more things she’d never know: the magic of the Pacific Ocean, and the formidable power behind a New York street, but with her hands, she could trace all of the 胡同 in Beijing. On some mornings, the girl would wake from a fever dream in which she was dropped like an alien inside a new world, all on her own…

The girl lives a million feet in the sky, and when she feels lonely she’s almost convinced it could be nice to return. To what, to what? The girl has no idea, though when she reaches the moon, all she wants is to grow like ivy: all-consuming and wild and silent. There, she watches the earth intently: the rooftops, the edges of the clouds curling like desire, the way airplanes cut the blue air open like the belly of a fish. When she hovers just a hundred feet in the air, she’ll overhear their conversations. In midtown, the voices ricochet from mirrors constructed like tubes of lipstick…they are worried, of course, because they are tethered in the way something is always wanted, measured, expected. When she hears these words, when she feels trapped living in this pre-ordained life, she’ll slowly scale the glassy office buildings and stare inside at the board meetings and slide decks like a ghost riding an invisible elevator. Why is it easier to simply avoid the ground? Maybe because down here, they can’t help but hunt her with questions she can’t answer, or because she feels the iron molds quietly closing in, ever so tightly, around her ring finger, her belly, maybe because each day on earth is just another game show episode… once, she asked if we were happy and we answered with our credit scores, our degrees, with our spot in line for the Great American Rat Race. I watched her listen to us, but could tell she would rather be dancing with helicopters and chasing blimps. It wasn’t too long after that when she disappeared, and I must admit I do miss her… last week I even stood on the corner of Hudson street staring at the moon and there she was: floating away like a free helium balloon.