Work Text:
Daisy saw it on the news on her phone. She saw the headline first. It said nothing about identity, nothing about race, nothing about the victims themselves. Casualties. That was all it said. Mass shooting. She closes the app. Not tonight. Not right now. She has no feelings, no thoughts. Just exhaustion.
She saw it again the next morning. Casualties. Asian woman.
Nothing. There is still nothing. Not even a numbness. No feelings. Just a vague thought. It could have been her.
(Maybe it was her. Maybe it was her a dozen times over but they never called it that because they were so busy calling it justified.)
It was not unpredictable.
She saw it before. She saw the videos. It could have been her grandparents. But her grandparents are dead. She does not know, cannot even imagine what they would say about his. How they would feel. She tries to imagine. Because imagining their feelings is easier somehow, than imagining her own.
A right. That’s what they called it.
Except it is easier to buy a rifle than to cast a ballot that might vote down that right.
(Does she not have the right to live?)
She saw it in the looks she got.
In the leers. In the smirks. In the persistence and the stubbornness and the assumption that she owed them something.
But they look at her like she is some thing, not some one.
She heard it in their jokes.
A punch line. So humorous.
Except she never laughs.
She saw their confusion. They do not know what to make of her.
But the only thing that ever changes is how they see her.
She is passing.
Until she isn’t.
Exotic.
They pretend it is a compliment.
How flattering. They said.
How cute. They said.
A crush. They said.
Funny.
Innocent.
Harmless.
(Except for when the air was filled with gas and she fell to the ground at his feet to be bred like cattle.
Except for when she was strapped to a table by another harmless white man who cried for himself as he cut into her and he looked at him after and called him respectable.
Except for when he traded the fantasy of one exotic Asian for another and kept her as an object in the not so hidden corners of his reality.
But they don’t like to talk about that part because it makes them uncomfortable.)
Harmless except for all of the casualties.
Helpless.
She does not feel it. Not right now. She just lives it. She lives it again and again.
In her darkest moments she thinks she is only standing out of pure spite.
She still has to prove them all wrong.
She saw it on the internet and she heard it on the television.
It was just speech. It gave them direction. It wasn’t personal.
It was only rhetoric.
Until it wasn’t. (It was not unpredictable.)
They told her to go back. They called her a disease. Alien. An abomination a plague a threat.
A person.
She is a person.
Part.
Part Asian. She always knew that. It seemed like an important qualifier.
Half Chinese, she finds out. Half Chinese, half not.
Never both. Only part.
She has been calling herself incomplete her entire life.
How strange that she didn’t even notice.
(She stops calling herself part alien. Starts calling herself Inhuman.)
It was not new. It did not start here.
There are photographs that were never taken and stories that remain unwritten and history that does not get told.
They learned to blend in. To keep their heads down. Eat their bitterness. Don’t start anything. Except it already started and they were excluded and imprisoned relocated and they are just trying to survive.
They are pitted against one another. A myth that goes down okay until it seeps out like poison and congeals into a lie that props up the order just the way they like it.
They speak over her. They don’t even realize when they do it. They silence her voice in a hundred different ways.
They ignore her. They erase her. They undermine her. The vilify her. They put her in a box and confine her. (They abduct her. They drug her. They drain her. They strap her to a table and cut into her.) And they expect her to be grateful for it.
Because they never meant for her to have a voice. And how dare she have the audacity to expect that they should listen.
Sometimes she gets louder in defiance. Sometimes she walks away and says nothing at all. (Survive. Always keep surviving.)
She is sorry, somehow. She is sorry that it wasn’t her. Maybe she could have saved them.
Quake. She saved the world. And the world kept on killing itself.
She heard it in their words. In their casual empathy to him that cut as sharply as if it were intended cruelty to her.
If she just listened to him. If she just gave him a chance.
She could change him. She could turn him good.
Why doesn’t she just see his point of view.
Can’t she have some empathy for him
He’s been through so much
He struggled so hard
He deserved better
If she would just-
If there is nothing left for her to feel maybe it is because they took it all already. And all she has left is exhaustion.
Somebody tell her. Somebody please tell her. How she is suppose to get it back?
She feels it on a bad day.
Anger.
It is burning in her arms. Nausea in her stomach that is choking up her lungs. Thumping at her chest.
Defense. Denial. Dismissal.
Fuck you.
That is what she feels.
Fuck you and your casual cruelty. Fuck you and your delusions of importance.
She is burning.
And she could tear the whole world apart. (She doesn’t.)
This is what she does.
She sits.
She closes her eyes.
Behind her eyelids there is a young girl. She exists as she so chooses and not under the judgmental weight of anyone else. She carries history with understanding and hope for the future. She holds an old black and white photograph. A wedding day. The couple smiles broadly. Their burdens fall to their feet as gently as the confetti that is being tossed above their heads. One day, they will be parents. And then grandparents. And they will still look at each other just like this. Their love was frozen, captured in time, and then handed down to a young girl.
Daisy opens her eyes. Is there a word for missing and longing for something you have never had?
If there is she does not know it.
It will come after. When she learns their names and sees their photographs and reads their stories and thinks of their families.
Heartbreak for people she has never met.
Love and loss for the ones that she knew before.
Grief for lives never lived and the way things could have been.
This is not about her. But she was left here to mourn for reasons she will never understand.
May sits down next to her. She takes her hand. Daisy laces their fingers together.
She is quiet.
The words will come later. No one can take their voice away.
But for now there is a moment of silence.
And in her silence she is not alone. And that is not nothing.