Letters to friends and the bee-loud glade
BY Huyen Hac Helen Tran
In the other world, there are no burnt edges. Cakes and ropes and candles are endless, and you and I are kinder than we ever could be.
In the other world, I am no longer disappointed that I’ve lost you or you’ve lost me or that we never lost each other in the first place. There are no wrong people, horrible people, or fabric that cannot be tied together. There are no cakes that taste like grit in your mouth, sweetness sickening, and cigarette smoke of doubt settling into your throat.
In the other world, we always know how to be better people, and we’re as peaceful as hill heaps upon hill, and two people sharing a plate of steamed tofu, and the sauteed weeds you picked from our backyard, and the river and stream that will work out their will.
In the other world, Yeats is as crucial to me as he is now when I’m alone and sick in bed.
✷
Dear friend,
I spent another day in bed. Same as yesterday, and the day before. Same as the last few years between work and seeing you and my family and going to therapy. I understand all too well that you are familiar with the state of my being, and that the peace has come dropping slow through my life. Indeed, the tarot cards I’ve become obsessed with have constantly reminded me of the devil in my distant past. Though the cards caution me against thinking my chains tighter than they are, it’s been an extraordinarily difficult time as of late.
I am writing like this because there is no other way. My body will not allow it, and even the lapping nature of sleep has disappeared. No soft waves and warmth to ease my slumber, to aid escapism from my tired body. Just the constant grind of noise, and attempt after attempt to escape it, only to find myself slumped back in the middle of this bee-loud glade.
The light keeps dimming and coming back alive while I sleep, and time is passing as time does, in that volatile way. In the dim I’m held in statis; back in those moments I haven’t quite left yet. When you told me my writing was worthless, or that I was a coward, or inconsiderate, or self-righteous, or meek. Maybe you didn’t mean these, so it’s unfair to hold onto them. I try my best to forget. But the dim, it harkens in its own way.
The thing is, I’ve been thinking too much about friendship. About how much care you devote to someone. About platonic love. Plato this, Plato that. I don’t really care to see what he has to say about it. I shrug my shoulders and turn inward. I’m listening to Rina Sawayama’s Bad Friend and Novo Amor’s Halloween instead because they get it. I don’t want to philosophise any of this. Sometimes pain is just pain. I'm listening to you as much as I can, even when it hurts, and it has hurt. You, you, you, you…before…
But I can assure you, my dear friend, that on ideas of self-love and self-respect, I have become more determined despite the cynic in me. These ethereal sorts of notions, which when radicalised, as I’m told to do, will surely release me at full force to another world, chasing the sun, unto hills and up trees and down rivers. This other world, where bees don’t sting with their helter-skelter humdrum. This other world, where there are no nagging rocks in the riverbed. No stone sinews bound together by desperate care.
In the other world, you don’t call me names that I can’t forget and forgive, and I remember you with a smile. I am not hurt by the realisation that things very rarely go the way we want. Cracks of anger and frustration are marginal. We tread softly when things fall apart, and the centre always holds. I’m unafraid to sleep, and I’m unafraid to wake.
✷
Dear friend,
I want to apologise for how scared I made you that night I kept walking in the rain, or the time I remained a shadow in the house, refusing to see you. I want to tell you I really do mean it this time when I say I’ll quit the bad things and that I really appreciate it when you don’t ask me to explain more and just smile, or when you do ask me to explain more and hold my hand. I also think you make excellent cakes, like that time we were swinging off a rope tied to a tree on a hill, and you made a tea cake using the lemons you had picked from out the back.
My therapist asked me to go to my happy place today, and I surrounded myself with pets, a book, and your laughter. I know that you care for me, and I want to give in return. But I have come to realise I’ve been shielded by a self-preservation that the bad things will keep coming. So, I steady myself, trying my best to be as much of a person as you are to me. Or I steady myself, knowing there’s only so much I can give to you, no matter how hard I try. I’m talking about too many people here. I’m turning this way and that way too. Time again, weighing down everything. I am delirious with sorrow. None of this makes sense to you. Regardless, I will grin and bear it, and truly mean every moment of it, and the memories will go languid down the stream. In the other world, the good words never run out.
✷
Dear friend,
I’ve been rereading this one poem by Yeats. It feels quiet in my soul when I read it. In The Lake Isle of Innisfree, he rises, he goes to a small cabin, and lives among the bee-loud glade, where the peace is, where water laps with low sounds by the shore.
I worry I am writing romantic speculative fiction. I worry I am living it. The truth is I just want to talk to you, but there’s so much to talk about before we can talk to each other. I want to keep building ideas and laugh as much as we always have, but there is something that makes me feel so sad about it these days. But I want to feel your laughter because it is so infectious. I think about you reading the poem, and I want to know what you think, because you read so deeply, you understand so deeply, and I’ve always appreciated this about you.
But I am so tired of the future, and it has barely begun.
✷
Dear friend,
I know it’s time to end this correspondence. I’ve Didion-ed and Yeats-ed (hah!) my way through writing enough to know that this is true. Ideally, something that gives you a sense of completion. Fragments to a whole, and a mourning that doesn’t just burn but gives way to some clarity. It would be neat and clever to talk about living amongst the bee-loud glade as Yeats does, which of course, is exactly what I am trying to do. Yet the maddening part of this all is that I hesitate from trying to reach any end, even when I know there isn’t one. I am still trying to push ahead, full force, bull-like, queen-like. I feel static. There’s a lengthy metaphor I could make about the noisy flight of bees and static, how they feel the same in my body. This is one instance where it hasn’t come so naturally to me. A promise I made myself years ago to always write from a place of joy has very nearly never come to fruition. I can give you some hope, but it’s bitter. I warn you now. I always remember the small things and forget the big things. My knees always scrape when climbing trees. I panic when a large wave comes toward me. I hate nature; I mean I don’t, but I do.
What I will do is retire from that other world I’ve imagined, for I’ve spent a maddening amount of time trying to make it so wholly mine. In fact, there is no need to placate myself anymore, to hold myself or that girl so tightly. In this world, I am raw, I am shocked at how horribly wrong I can be about who I am and who you are, and the other litanies of uncertainty and hesitation that march in single file through me.
Friend, there are many apologies I could make. I think I should make them to you, to myself as well. I would wither to the ground if nature made it possible. Not out of choice, but – and pardon the intensity of my words – out of self-flagellation. A girl who cannot remember to take it easy. Though she tries.
In this world, all the shit keeps coming around, and all I can do is listen to music, and try to work it through. Friend, thank you for caring for me. I’ll try and text you soon.
✷ ✷ ✷
Huyen Hac Helen Tran is a writer living and working on Wangal Land. Her work can be found in Sydney Review of Book, The Suburban Review, Big issue, Peril Magazine, The Wayward Sky Anthology (2021) and more. @helenlicious1