Every day, Hai runs along the coast of Saigon. He says that it’s his way of getting over his unrequited feelings for Lan. These days, however, his journeys are only getting more unforgiving. Some of Saigon’s streets are now filled with wet muck and debris, while others are covered in a beautiful sheen of water. There are many, if not most, that the ocean has already taken back outright and thus they are nothing but brine up to your ankles or your thighs or your stomach even and that’s no kind of place for a young, innocent boy like him to be running, though if he must, which is to say if he really has to trudge or wade or swim across all the risen waterways in order for him to feel better about everything, then so be it.
Ever since the tides have encroached further inland, the look of Saigon has changed. The rivers are wider, deeper. There are still some people we’re searching for underneath the mess of the crumpled, mangled buildings and perhaps my own lover really is buried underneath the bent steel of those wrecks that fell in the dead of night but maybe, just maybe there is some off chance that Lan is still alive and feeling her way in the dark of it and looking for a way out of all of this so that we can finally be together. I hear the same kind of tragedy is visiting the other coasts too—like Jakarta, or Venice, and even Miami—and yet there is nothing that any of us can do about it. Thus, every year, it seems like the coast of Saigon will only get smaller, and smaller, until it is finally nothing, and so, too, will the size of Hai’s heart, and mine.
Binh Do is a writer of Vietnamese descent. They are currently based in New York City and at work on a short story collection.
No comments:
Post a Comment