Dear Aliens,
You don't know me. You can rip up this letter. It was sent as an incongruous mistake by one insignificant face among billions; it doesn't matter in the slightest.
Or, maybe you do know me.
Maybe you were the dust mote I breathed in while laying on the operating table, when my breech firstborn was cut out of me. I hyperventilated, overcome with a grotesque nausea from the spinal block. I couldn't see anything except for my blood splatters on the transparent ‘window’ of the surgery drapes. My husband held my hand. Someone shouted out a time. An infant screamed. I let out a hoarse sob, and in that moment, I knew he was mine.
Maybe you were the piece of lint in between my grandfather's toes the day he was cremated, when I was thirty-nine weeks pregnant with my second child, thousands of miles away. My grandfather had Alzheimer's. He and my grandmother raised me, between the ages of three and six, when my parents left China to attend grad school in the States. My last memory of him before his brain decayed is when he sang to me, an old Russian song from long ago, over the phone about five years before he passed.
He had something of the Russian soul in him. He wrote passionate diatribes that the local newspapers occasionally printed. He frequented the social dancing scene, shamelessly flirting with any old lady who crossed his path. He fought with my grandmother, a woman cowed by her family's intentional abandonment of her while her older brother got to stay. She lived with her adoptive family and was forced to leave school at age nine to begin a lifetime of factory work.
But we have no Russian blood. I am Chinese, through and through. My ancestors were peasants who farmed the Jiangsu river plains and later moved to Shanghai to seek their fortunes. On my dad's side there are master calligraphers, and one great-grandfather doctor who was the first to import Bayer's medications into his small village practice. He grew rich off of inventing a successful rat poison. He had two concubines, a gigantic household of seven sons. All of it confiscated during the revolution.
Lately I have been searching for my own piece of ‘Russian soul.’ I've been reading Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. Maybe you would like it. It is about the writing and receiving of letters, like the one I am writing to you, except it was about a time when letters were the lifeblood of staying connected with loved ones. Grossman was a war correspondent on the front lines of Stalingrad. The novel was inspired by a letter that the author received from his mother, her last words before she was exterminated in the Berdychiv massacre in Ukraine. The manuscript itself was imprisoned, so devastating were its ideas to a regime that feared literature more than it feared people. It is about the ordinariness and tedium of marriage, the collision of nuclei, the dying of boy soldiers, the first kisses of teenagers who dare to fall in love under bomb blasts and machine gun fire. It is about making and having babies when one is surrounded by death. It is about fear and loathing on the battlefront, lice and foot cloths and interrogations in the concentration camps, whispered arguments and furtive glances under the shadow of the Lubyanka.
It was, to be honest, too much for me, a mother who was still fresh off the hormonal highs and lows of suckling an infant. I stopped reading it for a long while. It is impossible to process death when one's arms are laden with gurgles, and impetuous hunger, and shrieking. When one is engorged with the milk of life. Maybe you wouldn't like the book after all, if you have any of the mammalian instinct for love and pain in you.
I used to think love was like a poem. A momentous decision of words and thoughts. Composed at a quiet desk somewhere, strung together with decisive care.
Now, I think love is like a hundred thousand cells in the body, humming, buzzing, colliding. The drainage of grey matter that forcefully reshapes a woman's brain and identity during pregnancy, forever changing how she relates to the universe. The waving goodbye at a past self that only exists in old notebooks, in memory trapped in crystalline amber.
Goodbye, stardust.
Goodbye, stranger, lover, comrade, alien.
Perhaps, when it will be my turn to depart this earth, we shall meet again.