CHENNAI: Just before the solstice, a precious friend travelled to see me and arrived into the tidal resurgences of my life like a pair of bookending bulwarks, her presence parting the churn and providing solid ground. She told me a story from Japan — whether folklore or parable, I neglected to record, and I apologise for not asking her for its origins before I pay the story forward. I tell it to you now the way I remember or reimagine it.
In this tale, a young woman runs away from her father’s house to be with her lover. They traverse rivers and cross bridges. They cultivate a new life elsewhere, raise children and crops, and live well enough. Life has little to bewail it, other than the memory of what had to be let go of. Still, a disquiet runs through her, and her partner pays attention to it. Alone, he travels back to their native village, retracing the path they fled, and visits the man who is now his father-in-law, even if estranged.
At the threshold, when the door opens, the younger man tells the older one: “Your daughter and I built a life together, against your wishes, but her longing for your love has never abated. Time has passed, and much has happened. I want for you both to reconcile, and for you to meet our family.” “This is not true,” says the father-in-law. “My daughter has been upstairs for years, remaining in her bed. She took ill and has remained heartsick all this time, and does not leave her room at all.
You may see for yourself.” The younger man follows the older one into the house, puzzled. There, in a room he had never entered, is a young woman he remembered: his wife as she was before she became his wife, only wan and frail. A shadow. Shaken, perhaps even uncertain about whether his own life was but a dream, the man returns to his home and tells his wife what he saw. Needing to solve this mystery, they journey together to her father’s home.
There: the woman and her shadow merge. You can predict this folktale, at least in my telling of it — the grist imprinted in me, from my friend’s telling — ends on a note of contentment. This is a story about disassociation: about the parts of ourselves that remain locked within interior rooms because of a trauma, or a transition that’s too much to take in at once. It is a story of reintegrating parts of ourselves that were lost, left behind or taken from us. To do so requires going back — not literally as much as psychically — to the place in time when it happened to us.
I surrounded myself with grace and hope your life too allowed you to embody something like that, I hope it is not difficult for you to retrieve your fragments. This is forever work — or at least, a lifetime’s. But something about a changing calendar carries with it hope: there’s time. It’s marked, numbered, dated, diminishing constantly — but there is time.