By Alyssa Zhang
Edited by Alloe Mak
I sit here on this park bench that has been here all my life, and I think about the newness of it all. It’s almost as if nothing has changed.
The snow of the winter has melted, the silent noise of suburbia presses against my eardrums, and the crescent moon gleams just the same. I can see it all: the way I stumbled a little in my white heels, the drunken voices that echoed down my otherwise quiet street. The metal rings on your hands resting warm on my bare shoulder, the way you looked in the warm glow of the street light. How you stared me down, smiled like a kid, and said, “I heard you had a crush.”
I was so embarrassed. I covered my face in my hands and in a second, I watched everything unravel.
I remember the way you kissed me against your car, how I felt you smile between pecks. My back pressed against the cool metal—your lips grazing my neck. We whispered to one another, “We’re still friends, right?”
I remember the way the closet door swung open and then slammed shut as we pulled apart, my hand over your mouth as you fought a smile. My eyes widened in disbelief at our situation as our friends shrieked from the other side of the door, the room flooding with drunken teenage chatter. Amongst all the bodies, our eyes glinted back and forth to meet, our knowing glances reminiscent of children who know they’ve been caught doing something bad. I took pleasure in our mischief.
I remember your head in my lap as we sat atop the boardwalk, watching the lights fade in and out on the other side of the water. Everything seemed so far away.
I remember the stuffed animal you gifted me rising and falling on your chest as we watched my favourite cartoon, your fingers laced into mine.
My sister and I have been speaking again. We talk a couple times a month—maybe once a week if I’m lucky. I don’t think she’ll ever see me as older than fourteen. I tell her about my grades, the stress of applications, how terrified I am of change, and how scary it is to stay the same. She tells me it is never that serious. In some ways, her childlike view of my life is a blessing. My problems suddenly seem so small in the face of her loving condescension.
“I swear you’ve got this complex. Why do you always have to be ‘getting better’? Why can’t you just exist as you are? You make it everyone else’s problem.” She says, sighing into the microphone.
“Because I hate myself.” I replied.
“Have you ever heard of Sisyphean self-improvement? You’re like, the epitome of it.”
She’s right. Annoyingly, she always is. Sisyphus, this Greek figure, is doomed to roll this boulder up a steep hill for all of eternity in an attempt to push it over the top. Grunting, bleeding, and peeling the skin off of his sunburnt back, it is only for the stupid rock to pound right back down the hill as soon as he lets go. Critics say that the existence of Sisyphus serves as a critique of capitalistic self-improvement as a whole, where the constant need to refine and perfect oneself is ultimately futile.
Despite Sisyphus’ critics, I still imagine the King smiling as he pushes the rock up the hill. He knows his fate, but he still refuses to surrender to gravity. He’s relentless. He and I are the same. I have bled, cried, and killed to continue my journey up the hill. But on the brink of my senior year, it seems I have reached a divot in the mountain. I suddenly do not want to push anymore. The landscape that I have shed so much blood on is about to change irrevocably—I can feel it on my skin. I teeter on this strange border with a desire to let go, to relieve the pressure on my back and allow the boulder to roll, just so I can stay frozen in my hometown.
As I sit on this bench and watch the cars pass, I am suddenly no longer a myth, a legend, a king rolling a rock up a hill. I am a girl packing her life into cardboard boxes in anticipation of leaving everything she’s ever known behind.
I have focused so much of my energy on getting out of this town, into growing up and becoming something great, Yet for the first time, I can recognize everything that makes me want to stay. The flickering street lamps, the gold of the April sun through my bedroom windows, the smell of Unionville Main Street at dusk. The boy that makes me feel like a kid again.
Despite my best efforts, the universe will continue to move. I see my best friends in big white houses and penthouse apartments, their lives littered with the light of dogs and children and lovers. We will make homes out of soup dumplings and burnt baked goods. Our lives will move and thrive in different cities, our strings tangled and delicate. Everything I have ever loved will grow up and grow old.
Yet, the bench will stay right where we left it.
Perhaps one day, another Sisyphus will sit here, learning to fall in love as if it were the first time.