The Negative Space Between Us
Kimi K2 (0905) and GLM 4.5 Base
The photo was timestamped three years before I was born, and I’m the only one in it who’s looking at the camera. A friend pointed out you can’t even see my grandmother’s face, but I’m still holding her hand.
My mom’s expression is somewhere between grimace and smile. As a child myself, I recognize the look on her face. It’s the look of a parent trying to be gentle.
She’s trying to lure a toddler away from a puddle, trying to stop a little boy from throwing sand at his friend.
But I’m not a toddler here. This was taken two days after she married my father.
You can view this photograph in multiple ways. Maybe I wouldn’t let go of my grandmother’s hand. After all, I’d never let a stranger hold me. My mom was still a stranger to me then.
Maybe I just happened to hold my grandmother’s hand. Look at my tiny fist curled around her index finger.
Maybe this is the earliest hint of who I would become. I’ve always felt so much older than I am. It’s as if my life began long before I was born. And now, as I approach the age my mother was in this photo, I finally understand my mother’s face. I’ve seen it in the mirror myself.
You can view this photograph in multiple ways. That’s what I tell myself. That I have a choice in the narrative.
In reality, it’s the moments you can’t see in the photograph that determine the story. The moments just before or just after. The moments that happen behind the camera. And what you can’t see in this photo is that every memory I have with my mother, a shadow is following her.
It’s an old memory: The woman in the nursery telling me I was a miracle baby. My biological mother had another name for me. The moment she realized I was a girl growing in her womb, she called me a curse. The moment I was born, she called me a mistake. When my mother tells this story, she’s always looking away. She gives the shadow a place to sit.
And if you look at the photograph again, you can see a shadow climbing up her back.
My adoption is my origin story, but I don’t get a say in how it’s told.
Is it a miracle or a mistake?
Every time I look at this photograph, I wonder what my life would be like if I was still holding my grandmother’s hand.
My mother has a box full of photographs of her life before me. She’s smiling, she’s unburdened, she’s not a mother yet.
I’ve studied them for hours. I am a ghost. I am in the background of the photo, translucent. But sometimes I think I’m standing behind the camera, that I am the one framing these moments. A future version of my mother, a shadow, stands next to me.
I am a recession. My mother’s face is cave. I am a flashlight.
I used to think that my birth created a rupture in my mother’s life. Now I know that a severance took place instead. I am the edge that I can’t see over.
My mother prefers a simple story. She only understands the word miracle.
Some days, the only thing I understand is the word mistake.
In the gap◆ About the ending
❧ About the title