Transitional Objects
By Yuyi D. He
Bed, 66 Cassiopeia
All I could think about was my hometown: grandparents, classmates, my cousin “Piggie” with her crooked mouthful of teeth. Escapism between two earbuds. Grandpa’s motorbike, typhoons with funny names, the beards of banyan trees. Between two earbuds, the last songs I would ever listen to in Chinese. I lay in my bed and hid my cheeks under the duvet.
I took off my earbuds and they were already wet with tears. I dried them with the corner of my duvet and put them on again, so that my memories could start churning again in that space between my two ears. I was safe. The past was safe. The coolness of the fabric against my arms and the warmth underneath were proof. Memories spilled over, dripped from the edges of the side rails of my bed, seeped into the carpet. I wondered if my grandparents could hear them from across the Pacific. Strange that I slept in a double bed with my single body. I could make out the sound of some other churning things — my clothes in the dryer downstairs. Back home, I used to grab onto Grandma’s sleeve whenever she would finish the bedtime tale of the night and go off to hang the clothes, for our family of eight, with steel pegs and hangers.
Now it was just me and the Chinese books that we were running out of. But then, of what use are Chinese books when everyone else speaks English? Open, drift off, close, ruminate between earbuds. Music was more straightforward than paper and ink. I was safe, the past was safe.
Until my alarm sounded at half-past-seven, until my parents knocked on my door. The world revealing itself before me had black fangs and red tongues. Just one step out of my bedroom door and I could not stop thinking. What did it mean to live with my own family in this foreign country? What did it mean — my own family, and not my grandparents? The gleam of the smoky wooden floor beneath my bare feet looked intensely lonely.
Breakfast time. Over dirty dishes, my parents screamed about the mortgage in a currency I just learned was five times the yuan, the Canadian Dollar. While I poured maple syrup over half-baked waffles, it glued all three fingers of my left hand together. I could not stand one second of it.
Brother broke his arm yesterday. When he fell elbow-first in the room nearby, I lay in my bed frozen, not knowing how to act like a human being. No one’s taught me how. I don’t think Grandma and Grandpa ever cared if I acted like one, but Mom did, and she was mad. I thought I should do something to be more human, maybe spill feelings from my mouth like spilling petals of impossible flowers. But all I did was turn around and pretend to sleep. My limbs were made out of wood, a very sensitive kind of wood that only knew of its own inner weather. If I pretended to be continuous with the skeleton of my bed, maybe Mom would forget about it.
She didn’t. The dirty dishes clanged in the sink across the kitchen island and I had a hypothesis that she was still mad.
Dawn broke with the coos of mourning doves. Ten steps behind Brother, I carried myself to the bus station in the corner of Cassiopeia Crescent, taking care to correct my gait in the way that Mom asked. The big yellow machine rumbled close. I was always afraid of the driver’s right foot, specifically the when — when will he push it down, the sustain pedal that thrushes people backwards?
It finally happened.
My legs bruised, my forehead sweaty, I scrambled to my seat, raised my head and saw their curious gaze. I was lucky that no one laughed out loud, but their gaze followed me to gym class in the afternoon when the dodgeball expelled the lens from my glasses. I rose from the ivory gym floor and groped my way around the fangs and tongues of the world, my gait still stiffened by the prosody of a language I didn’t know. By the time I got out of the teacher’s office with a Band-Aid, no one was waiting. I walked. Only the rustles of maple leaves sounded under my shoes. It was autumn, and I wished I was forever under my duvet.
Desk, 48 Peacock
The bed stayed, but my new bedroom had a little white desk by the window. Arranged on top was my collection of merch for anime characters, the only friends I carried over the Pacific. It was the second year of high school. I’d begun to make artifacts to commemorate sorrowful occasions for myself: a jar of bells and dried baby’s breath sealed with clear tape, a box of plastic dolphins, and shards of a broken furin glued together like they meant something more together. They stayed silent while I pushed my pen through palm-thick binders, faithful companions to my sorrow in the corner of my eye. Studying was the only thing I enjoyed. Molecules were dead and math didn’t ask me to be more human.
The desk’s drawer was my most well-kept secret — not that anyone would care to look. Inside, with a pencil in my right hand, I stacked fallen angels, weeping mermaids, screeching faces among benzene rings and sodium-potassium pumps. Inside, I could see my imaginary friends and dance without justifying myself.
Something else that didn’t ask me to be more human was that vivid shade of blue outside of my window whenever dusk fell on the snow in our backyard. I always turned off the lights just to stare into that blue, standing in front of my desk, dazed by nothing in particular. Maybe it was the fog in my mind.
On December 7, 2019, my first orange bottle appeared on my desk. With stickers of gold and silver, I made it into another artifact.
Another morning. When I opened the front door, the frost of Toronto bit at my knuckles. I walked to our car on a tightrope, cracking ice with big snow boots, preparing for ten minutes of silence with the man I couldn’t quite call “Father.” I got off at school with a heart sinking and leaping to the faces that swam by. The bell rang. The face of Mr. Stetsko, my English teacher, was the only one I wanted to see, just for fifty minutes each day from my little corner in the classroom. The rest of the day — the rest of the world didn’t understand me. He did. He had a niece who’s on the spectrum. Just like myself. He would make time for us to chat in the hallway while others worked, time for my thoughts to scatter like the beads of a snapped bracelet.
After I presented my animated short film in English, they all started smiling when they saw me. Some of them tried to talk to me, but I didn’t know what to say. I opened my mouth and the Chinese got stuck in my throat.
Come on, just say the English!
Words came out. Then they stopped. I didn’t know how to breathe properly in an English sentence. So I nodded and smiled. The bell rang. I packed and walked, lowering my head. I wished I could tell Mr. Stetsko my art was more than what rolled on the projector screen, that I made art on my desk for all the sad things that were happening to me.
Lamp, 104 Leopard
The lights in my flat are too bright. On the third day after landing in Edinburgh, I bought myself a FADO lamp from IKEA and never turned them on again. I put the lamp on my shelf so that it’s even less bright. Under this eclipsed beige moon, I spend nights alone. I don’t think the tip of Arthur’s Seat ever smiled at me, the way it must’ve smiled when they conquered it during Welcome Week.
They don’t understand me. No one here really does, even when I finally understood their language. They say I am one of those “children of the stars:” unique, talented, somewhat of a misunderstood genius.[1] Then they carry on living so fluently like they always do anyway, shutting their eyes, turning me transparent in a culture of fireworks. It must be my fault. I just need to grow up. I need to be a student leader. Teamwork. Social capital. Industrial action. Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion. LinkedIn. Think bigger. Networking. Action points. Personal Employability Transcript. Think bigger. Think until you can’t think. Do the right thing or—
I’m falling behind. Mom will be disappointed. I don’t deserve to live in this country. I am an impostor. I go to the GP. I ask for a psychiatric assessment. I wait for four months. I wait again in the waiting room. I wonder what I’m waiting for.
The psychiatrist clasps his hands.
“If there is one word to summarise everything you just described, what would it be?”
“What would it be?”
I shift nervously in my seat.
“Anxiety.”
Just ten minutes earlier, I told him I thought I no longer qualify for the diagnosis of generalized anxiety.
With a new prescription slip in my hand, I walk into the pharmacy. I wait for my prescription and suddenly, I recall a reading from psychology: Winnicott’s “transitional objects.”
Transitional objects — the baby’s blanket and teddy bear, an “intermediate area of experience” that soothes while the mother is away. A bridge between fantasy and reality, safety and danger.[2] Something neither real nor unreal, a zone of twilight belonging to me only. So that must be it. When my heart clings to my lamp, when my soul climbs into my desk, when my limbs shudder in my bed, I am just like a baby grappling with separation anxiety. From home. From a home I don’t even know the whereabouts of, to a reality too sharp to be held in my hands.
I return to my flat with a paper bag. Thousands of kilometres away from both of my homes, I flick on my lamp again. Every year, for three hundred nights spent alone, the light of a false moon keeps me warm.
I guess I will never really grow up, and I forgive myself for that.
[1] “星星的孩子” (Xīngxing de háizi), a phrase used in China to describe autistic children.
[2] D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (Routledge, 1989), 2.
Yuyi D. He is a Chinese-Canadian writer and a Philosophy and Psychology graduate (University of Edinburgh). She believes in the interconnectedness of everything and is deeply captivated by experiences of beauty and divinity. She is nonfiction editor of Spellbinder and the editor-in-chief of Nighthawk Star, a world philosophies and literatures magazine she founded with her friends.
@yuyi_loves_beauty (IG)