I am at the point of reclamation—my grandmother’s clothes in my closet, my time all intended. Slowly, I am carving out the apathy from my life. My bookshelf has known this long before the rest of my life. If I don’t like a book, I don’t finish it. If I finish a book and think it’s good, I’ll sell it to Walden Pond. I only keep the ones I love, so that if my friends want a recommendation or a loaner, they can browse my library of obsession.
From my childhood home I pick up my grandmother’s copy of Jane Eyre, a novel she read in three languages. I grab the pink Bible my grandfather gifted me—the only Bible I’ve ever owned. And I cannot find my copy of Paradise Lost. I glance at a Norton anthology and think to myself that it must be on its own, it must have held its own spine solid. I look through my bookshelf, my sister’s. I come home to my apartment and tear through all three of the bookshelves in my one-bedroom. It’s not on the display shelves either.
Paradise Lost is my favorite book ever written. I think most people think of their most seminal read as the one that converted them to the page. I don’t even know what book that must have been for me—I remember loving reading from the phonics flashcards in preschool, how there was a secret voice hidden on flat ink, just waiting for you to get it out all loud. Paradise Lost was there for me when I didn’t want it to be, when I forgot that writing was more than opportunity. Writing was more than proof—it was creation, holy on its own.
At Berkeley, there are three classes that every English major has to take, a survey series through the antiquity of the English language. I fucking hated the classics. So I took the final two of the three classes and waited to take the oldest class. I consulted with the department (actually, after I left, they ended up taking lots of my suggestions), hoping to find a loophole to the rule. The final semester of my senior year, I had failed, and was the only senior in a class full of freshmen.
The world had shuttered its doors tight, and every lecture I watched from my co-op bedroom, deep in the years where we’d locked ourselves inside. I’d replaced my curtains with lace and light scattered in from my East-facing windows at 9am. I imagined the class to be begrudging and dull. But by then my doctors had caught on to my Ambien addiction, and I was much more awake than I had ever been, my eyes peeled to the full onslaught of grief I had in those years. It was during those classes that I suffered a full amnesiac episode erasing three days from my memory. No recollection. Just a highly annotated calendar that claimed I’d filled all my obligations.
I only told a few people about the episode at the time. I insisted my doctor test me for early onset dementia. We were nearing the end of the semester, and moving on to new material. We were moving on to Milton.
Professor Kevis Goodman taught a class entirely on Milton she loved him so much. And I had grown to love her, too—in the way that a student adores a teacher with an imagined halo around her intellect. Maybe it was the sobriety, maybe it was her lectures. I was awake every day to laugh at her jokes about Chaucer, to learn about the intricacies of historical weight on language. And when we got to Milton, I was already a frequenter of her office hours.
Paradise Lost is an epic detailing the fall of Adam and Eve—the original Bible fan fiction to say the least. In the Bible, you hear of the events that take place for the world to come forward as it is. In Paradise Lost, you feel it. Adam sacrifices his rib to end his loneliness. Eve tends to a garden. Her curiosity is beautiful at first. It helps them name each other, helps them name the world around them. They string together words from the air, build it together, find something new that they’re forbidden from tasting.
In church, we are told of Original Sin, told of how it was so preventable. We could have danced in Eden! We could have been saved at birth! We could have stopped Jesus from being nailed to the cross if not for that horrid, greedy Eve! It is the first lesson of a child that you are told you sin when you intend to hurt someone. An accident, stepping on someone’s toe, is harmless. You apologize and move on. When you sin, you must apologize three times. To the person you hurt, to yourself, and to God in a confessional booth. When I told my mom I wanted to die in my teenage years, she told me that I had to go to reconciliation. It was the weight of my sins, and I had to be absolved.
I waited in line on Saturday and when my turn came, I stepped into the wooden structure, kneeling on the cushion. I said the Act of Contrition and told the priest a few sins I’d done. Cursing, disobeying my parents, lying. Doubting God. Then I just started talking. I knew this man. He had blessed me every week for an illness undisclosed. I read the Word at the ambo every month, served the Eucharist to the congregation. I knew he recognized my voice, its nasal tone cracking as I told him I didn’t want to live. He suggested praying more, and I blacked out. I came to in the car with my mother as she asked me what sins I’d confessed to God. And did I feel better yet.
Eve in Paradise Lost agonizes over her famed decision. She has Adam to think of, and God. And yet—what of experience? What of tasting a fruit promised to open a world she couldn’t step back from? What of her, all the gardens she’d tended to her whole life, in search of beauty, in search of care. What if she wanted to feel something entirely new, something that she could hold in her own mind as hers? She takes a bite, without Adam.
Eve has not broken a covenant. She never agreed not to eat the apple. She had never signed a contract, shaken a hand. It was an instruction to test her, to see how close she could torment herself on the edges of temptation—there was no consent in her restriction.
I am at the point of reclamation—navigating what I’m choosing to do, to live, to share. I agree to a company dress code by signing the employee handbook. Daniel and I agree to monogamy on one of our first dates. I know the terms and conditions of writing, the rejection, the waiting, the sudden bursts of inspired mania.
When I realize my copy of Paradise Lost is missing, I am bereft. I have nightmares, and I struggle to sleep. I do not remember handing it away as a gift. I don’t remember putting it in a sell or a donate pile. I don’t even remember bringing it to my apartment. Again, I am an amnesiac. I have forgotten something that mattered, something I knew I had lost. More than time, it was a code for another world (three days) I had lost. Then, I had already lost so much.
Professor Goodman did not know that, in that semester, I had lost one of my close friends, an old flame, a housemate. Professor Goodman did not know that a year ago, I had lost my grandfather, my biggest supporter and safe harbor. I had not sat with his absence separately from missing the rest of the world—and then there I was, missing Tomas, missing Engkong, missing the familiarity of a life I had been slowly building. I was losing things on accident, and even though college was a contract, I was bargaining to avoid its end, too. I couldn’t lose something else. Not then.
And despite the fact that I severely did not need extra credit in the class, I did the bonus assignment. I memorized the last 16 lines of the epic:
The brandisht Sword of God before them blaz'd
Fierce as a Comet; which with torrid heat,
And vapour as the Libyan Air adust,
Began to parch that temperate Clime; whereat
In either hand the hastning Angel caught
Our lingring Parents, and to th' Eastern Gate
Led them direct, and down the Cliff as fast
To the subjected Plaine; then disappeer'd.
They looking back, all th' Eastern side beheld
Of Paradise, so late thir happie seat,
Wav'd over by that flaming Brand, the Gate
With dreadful Faces throng'd and fierie Armes:
Som natural tears they drop'd, but wip'd them soon;
The World was all before them, where to choose
Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:
They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,
Through Eden took thir solitarie way.
In office hours, I swallowed tears as I recited the words to Professor Goodman, who let out an exhale. “Every time,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s so beautiful.”
And I wanted to wail. I wanted to say that yes, it was. It was everything to me. By then, I’d accepted my place at NYU for my MFA, where I proposed an epic poem of my own full of conversations I’d never have with my past selves. One of these selves was trapped in that reconciliation booth, begging for an answer, asking forgiveness for a sin she couldn’t name.
Over the course of the past four years, I’ve been writing this poem, writing it hand in hand with an imagined version of my grandmother welcoming me into purgatory. The book has shapeshifted into a dialogue we’d never have—and when she left the Earth, I grieved those versions of myself all over again, having to take their solitary way without her now.
That book is somewhere in purgatory, waiting in many wrong inboxes and hopefully one right one. I’ve been angry at every no, as though it’s been an assessment of us. As if it’s proof that no one understands the depths of her comfort. It feels wrong to tell people I’ve lost my grandmother when she was so much more than a kind face at Christmas. She cooked every meal growing up. She took me to every piano lesson. I spent hours watching televangelism with her, reading next to her in her bed. I learned about kindness from my grandparents both, in a world where it felt like feelings were the bane of logical existence. My grandmother was always ready to admit she was wrong, especially when she wasn’t wrong at all. I learned that from her too. Apologizing for simply not being enough.
My grandmother had been telling me she would die since I was young. When I was 8, she showed me what outfit she wanted to be cremated in. I remembered it when the time came, when everyone asked me what secrets had stayed between us. It was easy. She’d placed a matching necklace on the hanger, too.
She’d long told me that she didn’t want me to be sad. Her purpose was filled with my coming of age. She once told me that when I graduated high school, she would go to sleep and die. Everyone knows she passed away peacefully. The day before, we took her to her favorite restaurant in Oakland to celebrate Chinese New Year, the year of the snake. She sat in my apartment, watching as my sister looked at my decorations for the first time, and witnessed a full creature stretching beyond its skin. She shed herself that night, going to bed early and never waking up.
I looking back upon the Eastern gates of that 9am sun in my co-op bedroom remember grief again and again. It’s been circling me since reconciliation, and will always be somewhere to remind me of the Eden I shared with the dead. How in some moments I can enshrine those memories, how my forgetting can be the scariest threat to moving forward.
I’d like to think that, wherever my copy of Paradise Lost is, it’s waiting for me to pick it up again and remember. Every note in marginalia, every highlighted line. If I close my eyes, I can almost read it from here.