月亮代表我的心

by Christy Tan
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in the language you grew up alongside, exceeding your grasp but still within hearing distance, you listen to each bittersweet note, softly pressing your ear against a door which separates you from your past, you do not remember the words or their meaning but the feelings they elicit are familiar – you feel remembered

like the vague sensation of slowly waking up, there is no perceptible trace or memory locating you and the song that surrounds you, you do not remember what happened or when, but you are certain it has and is still happening, the unmistakable crooning of Teresa Teng, ubiquitous and remote, as though she has been compressed outside of time – timeless and expanding – contracting into a vacant landscape you can enter but not see

the English word “translation” comes from the Latin “translatio”, meaning to “carry – by the time this reaches you, you will remember me in a different language, each time you hold the language of my hands and touch the language of my face, wanting to know more than language permits, you will emerge something less – across”

we are always in the middle of translating something, between past and present, between you and I, there
are things between us that language can not fathom, things that recoil back into themselves when
identified through singular or linear means, even when we speak the same language there is no way to
measure how much of what you are trying to say is reaching me, how much is immutable

when piecing together the fragments that evade your grasp, you inspect each angle at its outermost edge, like a crystal that catches and refracts light, offering different revelations with no discerning truth, each angle unfolding in relation to the next and gliding into a kind of slippery geometry – the moon and you and I, we look at each other but never at the same time, destabilising any permanent structure from calcifying our desire for simultaneity sustains their ceaseless movement, iridescent in its undulating,