You, Neverland, and I

You, Neverland, and I by Vivian (Xiao Wen) Li

2600 words, 13 minutes reading time
Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2023)

When you return to me, your ankled clothes will blow past your waist spinning in the sinking sun, the pale curve of your hand scooping through my glove. Your hands will glow, not with the sorrow of the past, but with the pain of pestilence lingering in the future. You will tell me you are finished looking for someone to obey. Sinking, you twirl on your toes. Your hair whips through my fingers as you whisper: Here’s a piece of love. Here’s a piece of nail. Here’s someone who is still trying to survive. Unbind.

That first time we felt skin, the people and objects we‘d known had all disappeared. Frigid air sliced through our veil and tore us until we roused and comforted one another. We followed our family’s footprints in the shā tān, then through the desert that connected us to their haunting—we learned how they compressed and unfurled creations, how they twirled the world so yīn and yáng could sing together. Lying on your arm, you told me you felt a plant seeding from the corner of your toe, growing through your stomach and blooming through your eyes. I smiled and whispered, that’s an auspicious dream, don’t you know?

There is a beginning with each new giver—the yáng in our beginning itched for movement, so we bled the orange it needed to simmer and boil into fire. Yīn was afraid of being noticed, so we shielded it with lies and cryptic blankets. We hid them in the hem of belonging; we created, grew, and planted soil where dark matter reigned, blew waterfalls into existence, glittered the world with love and laughter and joy. But when the plausibilities caught up to us, when we drained closer to our edge—we sang into arms so strong and silent I was almost afraid of touching the thread connecting us to our voices, to the ground.

Then, you whispered that the tingling sensations were growing—you were rooting deeper into the connected breath of the world. As you breathed out, a million dandelions spun their parasols, and we knew the name of Life. I opened my spinning arms, the strings tethered only to you, and I leapt from the edge, wandering; I left you to smooth through the rest of the marble—I danced with the creations you cultivated, I abandoned you to your genius. By the time I arrived again, you were wilting on the edge, your veins had become the roots pulsating through the earth, your eyes were the stones I would never again unpick. How easily life can disappear in a flash of a sleeve—in a cloth of swirling coolness. Time was the sharp images flashing across your irises, before you were spinning into someone else’s arms.

That was the first time I lost you, before we returned again.

I awoke with plinking needles on my nails—I reached for a name I did not yet know and found you slumbering next to me. Struck by solitude, I collapsed against you until we were swept into the silver tresses and undulating grasslands. You told me this time would be different, words I would never discover the meaning of until after the end.

We soared through the planes creating transient spirits, as you told me, Aleni, we have all the time we need, let us stop and enjoy what is before the beginning. We grew what became mushrooms from the silver, sparking tendrils and crafted bright, barreling sparks of phantoms before channeling actors into other shadow puppet shows. We did not stop to sleep, we did not eat, we did not memorize the taste of each other’s lips. We did not care what the world wanted, we only considered what we wanted the world to be.

As we weaved through meadows into dynasties, into millennia, we met, at the crest of a nearly evaporated hill, an entity we forgot we had once created—the slit of light upon a rock that trembled as it sagged deeper into the crevice of the world. I demanded for you to not leave me. We fumbled through our first words of disagreement before you slipped through the edge. At first, the remainder of our whimsical creatures kept me occupied, but I couldn’t help returning more often, and at last I slipped my hand through, catching with it the crushed music of fairies and heralds and dances. I did not know where you would be, in this time apart from our own. I shifted through.

It was suffocating. Blooming pink fuchsias, thick succulent roses—what we might’ve conceived when we were younger, before we cast these fragments aside for stranger creatures. I bubbled through fields of crimson, plum, amethyst pollen, the sweetness coating my throat until I could hardly speak. Until I saw you on that throne.

 You were lost in someone else’s daydreams, the lilies in your hair threading through what remained of your name. Sparking vines twisted over your arms and legs, and dust settled like piercings everywhere on your body—still, your eyes blinked when you saw me.  

I asked you who you were now, where you had travelled. You told me this was your happy place. You were queened by the fairies, and you would never sacrifice yourself again—you would never be mine alone. I was scared of being the only one unrooted. I screamed and sliced my skin, I burned through the yīn I had flattened within me, with breath so heavy I thought I would sink, eternally. And I poured out the taste of the edge of the world.

But when all was over, I could only pick you up, scattered stems in hand, and realize, at the moment I kissed you—this was the second time I had forgotten your name.

You dance, and the narrative web trembles. Your moonlit palms and lifting heels weave, effervescent. Your eyes, swimming and knowing me. Your hair twirls around my fingers as you thread into your hands a trickle of water, as it is reinstated into this world.

Beside us, the first gingko tree, softer than I remembered, hums as its first fruit cradles into our lips. We tunnel a whistle from its shell, and when time is created, when we desire structure again—every morning, with the bitter tinge of summer sweets on our tongues—we dance and sing under its brushed glow, recreating what still remains.

There are pieces of you I collect. You and I, our singing objects, our orchestras, your stone irises. The first time the fairy queen told me she adored you, the last time you whispered I was your adored one and kissed my fingers. And when we discover these missing pieces next to your mother’s open casket, we realize it was closer to the end of white. Your arms tremble against mine. Maybe there is still some ash of you that remembers the blinding when I lost you.

I forget how much I howled.

How many more cycles can we endure? How many more recursions of self-pity at my swallowed voice, of rage against the emotions I cannot control? 

As the darkness thickens within me, and the world yawns shut its eyes again—I’m holding onto you. In the sharp wind, I hold onto what little I can feel in my body. 

Al, you whisper, crumbling in my palms, why does the world bleed into me? 

Once again, I do not have an answer that can save you. 

So I swallow sorrow, high above, as the desert collapses in its hourglass death, as the sand crackles free in its broken promises. Wind slits my hands as heat burns into the center of the world. 

Everything and nothing, always whirling around us, within us. 

But if we stop here—if we give up, how will I ever see you again?

So I bury your wise, iris words next to the casket. I slip them as stones into the molten sand, watch them churn and burn into the abyss. 

I lie across our dissipating memories—knowing that one day, inevitably, they will find me again.

Laa—la—da. Laa—da—da. 

The echo of a dream, or a memory. A haunting. A feeling eradicated. How many times did we leave each other behind?

I do not remember.

The seventh time—I can only recall climbing through crumbling hills, every waking an expanse further from you. During the moments when the moon lost her warmth, when I was alone, I cried so I could embrace all of me. When you discovered where I was, I held you so tenderly that I swore I knew you. Your lips danced across my face in a temple kiss, as we spun twilight into a cocoon.

The moon is losing her struggle; does the world linger despite the goddess’ demise? Is that why the fairy queen cared about your grace above all else? There are parts of you that I have always missed, before every return:

Your soft feet before the aching window; your yáng fingers gripping elderberry flowers; your smooth, loose ankles dangling over the edge of a canyon eye. That which opens into neverland, and you and I and the spirits piercing color through our marrow—crimson lilies extending from our fingertips.

There is a way to transfer the earth’s yīn into you. I discovered this after the eighth time, when you bled into my arms, when your ankles dulled and ached and ghosted. When I whispered, I remember you, you smiled and dazzled into rusted lightning. It was the first time I had a body to bury, and I thickened the constellations into sheets so I could carry you closer to your fairy abode. After countless iterations, I am almost certain it is where our ancestors disappeared to, weary after their journeys as givers.

As the blanket fell across your body, your lips arched to bring a golden glow to your skin, and my memories started to twist away, threading back to their owner. I unwrapped you, and the hollow ringing returned to me. I repeated this, for several cycles, until the world was dark again, until what we created pierced into emptiness. 

Do you remember me? I whispered, upon your first breaths. 

I repeated this until I had nothing more to destroy, until the universe crumbled back into its core.

I do not recall counting anything beyond the ninth time I held you.

Do not forget us, even when the moon dabs on her pallid pallet of paint, when the arsenic seeps into fish gutted by the riverside. The metalloid oozing and mixing with blood in two spirals. Allow them to absorb in the soil of suffering, like us unraveling together. When the clouds are tinged with your residue, your blood suffused into the sky, you will become Cháng'é—rising from fox spirits, above the wailing rabbits, you’ll soar and embrace the blossoming doom. And I, underneath its harmonies, will lament under the ginkgo trees, singing: Laa—la—da. Laa—da—da.

We always begin with the destruction of the world. Your gift is creation, mine is extinction and rebirth. Each time I draw this energy, I steal from the empty echoes in the womb. Already I feel the thread of our powers thinning, and my voice crackles with strain. Soon, very soon, we will meet our demise.

I sing our sorrow, the burning of our loneliness, and the world shivers again, echoing with my voice. Suspension. Then: another collapse, another curling. Doom yawns, its tendrils grasping at your feet, enclosing my throat. 

I close my eyes to the folding constellations, knowing I will see them again too soon.

Al, you whispered, do you really want to create a world?

You had just finished your making, your toes tipped into the edge of a pond. Once, there were swirling objects in its depths, their echoes seen but never acknowledged. The air around us began melting with the ache of the past.

Somewhere, in the old ages, when we breathed heavier, when our minds didn’t seek to reach—you told me the world didn’t need us. How could we justify imposing our will upon something that didn’t want to be alive in the first place?

I spoke your name then, told you how they desired us as we needed them—that their value was in existence itself, but I knew it was just an excuse. We used them so we could justify ourselves existing. You felt it too, and you whimpered next to me, the nightmares of multiple deaths eroding your spirit. 

You were an orb cresting over the hill, the glow of a lone firefly—you didn’t know how to protect what you loved.

A lily pond’s breath ago, I unthreaded half of me to meet you, to untangle your fated eyes from the memories you had to consume. I experienced centuries of loneliness—I was no longer afraid of being abandoned; I only wanted you to live. I had enough yīn to build you, to recreate your beauty and sustain you until I fractured from within.

Your nails tessellate into my ribs. You are breathing as I transfer narratives between us. Remember, we are two people walking by our paths’ golden lanterns, experiencing sorrow and joy together, even as we separate to follow our dreams.

I press my hand deep into your center, until the last strands of my energy entangle and encase. The familiar ghosting, eyes wide open, memories crackling.

Before we crumple, I feather my fingers through your hair.

I promise you, this is the last time you will remember pain.  

I return to the epicenter, where pistils draw circles around gentle swells of glowing green, and the clouds obscure you, your being in the stillness, within a twirling universe, save for a flash of an ankle with my name on it. You always belonged to me, you whisper, even before I realized it.

 You lean against the ginkgo trees, the gold bright against your dark hair. I will remember to paint this moment in my last solo journey through the spinning disks in our time. I’ve retrieved the gifts I left for myself, remembering pieces of the future that seed into the past. 

I’ll take one piece of the world and swallow it, sing the other darkness into a shapely comet. I will lay back and rest for a few more centuries. By that time, I will be used to being alone, used to searching for you, dazzling in places you thought deserved the most beauty.  

You gasp as Nature tumbles off the strands of your hair—you cling closer to the orb tree. Without it, you are a flower that has lost its leaves, but I shield you from your nakedness. When I am here, you will never have to realize what loneliness means. You draw me closer and whisper how wonderful the gathering was, how they heralded you as Fairy and told you they would love you eternally, how they would worship your iris words. Your stones gleam. Your smile dreams. We lean closer and you breathe out. 

I can hear the universe humming at my feet, their voices swelling.  

Author’s Note

As I was writing this story, I initially focused how beauty and music could increase in intensity, despite the two lovers dealing with more destruction and pain. However, two years later, after returning to this piece upon acceptance and learning more about myself—I realized what I’ve been subconsciously exploring (in addition to my original vision) is related to my neurodivergence and how I’m struggling to make sense of this chaotic world. These bottled-up emotions are inextricably linked to the waves I experience of my depression and dissociation. I ended up adding section VI to develop these feelings further: “Why does the world bleed into me?” In this story, the world’s setting has an everything-everywhere-all-at-onceness and timelessness, perhaps because of the all-consuming and suspended ways time feels to me. Thank you for reading and sharing in these experiences!