The walls creep in to meet you. The door tightens in its frame. The windows, once large enough to let the outside in, shrink with every day that passes. They are no longer your view; you can’t see past their barrier. You should be out this week, far beyond that glass, celebrating with colour and light with the brightest of reds everywhere you turn. You should be squished-up travelling on an over-crowded train, rattling into countryside with pent-up, fractious children. You wouldn’t mind their angst; you’d know the end was in sight. You should be hurtling towards your hometown and the holidays.
Not this year.
You’d be forgiven for ignoring the festival, but you’ll do it for the children. So you mix paste for the wrappers, roll that dough as thin as the window glass used to be three weeks ago before it thickened, imperceptibly, while the walls slunk inwards. The elder child wants to help until he doesn’t. His itching fingers stretch a hole in that dumpling wrapper and you’ll need to start over. Spicy pork-with-chilli clambers into your nose and stings your eyes. You rub the tears and drag the boy screaming to the washroom to sponge sticky gloop from his fingers before they touch his sister’s hair. You remind him again that this is temporary, necessary, and will be over soon.
It isn’t.
As February limps into March, blurs into April rushing towards May, the air becomes clammy. The odour of clumsy re-made New Year dumplings has long given way to the freshly-woken, hair-plastering, sweet sweat of the smaller child mixing with the curtain-hanging, wall-climbing, bed-jumping energy of a boy who must play somewhere.
Your children buzz like flies in a jar.
Through the thick, thick glass of the windows, you peer into other prisons. None are within reach. The ceiling of your apartment is lower than it used to be. Heavier. And lighter. A neighbour paces above you. Treading softly, so softly, he steps on your every remaining nerve. The miniscule, millimetres-wide stretch of almost-outside that you once thought was a balcony is too high for escape.
Or just high enough.
It doesn’t cling to anyone else’s balcony, so the only possibility it offers is down. Clear, clean air beckons you towards the ground. Thirteen floors down the dim sum cart-sized empty space is the exact size to fit your tumbling body. You’d probably prefer the exhaust-filled, fume-ridden smog of before blinding your fall. Behind you, the baby cries. You pick her up and hold her close, thinking of elsewhere.
The seventy-fourth day is the day you break free. Your children spill into the street like a tipped-up bag of sugar, sweet, sticky, and everywhere all at once. Then, for a moment, the boy stills. Turns his face to the sky, inhales the wonder of outside and your heart sings for him again.
