Unconditional

If I close my eyes, I can picture you in your white coat: slender, starched, slightly worn.

If I had asked you to hem my white coat, you would have done it and then resented me for it. So I took it to a tailor on Lexington Avenue who, with one glance, knew exactly where I didn’t fit. When he gave it back, I felt for the first time that I looked the part. I wondered if I looked like you.

If there weren’t three thousand miles between us, I’d take us out for brunch. You would spend too long browsing the menu then order something you didn’t want. It would remind me of the times when you told me I was something you didn’t want. You would stick to small talk while I struggle for sentences longer than the span of a breath. You would say this is neither the time nor place.

If not now, then when?

If there were a language for the two of us, it would be neither Chinese nor English but medicine. I never felt like I could know you until you mentioned Rituximab and Tetralogy of Fallot when I came home for the holidays. All at once, the words I grew up with made sense. If only you could know me like you know melanoma, diagnose my pain like a myelodysplastic syndrome, read my face like a blood smear, then I think perhaps you would prescribe me love.

If I told you I wanted a love that nourishes and keeps me warm, you’d say affection has no caloric value and a second blanket will keep out the cold. It seems we are always keeping things out of our house—the wind, the neighbors, the world—when all I want is to let things in.

If there were a Daughter’s Day, I wonder what you would tell me. I am ugly and fair, wanted and unwanted, adored and disowned. You cannot embrace the woman who is a writer, lover, future obstetrician-gynecologist, but she is the only one I know. You say you wish I were a child again, by which I think you mean obedient.

If I wrote to you for Mother’s Day, I think it would be the hardest thing. I would sit all afternoon in a corner of the library, watching the cursor blink to the beat of my heart, wondering if all this time, I am writing to myself.

I think you could love me, under the right conditions, but what would we call it, if not love?