Acceleration

Learning to drive is terrifying. I spend most of my time at home learning to drive. Logical conclusion: I spend most of my time at home terrified.

Appa taught me how to brake before teaching me how to accelerate. As silly as it is, accelerating is the part I fear the most. I am afraid to carry the weight of other bodies, of other lives, with unflinching speed. In empty parking lots, I trace circles on warm concrete and brake often. It is a paralyzing endeavor, but one that I am learning to love.

After another day of circling the parking lot, Appa tells me my handling could be better, smoother. This is nothing new. But as I drive us home, I find myself becoming more aware of so many new things: my tense limbs, the bodies of water populating my hometown, the trees in the rearview mirror that bloom pink with magnolia flowers and summer light. Every landmark I accelerate past, every grazing cow I catch in my peripheral vision — all these pieces that blur and coalesce into memory.

While driving, Appa taught me that there is marginal time for error. In fact, time is deadly: It is the lightning-quick difference between a head-on collision and a normal ride home.

Everything is textbook precise, not unlike the way our bodies work. The sound of our hearts beating after a particularly jerky left turn is the same as that of blood crashing against mechanical valves. The reason sweat collects in pools that cool down our skin is the same reason we add antifreeze to car engines — and the same reason that Appa favors places that are coastal and spectacularly blue. Places like San Francisco, where seagulls coast lazily against bridges, where hills are sewn with yellow thread and valleys are studded with reflective buildings. Somewhere by the sea, by a lake, by some cycling body of water that will absorb leftover heat and bones, hunger and fear.

Appa is always the one with big ideas, the ones that soar and float. There is something about him that sparkles. Maybe it is his fearlessness.

To a fearless person, it might feel comforting to know that we are the conglomerate of so many cells, so much that is breathing, all that life concentrated into one body. Meanwhile, I find it a little burdensome. I brake and I brake.

Appa was born in the year of the tiger, while I was born in the year of the monkey. According to every fortune-telling website I scour on the internet, we are not very compatible, mostly because we are so similar. We are antagonistic species; we see the same faults in each other as we see in ourselves. At best, one website says we would make great tennis partners.

The first thing I wanted to do after learning to drive was use my newfound skills to see the water. Lake or river, ocean or puddle—it didn’t matter much to me. I like the water in the same way that I like fresh perilla leaves, stewed cucumbers, spinach boiled in salt: first and second and third derivatives of water. Maybe this is why I am often concerned about the nearest body, flesh or water, and always drowning for it. Why I break and I break.

But Appa likes lush forests and fertile soil and ancient trees that have limbs that stretch towards the sky. He prefers the persistence of rooted wood to the unpredictable force of an approaching wave. Maybe this is also why Appa is so insistent that his children learn to swim.

“You must be able to float on your back,” he would tell me as a child, gesturing at my inverted posture. “It’s easy.” Like merging onto the highway or like facing your deepest, darkest, ugliest fears. In response, I would look away and stare outside the car window, which never held any water. Only endless green, fragile yellow, lines of white. Only the long drive home.

In the zodiac race, the monkey trails far behind the tail of the tiger, who is more diligent and thus quicker to reach the shore. Meanwhile, the monkey cannot swim — only float along in death. The monkey can only grasp at crashing water, her small fists closing around blank space.

When I first heard the monkey’s story, I laughed. Still, I feel a little sorry for the monkey, who is only a monkey, foolish with its animal desires, unaware that nothing — not fear, not guilt — can hide behind a child’s face.

In one version of the story, the tiger and the monkey exist in their own respective universes and never cross paths.

In another, the monkey chokes on her own spit, salt filling her lungs, chlorine bubbling from her throat, and still the race goes on. Or the monkey is a daughter tracing repetitive circles in an empty parking lot.

When I think about the two of us, I realize a daughter inherits the best and worst parts of her father. The parts that are hungry to be loved or held or just seen. Maybe, many years from now, the monkey will have a daughter of her own, lungs sloshing with water. A daughter who is equally fearful and equally paralyzed.

Maybe not. Regardless of how it is told, it is an uncomfortable story. But someone has to tell it. Someone has to lose the race. Someone has to drown.

It is the year of the dragon. Year of sharpness and precision and animal hearts.

In a parking lot, Appa is teaching me to drive. “It gets easier,” he says. “It’s something that comes with time.” I think again about him, my Appa: the source of half my body and all my stuttering heart. Appa, wholly tigerish, wholly strong, wholly himself.

I think about seaside houses, about the dreams he’s never told me about. It’s easy. It’s all I can do.

— Magazine writer Elane M. Kim can be reached at elane.kim@thecrimson.com.