Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 16. Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know.
This week I stayed with the water.
Not in Florida. Not really. I was standing in my kitchen here, the scanner on the counter, but my breathing and my heart rate were somewhere else entirely. A brown river in Thailand. A boat in the early morning. A festival in November. My parents were both there, fifty years ago, and somehow I am the one watching it now.
I spent most of the week with four photographs.
All from the same night. Loy Krathong. My mother in an orange dress. The Ping River behind her, crowded with tiny lights moving away on the current. My father on the bank with his camera, doing what he always did: stepping in, then stepping back, and keeping everything.
It sounds almost gentle when I write it that way.
It did not feel gentle.
Each photograph lives in a different part of the story.
In the first one she has everything in her hands. An enormous krathong, white lotus petals layered all the way around, incense rising from the middle. She is turned toward him. Toward the camera. Toward whoever she thought she was looking at that night.
She was looking at him.
She did not know she was looking at me.
I thought I was ready for that line. I wrote it and then had to walk away from the desk. There is something about realizing you were loved before you existed that pulls the floor out from under you. It is beautiful. It is also, in that moment, almost unbearable.
The second photograph is all candlelight. Her face still. Her eyes closed. The look I knew my whole life but never saw from this angle: the way she went somewhere else when she prayed. The absence that wasn’t absence at all. The part of her that belonged to something beyond the room she was standing in.
I watched that look in real time for years.
Watching it now, on a screen, with her gone, was different.
I didn’t cry. Not then. My body has its own order of operations with grief. First it goes quiet. Then it goes cold. I felt the temperature drop in my chest, the way it does when you know a wave is coming and you are bracing for it without even realizing that is what you are doing.
The third photograph is the moment of return. Her eyes just opening. Not all the way back. Not gone either. That in-between place where someone is carrying whatever they found in the dark into the light again.
I paused the scanner on that one longer than I meant to.
What it cost me there was not the image itself, but the realization that I had watched her come back from that place a hundred times and never asked her what it felt like. There is a particular ache in all the questions you can no longer ask.
The fourth is the one that undid me.
Her back to the camera. Her hair loose. Both arms extended over black water. Two krathong in her hands, one already beginning to drift away. The moment she lets go. Of what, I don’t know. Whatever she wrote on the slip of paper tucked inside. Whatever she had been carrying that year. Whatever she was ready to hand to the river.
My father kept that moment.
The river did not.
I sat there in Florida looking at that frame and my body moved before my mind caught up. My throat closed. My hands went still on the edge of the scanner. It felt like standing on the bank again watching her ashes go, except this time I couldn’t tell if I was in the past or the present or some impossible place in between.
Grief is expensive.
That was the bill coming due.
I thought about a different morning, a different basket, the same river. Her ashes. Flowers. Incense. A moon pie. A phone held up so I could watch the Ping River from 8,600 miles away. The seventh day after she passed. The kind of ceremony you are there for and not there for at the same time.
She had been practicing this her whole life.
That thought did not comfort me at first.
It made me angry.
Not at her. Not at the river. At the distance. At the fact that she knew how to release things and I am still here, decades younger than she was in that photograph, trying to learn it at a kitchen counter with a scanner humming and no river in sight.
I cooked my way through that anger the only way I know how.
Boat noodles one day. Khao tom another. Two different bowls, same river in my head. One from a boat at Damnoen Saduak when I was six. One from a temple morning offering she must have made a hundred times. The tastes are different, but they both belong to the same element.
Water carries things.
It also takes things.
That line sat in my notebook for three days before I let myself write the rest of the paragraph. I kept finding other things to do: laundry, dishes, checking the mail, anything that did not involve admitting that the same water that carried her offerings carried her away from me too.
Here is what I know now, after this week:
- My father stepped into the water so he could keep what my mother was willing to let go.
- My mother trusted the water because it had been carrying her offerings her whole life.
- I am the one standing in a kitchen in Florida trying to hold both of those truths in the same chapter, and some days it feels like more than I can carry.
Writing this book means deciding what gets released and what gets kept.
The cost is that I have to feel each thing twice: once when it happened, and again when I put it into words.
Some things go to the river. Some things stay on the page. Some things never leave my own hands.
There are parts of this week I will only ever write in the book.
The exact words I said to her before she left for Thailand. The photograph we took on her last day in America. The moment I had to decide, in real time, what loving her actually looked like when it meant letting her go home to die on the other side of the world. The part where I hung up the phone and sat on the floor because there was nowhere else for that decision to go.
Those belong to the book.
What belongs here, with you, is the admission that I did not move through this week gracefully. I stalled. I snapped at small things. I burned garlic I have never burned in my life. I stood at the sink longer than it takes to wash one bowl of soup.
I made khao tom one morning, lit a candle on the counter, and sat with the bowl longer than it took to eat it. I thought about Loy Krathong in Kamphaeng Phet. I thought about the Patuxent River in Maryland, where we floated our own krathong on cold American water because that’s the river we had. I thought about the Ping River on my phone screen, carrying a basket away from people I love.
You do not need a river, I wrote in the margin.
You just need to remember.
The remembering hurts.
Water keeps everything if someone is willing to stand on the bank and watch. My father did that with his camera. My mother did it with her offerings. This week, sitting in a kitchen in Florida with a scanner humming on the counter, I realized I am doing the same thing.
It costs me tears I don’t always let fall.
It costs me days where the only thing I finish is one paragraph and one pot of soup.
It costs me the illusion that I can tell this story without breaking my own heart a little every time I sit down to write.
I am the one standing in the dark, watching what leaves and deciding what stays.
And I am writing it down anyway.
