It opens with the kind of sunlight ambiguous to the time of day, bright but missing its usual warmth. I am on the back seat of my mother’s bicycle, and the rustling of weeping willow leaves fills my ears and eyes. As we hurtle forward we start picking up speed along the wind, almost daring it to race, and the streets around us are silent as we slide past.

The further we go, the tighter the silence closes in around us, until at last even the rattling of the wind in the trees fades to nothing. There is no more sound in my memory after this point.

I look down at my hands and contemplate the string connecting my black knitted mittens. I try pulling on it to separate them. Why does the idea of a single strand connecting both hands bother me so much? I will never remember. I look up now at my mom, who has never looked back, who is still pedaling forwards faster and faster until the streets around us sharpen into focus again and right as I recognize the front of my grandparent’s apartment we stop, and head inside.

Inside, all the lights are turned off. I am sent to the back corner of the table, the one closest to the window, and everyone sits in silence, cast against the increasingly sepia light that leaks in. I turn away to look outside. The sky darkens as the wind picks up, and as it does, hurtling dust and leaves in increasingly erratic spasms, it feels as if even time is speeding up. As the procession ends there is nothing left but a wall of sediment from the Yellow River mixed with factory fumes, a tawny chimera irrevocably marching forwards, conquering more and more of the sky.

And as it swallows us, my memory fades into oblivion…