Asian Ghosts Quotes

“I’m here,” you call out, feet planted in the sand.

Beneath the water, she smiles wide in answer.

Step free of your shirt and trousers. Throw your hair into a tucked bun, tie it tight, and leap into the cool green sea with hands splayed and knees bent. As the currents swirl round, you reach out, taking her extended hand; she pulls you close and the pair of you cut through the water at her knifing, lurching speed.

You play tag games in the water most afternoons, which of course you cannot ever win, even when she closes her eyes and twists a hand behind her back. Still, it’s fun. She catches fish, caging them in her long-fingered hands so that you can see them up close. Sometimes urchins, too, and once an octopus. The octopus isn’t afraid, and wraps a tentacle thoughtfully around your wrist before jetting off.

Sea Sister is as dangerous as the ocean itself. Logically, you know this. She has those teeth for a reason, and once or twice—when meeting a shark in the open waters—she has snapped her jaws in their direction. None of them stick around; animals have enough sense to recognize death when they see it.

But also like the ocean, Sea Sister is magical and beautiful, and you can’t get enough of her. Of the two options—spending time with a monster, or spending time with ghosts—you know which you’d rather choose.

Sometimes, she peers through the tendrils of her dark, water-logged hair, and you glimpse how others might see her: lurking, cruel, dangerous. A twisted and hungry creature. Sometimes, she will dance by spinning through the water in a whirl of gaunt limbs, a sight as terrifying as it is fascinating.

Then she smiles, dives, cavorts, and there is only Sea Sister again. Fierce and fiercely lonely, savage and savagely beautiful. She belongs only to you; the light that dazzles your eyes alone.

And you know with every filament of your being that these are the good days, the bright hours and best moments of your life, and that their like will never come again.”
― Sunyi Dean, The Girl with a Thousand Faces