Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

It was a new year. That always made me a little bit sad. As though something were wrong with the old one.

Love irrigated everything with new meaning. Loving him fully and well—this was a task I felt up to. I was used to an atmosphere of unease that traveled constantly with me; when I was with Matthew, it lifted. Both of us had been lonely; we weren’t anymore.

Falling in love didn’t seem to me a choice. It was disorientation.

The world always seemed to be ending, not even in one specific way but all the ways: climate change, gun violence, war, coronavirus. In the quiet mornings it didn’t matter: The world would go on without us.

This was what love had always been for me: denying your own reality in order to protect another person.

Without time, ambition is worth nothing: It is only frustration.

Li Bai wrote a lot about being drunk under the moonlight. This was amusing to me, that writing about being drunk counted as literature.

This was how it felt to be with him—a deep sigh of comfort. Until now, belonging had meant a denial of myself—a flattening. With Ping it was different. I could be who I was, however imperfect.

She had never been comfortable, as a younger person. There was so much expectation placed on the young, who were uniformly full of potential, who could change the world, until they did or didn’t. Nobody expected anything remarkable from a woman her age. But she had never wanted to be remarkable.

Friendship didn’t require blunting the richness of yourself to find common ground. Sometimes it was that, but it was also appreciating another person, in all their particularity.

As people we interrupted one another’s lives—that was what we did. If you sought to live your life without interruption you wound up like me: living life without interruption, totally alone.

Hearing a story—what did it accomplish? Nothing and everything.