Real Americans

by Rachel Khong

She is in love, which feels, to her, at once easy and hard, elemental and ungraspable—like vanishing and eternity at the same time.

Would it be so bad to discover that life until now, or some portion of it, had been illusory—an advanced society’s highly realistic simulation? It might actually be a relief.

She had always wanted more than one life could contain.

It was a habit, with my parents: omitting information, not wanting to worry them unnecessarily. Though they’d raised me so American, I could never manage the sorts of American relationships my friends had with their parents, where they talked to them like friends.

He blew on my arm to cool it, and in that moment, what love was seemed so clear to me: the need to guard against loss. If I lost him, I thought then, feeling his cool breath against my hot arm, I would never recover.

My mother had always spoken English to me. Now I wondered if, in doing so, she had not fully been herself.