Highway with Green Apples

by Bae Suah

I am one week away from my twenty-fifth birthday. I hate being that age. That age is neither as fresh and full of life as fifteen years nor as jaded as the afternoon of thirty-five years. I never know what the next day will bring, so I am always uneasy.

I am a twenty-five year-old who goes to bed every night wondering what I will do the next day. By now, all the other women I know who went to the same all-girls high school as me are at their most self-assured, having married or living as career women in the big city, but I am as unsure of myself as I was at fifteen.

His friend says he wants to move back to the big city to get a job and enjoy the unsentimental nature of organized society for a change.

How long is an ocean of time? Feelings as countless as grains of sand. Distances as far-flung as the sky. How much is that, I wonder.

“I wish you were a different type of girl,” he continues. “The type who cries and refuses to let go when a guy breaks up with her. The type who says, ‘How dare you see another woman, I won’t stand for it.’ If you were that type, you would never have gotten this call from me. But, we were good in the beginning! You said so yourself.”

Because life has not turned out the way I wanted it to. Because that’s how it always is—as a child, you get no love from your parents, and at school, you get bad grades and never catch anyone’s eye. And after you’re all grown up, you keep peeking in the door of the gynecology clinic, and then wait for an hour, and another hour, at the café where a man has promised to meet you, gulping down several cups of weak coffee before leaving alone in the dark. Then, to top it off, the cat that crosses your path one day on a highway with green apples turns out to be a black cat.

I was the kind of girl who felt defeated at the sight of pretty girls walking around confidently. I never trust anyone who tells me I’m pretty or says they like me.

I felt certain that just because practically every single person found someone to marry did not mean that they’d found a love as gentle as a spring breeze or that shook them up like a midsummer storm.

“If you like painting that much, shouldn’t you be a painter instead of working in a department store? If you don’t want to live an ordinary life, then why are you dating a good-for-nothing like me, instead of finishing college and meeting someone in the same league as you?”

“I don’t think about the future. You said you don’t, either. All I think about is death.”

To the final darkness of summer before the oncoming dawn, I whisper: “I don’t know anything.” I’m not thrilled by sex, and I’m not moved by love. I gaze down at the road stretching off into the distance and stand still in the bleak, dusty wind. I think I can smell the green of the river and the scent of old grass. “Is the ocean this way?” they pull over and ask. The wind ruffles my hair and flattens the tall, dry grass along the side of the road. Rachmaninov blares out the car windows, and they buy green apples.