Highway with Green Apples

by Bae Suah

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 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.

A cousin isn’t something solid. Neither is family.

“But that’s how it is. Nothing ever ends the way it begins.

He doesn’t mean anything to me anymore. He doesn’t make me sad, but he doesn’t make me happy, either. That’s how it started, and that’s how it’ll end.”

I am leaning out the window of a car racing down a highway in late autumn in order to get a better look at the windy, deserted fields.

Dawn is coming. Some eager person somewhere must already be warming up for a jog.

To the final darkness of summer before the oncoming dawn, I whisper: “I don’t know anything.”