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.

context: I turned 25 two weeks ago

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.

slap me on the face, why don’t you?

“I wish you were a different type of girl,”

so... a pick me girl

He forgot it was my birthday. I don’t feel like reminding him, either. And that is how I end up turning twenty-five. During the two years that we dated, he gave me a gift to celebrate every occasion—my birthday, the anniversary of the day he bought a dress shirt from me at the department store where I worked, the anniversary of our first date. If I told him it’s my birthday, he would buy me a gaudy printed scarf or an African-style necklace. That’s the kind of girl he likes.

chronic ted mosby syndrome

I think back to elementary school. My handwriting was always neat and perfect, and during class, I kept my eyes on the swaying hem of my teacher’s dress. She would hand back my pristine homework that never had any eraser marks on it and praise me by patting me on the head with a hand that smelled like soap. “You’re such a good girl,” she would say. “Keep it up.”

ah yes, the gifted kid wasteland

Though I’d never watched the show, I knew the whole story because their dialogue filled the house every weekend evening. When I went to class on Mondays, the other girls all talked about the show over paper cups of coffee. “I think I’d like to marry him,” my cousin said while painting clear polish onto her nails. “We haven’t been dating that long, but where else am I going to meet someone like him?

But I don’t think she has what it takes to be a model.

ok tyra

“Why does your mother hate her so much? Is she from a poor family? Did she go to a bad school? Or is her mother a shaman?”