Goodbye, Vitamin

by Rachel Khong

At one point Dad emerges, shirtless, into the kitchen, to brew himself coffee. I get my nipples from him, I realize, alarmed.

“I don’t go to sleep,” my father says, with some indignation. “I go to sleeps.”

Try not to feel too shitty, was her main piece of advice. Stop, always, at 2.5 drinks. Make a list of good things—however small. I did everything she said. Granted, I would have tried anything.

Seagulls are squawking; the gutsy ones come close and give us piercing stares. They look like Jack Nicholson.

I don’t know how I got to be thirty. I don’t feel thirty, the way I felt so definitely nine, and thirteen, and twenty-one.

What imperfect carriers of love we are, and what imperfect givers. That the reasons we can care for one another can have nothing to do with the person cared for. That it has only to do with who we were around that person—what we felt about that person. Here’s the fear: she gave to us, and we took from her, until she disappeared.

She’s since told me that, that year we didn’t speak, she had an Afro. What a thing to have missed.

No one here has never not thought that. Your heart is in the right place. Or close enough. Your heart has nothing to do with this. You know what the origin of that phrase is, “cut out”? It’s from tailors. Having their cloth cut out for them.

Here, now, I’m wishing things were different. The other day I read that patients in later stages of the disease will eat the entire banana or orange. They will fail to recognize the peel.

As a teenager, she chipped her front tooth on a jam seed. Her eyes have always made me think of pitted olives, the way they remind you—in case you’ve forgotten—that pupils are empty.

transparent. I never once heard my dad say she looked pretty. Instead he’d say, “Annie, you look so memorable.”

The present: Theo dipping a chocolate-covered cookie into his tea and it dissolving immediately, and his panic. The present: me laughing uncontrollably. The present: me remembering, Don’t get me wrong. It was what Joel had said. But I did! I got it all wrong. And: be present, and the words falling behind me, quickly, into the past, too.

At the café, there are pastries in the display case—croissants and bagels and bear claws—that look like uncomfortable people in a waiting room, trapped under bad fluorescent lighting.

Today you called your grandmother “small mom.” Today we walked past a café’s colorful chalkboard and you asked me, “Why is that sun wearing a bra on his face?” “Those are sunglasses,” I told you.

Today I cooked clams, which I’d never done before. I read you’re supposed to put them in water and throw in a handful of cornmeal, to encourage them to spit out their dirt, was what I read. The clams spat and spat, coughing, like they were afflicted with tiny clam colds.

“Hello, water,” you said, holding the glass against the moonlight and shaking the pills, like they were dice you were ready to roll, in your other hand. “Goodbye, vitamin.”

You repeated about how nice the day was, either because you really wanted me to know it or because you’d forgotten you already mentioned it, but all of a sudden, it didn’t matter what you remembered or didn’t, and the remembering—it occurred to me—was irrelevant. All that mattered was that the day was nice—was what it was.

Here I am, in lieu of you, collecting the moments.

Collecting—I guess that’s the operative word. Unless it’s moments.