Goodbye, Vitamin

by Rachel Khong

I’ve never liked New Year’s. The trouble with beginnings is that there’s no such thing. What’s a beginning but an arbitrary point of entry?

It was grotesque, the way I kept trying to save that relationship. Like trying to tuck an elephant into pants.

You know what else is unfair, about Joel? That I loosened the jar lid, so somebody else could open him.

A long time ago I stopped wondering why there were so many crazy people. What surprises me now is that there are so many sane ones.

I wonder if this is why my mother asked me to stay: she didn’t want to be alone with him.

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.

What I want to know is what counted for something and what counted not at all. Now I feel like a shit for spending that time—that’s the word it’s convention to use: spending—on what turns out not to matter, and neglecting the things that did, and do.

If I were you is something I’ve never really understood. Why say, “If I were you”? Why say, “If I were you,” when the problem is you’re not me? I wish people would say, “Since I am me,” followed by whatever advice it is they have.

Sharing things is how things get started, and not sharing things is how they end.

Something else I appreciate about hangovers: you are given the chance to value your regular things. Water, for instance, becomes so delicious and appealing. I like also that having a terrible day pretty much guarantees that the next day will be much, much better.

When I brought it up, months later, Joel said, “What are you talking about?” because he didn’t remember it—he’d forgotten it completely—and it was at that point I realized that I could remember something and he could remember something different and if we built up a store of separate memories, how would that work, and would it be okay? The answer, of course, in the end, was no.

Why don’t we get married? was how Joel had proposed. “Why don’t we?” he liked to say. What a chickenshit way to say things.

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.

The mind tells you what or whom to love, and then you do it, but sometimes it doesn’t: sometimes the mind plays tricks, and sometimes the mind is the worst.

I’m crying, first because I’m expecting that the procedure will be painful, later because it doesn’t meet my expectations: it feels like nothing, and the feeling of nothing is disorienting.