Goodbye, Vitamin

by Rachel Khong

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.

Today you asked why it was that people say cloudless but not cloudful. Today you made clear you did not know there was a difference in the spellings of “pitchers” and “pictures.” You scraped seeds off of bagels and planted them in the flower bed out front. I didn’t have the heart to tell you that there’s no such thing as a bagel tree. Today I thought: I’m nuts—I’m just nuts—about you.

Tonight I peeled peaches and we sat beneath the mostly done pergola, and in the moonlight your face was tired and lined like the underside of a cabbage leaf and I wondered what I looked like to you.

You mentioned that there were some things on your mind, but lately you were having trouble getting to them—accessing them. You had the feeling that all the thoughts were in a box covered in tape, and the trouble was there was too much tape, and the trouble was you didn’t have the proper tools to access them—no scissors and no knife—and it was a lot of trouble—every day it was new trouble—trying to find the end of the tape.

Anyway, the memory: You are holding my hand. You’re cutting my fingernails, and 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.