Permanent Record

by Mary H.K. Choi

Honestly, it scares me the way I end up living out the aftermath of decisions I don’t remember making.

on some nights I feel the panic rise in my chest and I want to tear the skin off my arms.

To this day I have no inkling as to what I care about the most. I care about everything equally until I care about so many things I get overwhelmed and care about nothing at all.

As if I’m a lightning bug that forgot how to turn its ass on.

Who hates babies? They’re mysterious tiny envoys from the other side that smell of powder-fresh sunshine.

Man, I hate having me for company.

You can tell a lot from a person by their condiment abuse.

Here’s what I want to know about school. Everyone assumes kids are bad at decisions, right? So why would anyone let an eighteen-year-old pick what they want to do in college? Because if you actually think about it, if you’re a red-blooded American teen, the financial risk is devastating.

But I can’t help but wonder how much my people are mine. If they’d claim me in the same way I want to claim them.

You can tell it’s an entire building of immigrants because the hallways always smell of food. Polish food and Middle Eastern food and Chinese food and Korean food and Indian food battling for dominance. If it were only rich white residents it would smell of Tide PODS and vanilla.

I’m exhausted, but any time I still my mind it’s as if twenty pairs of eyes inside my head spring open.

I wonder how life would feel if that were a legitimate concern of mine. The not having of a literal Grammy.

But home isn’t a place, he comes to realize; it’s wherever you find acceptance and support.

“People aren’t ever in the moment,” I chime in, imagining the hordes who travel trillions of miles only to lodge a screen between their eyes and the very thing they’ve crossed oceans to experience. “We have to plan and scheme and shop the best deal, and when we arrive, the first order of business is to collapse the experience and stuff it into our phones. Instant gratification isn’t good enough. We have to save it for later since we’re sooo busy.”

I love them and I forgive them, but

and I don’t expect them to give me things they don’t have.

I give myself permission not to spend t...

I can’t adult. Most days I can barely human.

If all you do, all day long, is binge-eat social media, at night you’ll have explosive diarrhea. It’s an anxiety and garbage bomb because you didn’t consume anything meaningful or nourishing or nutritious.

You don’t get to start over every day; you get to keep going.”

“What is modern society’s obsession with wiping out all diversity and nuance in favor of cheap, shoddy monoliths?”

“Nothing that is a manifestation of your creative energies is stupid,” he says. “Doing nothing is the only stupid.”

“Do you enjoy doing anything for the sake of doing it? Life isn’t a destination. It’s the continual practice of things that make you wiser and happier.

Find joy in the learning, Pablo, not in what it will get you.