Last Tang Standing

by Lauren Ho

“Not only were you pooping where you eat, you had to go for the pretty toilet magazine, didn’t you?”

clear skies, cotton-candy puffs of clouds, lush vegetation.

There was also something else acting upon me, a foreign emotion: indifference.

Sometimes that’s what we need from our friends: sweet, sweet lies.

miscegenation

Dejection apparently increases my appetite.

sotto voce

enmeshed.

Work had always been there for me, no matter how bad things were. Work was family, a drug. Work was life.

“You don’t have to be the brightest star in the sky, but you’re the one I look to when I need direction.”

Choosing Eric meant choosing to study medicine when I really wanted to study pharmacy, however ridiculous that analogy was. Choosing Eric meant not ultimately choosing Me.

Why, God, why, are men not arrested on public indecency if they wear Lycra suits? Why? It’s so unfair!

he looked like he’d been Photoshopped—in person.

I realized that the job that I was clinging to, my shitty, life-sucking job that paid me so well to afford things I didn’t need, didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. And I was tired of having other people’s decisions dictate the course of my life.

Drunken walk-offs are not easy.

apropos

Now that I had made up my mind on my next steps, I went home to work on them. As in, I went to sleep. Hey, it had been a long day.

Family is, after all, almost everything. But not quite.

wondering how it was that I wanted to punch her in the mouth and hug her at the same time. There was poetry in that tension.

Posh people paying for the privilege to serve their equals—

she had a daughter who was an even bigger fan of mine, and

Funny how the simplest words become so hard when you’re afraid of being rejected.

And Diary, it felt just right.