Yolk

by Mary H.K. Choi

I feel callow and gullible and unspeakably sad.

I even love how it takes sixteen minutes to get to June’s house in a taxi and thirteen if I’d just taken the F at Second Avenue. Nothing makes sense and it’s perfect.

I don’t know where the humiliation ends and the rage begins or if those two sentiments are ever unlinked.

What’s the point? The planet is on fire and everything is random.

She said that there was more than one type of perfectionist. And that I qualified because the kind of perfectionist I was, was the kind that abandoned everything if I wasn’t good enough at it.

There’s nothing more humiliating than trying so hard for everyone to see and still ending up a loser.

“Fernweh. Noun. Origin: German. Translated as wanderlust but more literally, far woe. Or, far pain. Longing for a distant place. Could be characterized as a homesickness for somewhere you’ve never been before.” I’m struck by how I feel this way about New York even though I’m here.

“People aren’t abandoning you just because they go.”

I think of Dad’s lump of dough, parceled off and tossed into deep-freeze time-out so that the rest of the family can thrive. I wonder if that’s what June’s been doing all along in plain sight. Hiding her vulnerabilities so as not to be a burden.

once we arrive and the faraway is known and becomes familiar, then what? You’ve got all that energy and longing and possibility that no longer has anywhere to go. It’s got nowhere to be invested, nowhere to live.