Yolk

by Mary H.K. Choi

She’d given me her ring, and I’d betrayed her by taking it. I’d given her permission to leave when my sister or father would have demanded she stay.

Mom’s love language is to scrutinize and criticize all the physical attributes that you’re most sensitive about.

I checked my shallow pocket for the hard contour of mom’s ring. I’d tried to tell June that first night. That this was our new life and still she wouldn’t listen. It was so pathetic the way she kept pretending that things were ever going to be the same. Her naiveté sickened me. She was supposed to be my older sister. She was supposed to be so fucking smart.

“Every time someone hurts you, you find a way to hurt yourself ten times worse.” It doesn’t sound untrue even if it feels wounding

They say that daughters are never yours to begin with.”

Manufactured urgency is their absolute favorite emotion. I get it. Control feels good no matter how small the triumph.

I’m strangely calm. I’d let my guard down with Patrick, and that was my fault. I should have remembered: Everyone is disappointing.

He takes a deep breath. “I wanted to tell you about her.” I smile brightly. “Well, now you don’t have to,” I demur. “We’re fine, Patrick. Honestly, you don’t owe me an explanation. We don’t owe each other anything.” I am the very picture of detachment. A person with options. I may not have the job he has or the apartment or the significant other or the art, but one day I might.

No matter how much I love it, it doesn’t love me back. If I weren’t so broken, it would fit. I feel like I don’t have a home.”

it’s also longing for the unknown, since the familiar is stifling or challenging. The foreign can seem fantastic, exalted, since its possibilities are infinite. We have no data or experience around it. But 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. Have you ever considered that it isn’t a place that will improve your life? That there is no such thing as a geographic cure?”

can’t believe this man who’s old enough to live through wars and probably protested against Vietnam would admit this to a roomful of people. I didn’t know bulimics even came in male. Especially grandpas.

It’s the psychosis of knowing that your eyes are broken. That we all know what it’s like to look at yourself in the mirror one minute and then see something completely different the next. Most of us have left our bodies in times of crisis. We’ve been stuck in scribbly, maddening thoughts of what to eat for lunch, paralyzed that a wrong choice will turn us down the road to a binge that ends with aching bellies and sour mouths.

A binge is defined as that freight-train feeling I know too well. That rush. The helplessness. The hostage situation. The compulsion to eat everything to blot out the feelings of anything else. The peace of feeling as though you’re choking because putting things in your mouth and then taking them out is the only thing in an unmanageable world that feel you can control.

Humans need to share their darkest parts. Unburdening makes you closer to everyone. There’s that thing that all addicts have, that you’re a piece of shit in the center of the universe. That everybody’s obsessed with the ways you fall short. But the truth is, we all have the same, boring problems. Sometimes the best thing you can do is talk about it. It makes no sense, but glory if it doesn’t work like a charm.