Yolk

by Mary H.K. Choi

I find that the more I hide, the more presentable I am to the world.

I know that attending college is like praying to God. It’s not that you believe in it; you do it just in case. Because other people are.

I swipe and swipe and swipe and swipe. It’s dazzling how disposable we all are.

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. And that’s why I couldn’t finish tasks.

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

I know I’m disappointing her. I’m dying to know the right words to say, but I’m still a little stoned and failing. She probably thinks I’m a freak.

It’s also so weird that any news of death makes you almost immediately think of yourself. I’m determined to know how I’ll feel when June dies. I want to be able to see it, touch it, taste it so I can make sure I’ll survive.

I can’t show the work. I don’t know what I’ve done. I barely know where I’ve been.

I hate that somewhere out there, somehow, June and I are melded into one. Even on paper. That me and June are together again in this way. I may as well be the twin that’s absorbed in the womb.

I reline my eyes, fix my lipstick, and put away my reflection. I allow a smile to tease at my lips, summoning someone beguiling. I imagine myself in a movie. It usually helps. I glance around for any attractive people. Male, female, old, it doesn’t matter. Someone to see myself through.

The picturesque sweetness of a matching set is never experienced by either of the people in it.

But then the warmth of him leaves. He pulls away, propping himself up. I peek just as he hooks his finger against my cheek—pulling—and a hair slides out from the back of my throat, tickling the wet of my mouth, and is freed. It’s such a small movement. Tender. Patient. There’s a pleasant buzzing in my ears as my senses go all syrupy, and then the room snaps into focus. That Patrick would consider my comfort above his even for a moment grounds me back into my body.

Patrick walks me to the train. We’re huddled under his umbrella, and he’s tilting it to favor my side, his shoulder getting soaked in the process.

One: my sister watching the doctor intently. Two: my sister’s chest rising and falling. Three: my sister in her overalls with her size-six sneaker jogging in place. It is the foot of a child. For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Airport departure halls are like enormous day care centers where every adult baby has a credit card.

I know my sister. She could have just as easily signed the permission slip herself. We were constantly filling out our own permission slips and tardiness notices. June wanted to tell me where she’d be that day without having to tell me.

At home, my true home, in New York, I overhear people complaining all the time about the city, how it’s busy, that the din of traffic makes it impossible to hear their own thoughts. This is precisely why Texas scares me. The silence makes my thoughts too noisy to bear.

While Mom was gone, I tried rubbing my own ear and was shocked by how loud and insistent it was, how unpleasant. It never occurred to me that she might not be experiencing the exact soothing, quieting sensation I was. I hadn’t known I was a nuisance.

I had seen the look on her face. 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.

She stomps the brakes at the blind corner as another car barrels toward us. As she does, Mom instinctively sticks her arm out, crossing June’s chest. “Sorry,” she says softly, and pats my sister’s hair. I watch June watch our mother with such tenderness that my heart cracks open.

People don’t really want to know how you’re doing. They want to wait until you’re done telling them so they can tell you how they’re doing.”

I see the appeal of voicemails for the first time in my life. There’s a prickly sensation inside my body when I think about him. It’s the nettlesome conflict between the him I know and the other him he becomes when I’m away. He’s flattened on Instagram. Bloodless and scarily intimidating for it, a stranger.

“I just want Mom to like me.”

Ladybird are u there

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

Hours of YouTube makeup tutorials prepared me for the rest of my life. I learned exactly how to appear indestructible. Impenetrable. Paint as armor.

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.

It’s not even that I want to move in with Patrick. It’s that his house feels like a home in a way I’ve never experienced in New York. The pictures on the walls, the impractical number of books, the stupid avocado egg timer. It’s festooned with personal effects. Nobody’s leaving anytime soon. It feels like a place where people want to stay.

In our reflection, I think how unfair it is that men get to look the same all the time. That they don’t have to experience the rude shock of their appearance unadorned and without makeup.

I want to feel his chest on mine and I don’t care if our chests suction cup together and make a noise, because what I want is to plunge my entire chest inside his and feel the warmth there.

I watch as his hand travels up to his cowlick to pat it down, and something forceful corkscrews inside of me. I want to eat him.

and at some point I’m no longer looking out of my eyes, wondering how I must appear, whether I smell okay, if I taste good, if I’m fatter or thinner with my clothes off or on, or how I rank against the billions of other images of women that exist in the world.

“It’s not at all what I thought it would be. Nothing is. 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.”

New York is just a place. It’s the people who will become a home for you.”

I’m crying. And watching myself cry only amplifies my sadness. I’m filled with devastating pity for every single mirror version of me, all those times before, the youngest ones making me saddest of all. Watching myself have compassion for me in the absence of anyone else makes me cry harder.

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.

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.

“She tossed it out of the window to show you what would happen. I didn’t know what she was doing, but she took you to see it, and you finally understood. You stopped playing out there. It was her most precious possession, and she sacrificed it for you.”

I know what it’s like to want to leave. How it feels when the home you have is a mirage, an illusion. But I know that wherever I am, if June’s around, I’ll be okay. Even if she hates me a little. Because even when she hates me, she loves me the most.