Yolk

by Mary H.K. Choi

And please know that there is no such thing as a bad body. Truly. Take up space, it is your birthright.

The only time I don’t hate him is when I think he’s mad at me.

I pocket the credit card and fake ID. It’s funny how no one ever notices that the names don’t match. And that the photo isn’t my face. Partly it’s that they don’t expect criminals to look like me, an Asian art student dressed in black, but it also confirms a horrible suspicion: that no one’s ever looking at me. Really looking.

Her nose was buried in her phone and she was wearing a slate-gray businesswoman’s dress to the knees, looking like someone I’d never be friends with.

Flaunting my comparative popularity. I dislike myself as I do it.

All I want to do is peel off this costume, step into the shower, eat the world, and go to bed.

I’d sit near them with a book and wait to be invited.

My stomach gurgles from the coffee, but I need the caffeine. I promise myself not to eat today.

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.

I’d rather fail outright than be imperfect.

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

I’m annoyed at my sister, but I’m aware that something’s loosening between us.

In the span of time we were becoming adults and I had so many questions, we barely spoke.

“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.”

Sometimes my memories are so remote they may as well have happened to someone else.

“Okay, so Buc-ee’s we gotta go to for jerky….” June’s counting off all the stores we need to hit while we’re in Texas. “Totally.” Buc-ee’s also has the absolute hands-down best bathrooms in the entire solar system. Clean and enormous.

Sisters never stand a chance to be friends. We’re pitted against each other from the moment we’re born. A daughter is a treasure. Two is a tax.

Everything about my existence feels like a costume.

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. I stare at the train tracks and imagine myself falling.

I imagine myself as an entirely different person. Someone new. Someone strong. Someone whole.

This was before I knew how to be seen. How to hide, too.

He should have known how sad I was from the exclamation points.

The silence makes my thoughts too noisy to bear.

Secrets are like wishes. Everyone knows they don’t work if you tell. But if you really want them to gain power, you can’t acknowledge that they even exist.

but the thought of cruising around with my sister after all this time makes my heart surge giddily.

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

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.

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.

But 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?”

know it’s spoiled and reckless, but for a moment I’m jealous of June’s cancer. There’s such powerful recognition in the diagnosis. Everybody respects cancer. Being sick with cancer would explain my sadness, my sickness, my anxiety, and the horrible suspicion that everyone in the world was born with a user’s manual or a guide to personal happiness but me.

eat so fast that it doesn’t count.

They talk about how desperately they believed that if they only lost enough weight that they’d feel at home in their bodies. That if they were skinny they’d finally be treated the way they deserved.

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.

I’m overcome that I’m not anonymous to her.

you’re only as sick as your secrets.

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.