Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

Life is unfair, and sometimes it helps to irrationally blame someone for it.

I wonder how many people at H Mart miss their families. How many are thinking of them as they bring their trays back from the different stalls. If they’re eating to feel connected, to celebrate these people through food. Which ones weren’t able to fly back home this year, or for the past ten years? Which ones are like me, missing the people who are gone from their lives forever?

Some of the earliest memories I can recall are of my mother instructing me to always “save ten percent of yourself.” What she meant was that, no matter how much you thought you loved someone, or thought they loved you, you never gave all of yourself. Save 10 percent, always, so there was something to fall back on. “Even from Daddy, I save,” she would add.

A familiar itch was creeping in. That aching toward something wild—when the days get longer and a walk through the city becomes entirely pleasant from morning to night, when you want to run drunk down an empty street in sneakers and fling all responsibility to the wayside. But for the first time it felt like an impulse I needed to turn away from. I knew there were no more summer vacations for me, no more idle days. I needed to accept that something, at some point soon, would have to change.

One of my favorite things about Peter was the way he closed his eyes when he ate something he really liked. It was as if he believed cutting off one of his senses amplified the others.

He spent six weeks in jail before moving to a rehabilitation center in Camden County, where he became a guinea pig for a new psychotherapy treatment.

Camden County mention ftw

I sang teenage songs about longing for the simpler times, not realizing that’s exactly what these times were supposed to be.

It was not lost on me how different the circumstances were now. Here I was again, this time returned of my own free will, no longer scheming a wild escape into the dark but desperately hoping that a darkness would not come in.

Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There

Sure, I had taken my upbringing for granted, I had lashed out at the ones who loved me the most, allowed myself to flounder in a depression I perhaps had no real right to.