Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

loneliness and AOL instant messenger. 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.

“This is a very old taste,”

Such was puberty, one big masochistic joke set in the halfway house of middle school,

where kids endure the three most confusing and sensitive years of their lives, where girls who’ve already sprouted D cups and know about blow jobs sit beside girls in trainers from the Gap who still have crushes on anime characters. A time when anything that is unique about ourselves, anything that makes us depart ever so slightly from the collective, prototypical vision of popular beauty becomes an agonizing pockmark and self-denial the only remedy at hand.

Twenty-four chemotherapy treatments later, Eunmi died on Valentine’s Day. A cosmically cruel fate for a woman who’d never known romantic love. Her last words were “Where are we going?”