Crying in H Mart

by Michelle Zauner

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

I want to tell him how much I miss my mother. How he should be kind to his mom, remember that life is fragile and she could be gone at any moment. Tell her to go to the doctor and make sure there isn’t a small tumor growing inside her too.

It was as if I possessed a new internal core that gravitated toward her affection, its charge renewed by the time I’d spent away from its field.

Even then I must have known that no one would ever love me as much as she would.

I wondered if I could ever know all of her, what other threads she’d left behind to pull.

How cyclical and bittersweet for a child to retrace the image of their mother. For a subject to turn back to document their archivist.