Seven Days
(Exceprt)
Thursday
I feel nauseated by everything that isn’t spicy or tart. I buy packets of Ramyun noodles, ‘fire chicken’ flavour, which I would never normally choose. Now, thinking about their tear-inducing heat, I feel a wave of desire. The only fruits I have an active desire for are peaches and nectarines. Suddenly I feel an affinity for Gu Sang, poet who, perishing from tuberculosis, had a dying wish for yellow peaches, a luxury in the 1920s in Korea, and Yi Jung-sup, his painter friend, equally destitute, who drew him peaches on cigarette paper every time he visited. The peach drawings are now worth millions. In Korean the yellow peaches are called the fruit of the heaven, the fruit that in the myth got Sonogong expelled from the heavenly garden, the fruit of sin. I eat one every day for breakfast, alone, wondering how many heavenly communities I’m barred from.
My mind starts unleashing strange obsessions. I fixate myself on a thought, am unable to look away from it. I tell M we should break up. I find out about a lie, something that I’d long suspected might have been the case, something that I’d decided to disregard. But now, in the light of this week, it feels unforgivable, irrefutable evidence that we are not compatible. I go through the calendar, photo album, and Whatsapp inbox on my phone to uncover further evidence of disloyalty and disconnection, moments where we’d hurt each other or were absent, and I make myself stare at them until they feel like the only things in the world. I call him at 8am to yell and cry. My mind feels inflamed, rotting, I do not recognize it any more, and yet, like the Ramyun and the peaches, these are the only thoughts I have appetite for, that make me feel round and alive.
He comes over at night, he is helpless and honest. He says I’m right, that the lying was a symptom, not the problem, and that the problem was that we are not right for each other. This makes me angry. It seems to me that what he means is that he’s too ashamed to admit to the cowardice that resulted in the lying. My anger is genuine, but I also know that this is the exact thing I would have done in his position. I am angry because I want him to be sorry more than he is honest, because I want his submission rather than his truth, and because I don’t want to be this person, and yet I am this person at this moment, I am this person more than I am anything else. A part of me scolds myself for having engineered a new crisis instead of tending to the one already in full bloom, perhaps in order to avoid tending to it.
Another part of me says, so what? Isn’t that authenticity, willing something to happen regardless of need, relevance, or value, even if it implicates disaster, self-harm? Isn’t that control, power? Isn’t that an act of creation, too?
Friday
Do you know at the deepest bottom of your heart that this is what you want? At 10am, I sit in front of Dr Müller in her office. M sits next to me. The question is startling. I feel an urge to laugh. I want to ask her back: do you know anything with that level of certainty? Does anyone?
essay published in The Dublin Review (Issue 84, Autumn 2021) & Show Your Work (2022)