myclippings

[myclippings]

Crying in H-mart - Michelle Zauner

"It was difficult to write about someone I felt I knew so well. The words were unwieldly, engorged with pretension. I wanted to uncover something special about her that only I could reveal. That she was so much more than a housewife, than a mother. That she was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. 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 could not be one without the other."

[myclippings]

Yolk - Mary H. K. Choi (Part 2)

Sunday, 9 June 2024

>"I tidy it up. So it’s more aesthetic. I find that the more I hide, the more presentable I am to the world."

Monday, 10 June 2024

>"Knowing that we don’t know everything leaves room for mindfulness. It opens up the possibility that thoughts and feelings can change. Perception is a lot more subjective than anyone feels in the moment.”

Sunday, 16 June 2024

>"I want her to tell me the day, the hour, and the exact minute when she’ll die. And I want her to go away so I can start preparing for it now with zero new memories because I have enough that I’ll miss. She gets up. The conversation is over. When I stand, I’m struck again by the heft of it. My sister has cancer."

Wednesday, 19 June 2024

>"It’s also so weird that any news of death makes you almost immediately think of yourself. I’m determined to know how I’ll feel when June dies. I want to be able to see it, touch it, taste it so I can make sure I’ll survive."

>"If they show you who they are, believe them."

Thursday, 20 June 2024

>"I can practically hear the fissure in my brain. It’s as if every splinter of frustration from every nonconfrontational moment in my entire life forms this dense thorny morning star of rage that I’m desperate to hurl at him."

>"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.”

>"Everyone else’s need to be seen is embarrassing to me because I so badly need the same."

>I always looked away first. I wasn’t ever sure whether he was mocking me. “You see quiet things,” I practically whisper. “You do too,” he says. “At least you did then.” “I’ve changed a lot though.” I finish my vodka, hoping to make it true. “Yeah,” he says evenly. “I see that.”

>“Do you ever look at your parents and wonder why they make their lives so hard?” I ask him. “Okay,” he says, getting up on the sofa with me. “I guess we’re going in.” “Sorry.” I bite my lip. “No,” he says, and reaches over to touch my forearm. “I didn’t mean that. I just…” He shakes his head. “It’s like you said the exact thing I’ve been thinking for the past few years. It’s just a bit uncanny, I guess.”

>"He’d rearrange small things for maximum unraveling."

>“You look nice,” I tell June when I see her at the gate. “Thanks,” says June. It feels like it’s been a month since I’ve seen her. It’s oddly reassuring that in her black suit and tall, spiky heels, she’s back to the June costume I’m most familiar with, the version of her I know least well.

Sunday, 4 August 2024

>"There’s that Maya Angelou quote how people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. For a few hours, I felt my mother’s love for me in a deep and profound way, and then she was gone."

>"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."

>"While Mom was gone, I tried rubbing my own ear and was shocked by how loud and insistent it was, how unpleasant. It never occurred to me that she might not be experiencing the exact soothing, quieting sensation I was. I hadn’t known I was a nuisance."

>“Because being in a family is about doing shit you don’t want to for the benefit of other people,” she says. “Mom and Dad sacrificed everything for us, and they want the stupidest, basic shit in return.”

>"People don’t really want to know how you’re doing. They want to wait until you’re done telling them so they can tell you how they’re doing.”

Wednesday, 2 October 2024

>Still without talking, he kissed me, pushing up against me on the splintery wall of that dank shell of a house. His hooded eyes were open but unseeing, and I left my body there, preferring to witness this as a bystander. I knew this was going to have to be a secret—at least for a while—but I was confident that everyone would recognize the change in me. They’d see it in my movements. That this intense, pulsing charge of rage at my mother could be alchemized into power. He was a good kisser. Slow and deliberate, melting into my edges, which were already fuzzy from the cinnamon liquor. For that moment, I didn’t mind that we stood in a squatter’s den. That there was so much broken glass on the floor. We were both floating.

>“Every time someone hurts you, you find a way to hurt yourself ten times worse.”

>"People aren’t abandoning you just because they go.”

>"I grab four more sheepishly and add them to the cart. I feel guilty all the time when I forget she’s sick. As if the cancer will discover my negligence and multiply faster out of pique."

>"June says that however badly people treat me, I treat myself worse. She doesn’t get that there’s a certain logic to it. When I had my wisdom teeth pulled last year, I couldn’t stop rooting in the metallic socket, dislodging the blood clot with my tongue, exposing all the nerves. The pain had been so stunning and clear. It was both precise and expansive. I like that I could control when that zip of agony coursed through my head. It made everything and everyone else so quiet."

Sunday, 10 November 2024

>“Life is fucking weird,” she says. “It is.” “Do you think it gets worse?” “Probably?” She laughs and toasts me again, which makes me laugh. My sister hugs my shoulders and squeezes. I wrap my arms around her middle. In her stripper heels, she’s taller than me for once.

>"We’re posted up on the street in front of the glass-enclosed white entryway. I cross my arms to conserve heat and tuck my head as low as I can. Anyone reading our backlit body language across from us would take this for a breakup."

Friday, 13 December 2024

>“Fernweh is rooted in pain, or sickness and sadness,” says Gina. “It’s directly translated as ‘far pain’ or ‘far sickness’ as opposed to ‘heimweh’ or ‘homesickness.’ 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?”

>"New York is just a place. It’s the people who will become a home for you.”

>"He confesses how difficult it is to find a reason for it, but he was always filled with a deep loneliness. He leans forward, and his knee starts to jog. He says that from a young age he’d always felt as though he were observing all the people around him as if through glass. That everyone always seemed to know how to have friends and joke around and that he didn’t. That they all seemed to know what to do with boyfriends and girlfriends and that it all looked so easy."

>“You know, the trick to taking care of your sister is letting her think she’s taking care of you.” She scoops my hand in hers. “I suspect you can ask your father the best way to do that since he does it so well with me.” This makes me laugh."

[myclippings]

Yolk - Mary H. K. Choi

Friday, 21 June 2024 15:50:01

"I let myself cry. My face is instantly numb from the cold. Whatever this feeling is, I never want to feel it again. I hate that somewhere out there, somehow, June and I are melded into one. Even on paper. That me and June are together again in this way. I may as well be the twin that’s absorbed in the womb. I’m too scared to talk about it, but sometimes I worry that I don’t exist. That I don’t count. It’s not solely that June’s superior to me in every aspect. Or that I lack conviction, which I do. It’s that I have this awful, unshakable suspicion, an itchy, terrible belief that I’m some kind of reincarnation, the recycling of my middle sister’s spirit. That I don’t have my own personality or destiny and I’m just a do-over for someone else and that’s why my life doesn’t ever feel like it fits. My family thinks it’s a play for attention. My depression. The anxiety. Or as June put it, my “emotional” nature. Mom thinks anxiety is about as insufferably first world as it gets. Like lactose intolerance. She thinks it’s an idle mind searching for things to bitch about at the lack of famine or war. If you’ve got a full belly, you’ve lost your right to bellyache. I’m too terrified to ask if Mom’s dead baby was called Ji-young, but I’m convinced of it. I know it’s not unheard of that people name their younger children after dead ones. Everything about my existence feels like a costume. And losing my name to June makes this wobbly feeling stronger."

[myclippings]

Yolk - Mary H. K. Choi (Part 1)

(random)

-

words:

[myclippings]

Crying in H-mart - Michelle Zauner (Part 4)

[myclippings]

Crying in H-mart - Michelle Zauner (Part 3)

-

[myclippings]

Crying in H-mart - Michelle Zauner (Part 2)

[myclippings]

Crying in H-mart - Michelle Zauner (Part 1)

(random)

[myclippings]

Next To You - Hannah Bonam Young (Part 3)

"So, I will just talk about what I hope comes next. I hope that tomorrow, when we wake up, it feels like the first of an infinite number of mornings. I hope our days together feel slow and our years long. I hope time passes mercifully."

[myclippings]

Next To You - Hannah Bonam Young (Part 2)

(random)

[myclippings]

Next To You - Hannah Bonam Young (Part 1)

(random)

[myclippings]

I Want to Be Where the Normal People Are - Rachel Bloom

[myclippings]

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library - Michiko Aoyama (Part 3)

[myclippings]

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library - Michiko Aoyama (Part 2)

[myclippings]

What You Are Looking For Is in the Library - Michiko Aoyama (Part 1)

[myclippings]

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On - Franny Choi

"...toward the sun's familiar laugh"

[myclippings]

The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On - Franny Choi

"Lord, I confess I want the clarity of catastrophe but not the catastrophe. Like everyone else, I want a storm I can dance in. I want an excuse to change my life."

-i'm kind of upset right now because i lost all my kindle highlights sa book na ito. this is what i get for being madamot about it but this is also what i get for realizing my mistake: a chance to re-read and redo all the highlights :)) (......i'm still upset though, being positive about this situation is not working right now pero sige HAHAHAHA)