Category: short creative nonfiction

Origin Stories | Frankie Concepcion

You imagine it like this:

You and your mother are standing in front of a mirror. You are both looking at your reflection as you brush your still-wet hair and as you push the bristles through your black curls, she counts out loud the number of strokes you have made: “One. Two. Three. All the way through. Four. Again. Again.”

You are wearing matching Tweety Bird nightshirts that both go down to your ankles. Or perhaps you are wearing the pink nightdress with the ruffled edges, and your mother, still dressed from the day, is waiting for you to finish getting ready for bed before she rejoins the rest of the adults downstairs. With each pass, your sleeve brushes against the raw skin of your upper arm, and you wince but do not dare stop. You do not want to anger your mother again. Instead, you splay your elbows wide so only the very tops of your shoulders prickle and burn. 

Steam clouds the top of the mirror. Outside, you know the air is damp with the perspiration of pine and bamboo, and from this balcony at the top of the hill you are able to see the Manila skyline glimmering in the distance. You know that if you just open the window, you will be able to hear the sounds of crickets, frogs, and tuko: the speckled geckos that can often be heard singing their own name in the night.

But the window is closed, and the air conditioner hums loudly. Still, you can hear the voices of your new friends, Megan and Tony, in the other rooms. Earlier that evening, the three of you had made a game of seeing who could roll down a hill fastest: tucking your arms close to your bodies and letting gravity do its work, not knowing that each blade of grass was a sharp edge. When you stood, a thousand invisible cuts made themselves known. Now your skin is still on fire, even after the hot shower your mother said would soothe it.

You picture them, your friends across the hall, laughing with their parents, wrapped in soft, warm towels. You imagine Megan’s mother rubbing lotion on her arms and legs, Tony playing with his Gameboy on the bed while his mother and father chat on the veranda.

“I just want you to learn how to take care of yourself,” your mother says. She is still counting. “Boys like your father can do whatever they want, look however they want. But not us girls. We have to be beautiful, always. Don’t you want to be beautiful?”

“I do,” you say. You will say anything, you think, to be forgiven.

Your parents met Megan and Tony’s parents at the Couples for Christ meetings your parish held every week in the church basement. Megan’s parents each worked at rival banks, while Tony’s parents were thinking of leaving their jobs to migrate to New Zealand in the coming year. Both Megan and Tony were close to your age, which is why today, at your mother’s invitation, they and their parents have all come to celebrate the Holy Week holiday at your father’s mountain estate: a sprawling landscape marked on all sides by a white picket fence, just a few hours drive from your home in Metro Manila. His family called it La Veranda. But you simply called it Antipolo, after the mountain city upon which it was built.

Your mother was always inviting strangers to your family vacations. Two years prior, you and your family had come to Antipolo with a handsome young neighbor and a woman your mother said had once represented the Philippines in the Miss Earth pageant. The year after that, you celebrated with a couple and their two young sons, who had recently moved back to the Philippines after spending a decade in California. Always, within a year, your mother would lose interest in their company, or they would lose interest in your mother— you were never sure which. You taught yourself to enjoy their company while it lasted. You were still a child, but you were already learning not to get too attached to people.

Though it was your father’s house, each time a new person came to visit, your mother would take them on a tour. Yesterday, when you’d arrived with Megan and Tony’s parents, she’d gone through her usual routine: starting with a walk through the vast receiving area with its towering portraits of grandparents and great-grandparents, its walls of books and magazines lauding the business that your great-grandfather had built. She told them about the neighbors: one a former president, the other a businessman whose name could be found plastered all over the country. Finally, in front of your guests, she pointed you toward every picture that held your image. In most of them, you were small enough that you could not yet stand on your own two feet, young enough that you could not even remember where or when they had been taken.

“This is your inheritance,” she’d said. You’d turned to your father to see if this was true, but by then he had disappeared into the kitchen or outside to sun himself in the grass, embarrassed by your mother’s brazen display.

“Twenty. Twenty-one. Twenty-two.” Suddenly the bristles catch on a tangle of hair, and the wet handle pulls itself from your hands. With a clatter, it hits the edge of the vanity and tumbles to the wooden floor. But before you can reach for it, you feel your mother’s fingers dig into the flesh just above your elbow and, with her touch, the singing of the invisible cuts on your skin. 

“Pick it up,” she hisses, and though it would be easier to obey her if she let go, you say nothing. With one arm attached to your mother and the other reaching for the floor, you twist your body, catching the brush with your fingertips. Later, you will wonder if she had meant to hurt you on purpose, or if she’d forgotten your skin was still sensitive from that afternoon. After all, her grip is just tight enough to sting but not to leave a permanent mark others might see.

When you sit back down, brush in hand, she begins her counting anew. “Twenty-three. Twenty-four.” You make sure to run the brush all the way from the roots to the damp ends of your hair, which fall down to your waist. You tell yourself that if you do this one thing well, then maybe she will forget you had made a mess of yourself earlier that day, maybe you can erase the image of your tangled hair and grass-stained clothes from her memory. “Twenty-five. Keep going, all the way to a hundred.”

After a few brushes, her fingers eventually relax away from your arm. Now, in the mirror, you watch as she reaches for your face. You brace, but her knuckle only caresses your cheek, pushing a stray curl away from your nose. “You know who was beautiful? Julie Vega,” she says. “She was my cousin, you know.”

When you don’t reply, she leans back in shock. She gasps. “You don’t know Julie Vega? She was a famous actress in the eighties. A superstar. She must have been in dozens of movies and TV shows in her time. You have her nose. And her fair skin.”

As you continue brushing, your mother tells you how, at your age, Julie Vega had captivated the country with her talent. Not only could she act, winning multiple awards for her movie and TV roles at the age of ten but, by the time she was sixteen, she had also released her debut music album and was set to record a second. But Julie Vega, she said, had been a stage name. Born Julie Pearl Apostol Postigo, she had been your mother’s cousin on your grandmother’s side. 

“Is she still an actress?” you ask. “Can I meet her?” You are happy to be compared to someone beautiful, but even happier that your mother seems to have forgotten that she is angry with you. You look in the mirror and try to separate your nose and skin from the rest of your face. As you try to transform your own reflection into that of a stranger, you wonder: who does your mother see? You, or someone else?

“No,” says your mother wistfully.

“Why not?”

“She died,” says your mother.

After your mother finished her tour and the guests had been allowed to settle into their rooms, you all reconvened at the kitchen for lunch, where the parents went over their plans for the weekend. You would all say the rosary every night, starting tonight—Maundy Thursday. Then, on both Holy Saturday and Easter Sunday, you would drive into the city for Mass at the local parish church. After that, they had something special planned. There would be an egg hunt, your mother said, and some other games, and of course there would be chocolate.

But Easter Sunday was days away, and for now you three children would have to entertain yourselves. “Why don’t you show Megan and Tony the living room?” your mother had said. “You could put a movie on the big TV. You can turn on the aircon.”

You looked at your father, who had by then rejoined the group. He was sitting at the head of the table, and until then he had been chatting only with the adults, while you sat at the children’s table with your new friends. But when you locked eyes with him then, you knew that he was planning something mischievous.

“Why don’t we go on a tour?” he said.

“I’ve already taken them on a tour,” said your mother.

“I mean a real tour. There’s so much more beyond this house. We could go on a trek. I could show you the lake, the grotto. We could go exploring.”

“I’d like to see the lake,” said Tito Jim, Megan’s father.

“See,” said your father with a grin. “We’ll take the kids and be back by merienda.” 

Led by your father, the pack of you walked away from the main house, off the brick driveway, and into the wilderness beyond. He walked you down to the man-made lake, where years earlier, he’d taught you how to fish for tilapia with rods made of bamboo. He showed you the pink eggs of the snails that clung to the carved rock edges of the lake and then took you all to the small, cave-like structure within which a statue of the Virgin Mary was supposedly nestled into the rock— but inside, when you raised your hands in front of your faces, darkness encased the outlines of your fingers like a glove.

“What was that?” Tito Jim said before the cave exploded with movement. Back out into the light you ran, as the air chittered and flapped around you. Mother Mary, you discovered, had been sharing her grotto with a family of bats.

You had seen most of this already, of course. But with your new friends, and your father as guide, the familiar landscape had taken on a new vibrance. Wherever you walked, there was a story to tell. Whatever you saw, there was a memory beneath, waiting to be unearthed.

After walking through a small vegetable garden and up a grassy, overgrown field, you skirted around the second house on the property, which was primarily used as a storage space, and which your father said was haunted.

“When you leave a house empty for too long,” he said, “things are bound to move in.”

Then you found a path that took you into the trees. From within the patch of pines, he pointed one out to you and said, “Look, there’s the one you planted.”

“I planted that?” You looked up. It seemed impossible that something so large could have been planted in your lifetime.

“Yes, don’t you remember? You and all your cousins planted one each.” But you didn’t remember your cousins, not well. They too had disappeared from your lives at that time, and over the years your relationship to your father’s family would continue to fluctuate, cousins and aunts and uncles and grandparents blinking in and out of your sphere.

“Is this really all going to be mine? Like mom says?” you said to your father.

“It’s ours. It belongs to our family,” he replied, and somehow even then you understood that he meant his family— his mother and father, his four siblings, and their children, who were your cousins. You did not yet know what this meant for you, a person who’s only tie to the family he described was standing in front of you. You did not yet have the language to describe what you knew intuitively was missing.

After a short rest in a small nipa hut that was built around an ancient mango tree (“Don’t forget to say tabi-tabi po,” said your father, as you entered one by one), it was almost time for merienda. The tree was at the top of a hill, from which you could see the main house below. Between the nipa hut and the house, the grass sloped at an angle sharp enough that should you walk down, you would have to lock your knees to avoid slipping all the way to the bottom.

“I wonder how fast you could make it down just on momentum,” your father said casually, but you knew him better than the others did. You knew it was a challenge.

By the time your father met you and your friends at the bottom of the hill, all three of you were covered in dirt, your tears carving pale streaks into your dust-brown faces. Searching for your mothers, you, Megan, and Tony flung yourselves into the house, where you found them in the dining room. But while the other mothers instantly began to coo and caress, wiping away their children’s tears with gentle hands, your own mother tugged at your collar, the knots in your hair and when she spoke, she did so through lips pulled thinly over teeth.

“Look at your clothes,” she hissed. “Look at your hair.” The words were for you, but between tears you saw that she was looking at your father. “You should have stayed inside like I told you to. Is this how you’re going to behave all weekend? How am I supposed to trust you? Or would you prefer to spend Easter Sunday in your room?”

But you could not answer her. You could only think of your burning arms, feel only the sting of each movement. It felt as if a colony of hungry ants had grown beneath your skin; when you scratched, they bit down harder.

Hearing your mother’s words, Tito Jim bent down and patted you awkwardly on the head. “It’s just some grass,” he said weakly. He told you not to worry, that it would wash off, that the fire in your skin was temporary. “I used to play in the grass all the time. Nothing some baby powder won’t fix.” But seeing your mother’s expression, he quickly backed away again. You looked around for your father to see if he would come and comfort you, but he was already gone.

Finally, as your mothers herded you into your rooms, your cries echoing off the walls of the house, you wondered if this was the last time you would see your new friends. You had accepted that, as your mother had decreed, you might spend the rest of the day in your room, alone. You only wished you knew why they were deserving of comfort and you were not, if only so you could avoid being punished again.

“This is what you get,” she said, as she walked you up the stairs. “This is what you get for not listening to me.”

You have just passed fifty strokes when your mother takes the brush from your hands. “You’re going too slow,” she says. “Here, let me do it.” With each swift stroke, you can feel her impatience building, the bristles digging harder and harder into your scalp.

“How did Julie Vega die?” you ask her. At this, the brush softens. You lean back and close your eyes. Now the repetitive motion feels almost loving, and you want to enjoy it while it lasts.

“Well,” says your mother, “She was beautiful, you see. And young. She was only sixteen when she died.”

Then your mother tells you about Julie Vega’s final role. For a movie anthology, Julie had been asked to play a possessed child, for a segment that later would be likened to The Exorcist. One day, as the film was wrapping up, Julie collapsed on set and had to be rushed to the hospital. She died days later. After her death, rumors began to spread that the house they’d been filming in had been haunted all along, home to an engkanto: an ancient and powerful forest spirit who could sometimes be seen in wild or abandoned places but primarily lived in a spirit realm, a realm just beyond the senses.

Insulted by the chanting of Latin prayers and the mockery they had made of the spirits, your mother said that the engkanto must have already been angry at the people who had invaded their space. So when they saw Julie —talented, beloved, charismatic Julie— it only made sense that they would want her for themselves. 

“Sure,” she continues, “some people say she died of an auto-immune disease. Some say it was pneumonia. But me? I know the truth. Julie Vega died because she was beautiful. So beautiful that she was whisked away to live in the spirit realm forever.” After Julie’s death, she says, people even began to tell stories of a young, beautiful girl who would appear in the forest near the house, asking for help finding her way home. But as soon as the apparition reached the tree line, she would disappear.

“There,” says your mother, putting the brush down. You are certain she hasn’t reached a hundred strokes but you know better than to point that out. You wait until she places the brush on the vanity and steps away before standing from your chair.

Stepping away from the mirror, you turn to face your mother. “You could be like her, you know,” she says, touching your cheek once more. “You could look just like her, if you just take care of yourself. Will you promise?”

You pause, confused. You know your mother is telling you that Julie’s fate is something you should admire, and yet you don’t want to be like Julie. You don’t want to die, nor do you want to be kidnapped by a strange creature, forced to live in a strange land.

But you do want to please your mother. You want to prove to her that you can be good, good enough to spend the weekend with your new friends. So when she asks again, you look at her and you say, “I promise.”

You lie awake for the rest of the night thinking of Julie Vega and her fate. You think of the grotto, and the family of bats you had disturbed, unaware that they had made the cave their home. You think of the house at the top of the hill, empty and abandoned, except for the spirits that had crept inside. So many invisible dangers, so many rules you could break without even knowing it. You touch your nose, your chin, and when you hear a creaking on the veranda outside, you wait for hours, watching the window, waiting to see if something will try to make its way inside, fear and desire swirling in you until you cannot tell them apart.

Later, you will think of Julie Vega each time your mother pulls you away from the playground to powder your nose, each time she books a hair appointment to iron your curls into submission. On your first visit to the dermatologist, as the doctor brings her hands to your face and your eyes fill with anticipatory tears, you will think of the steady rhythm of your mother’s brush in your hair, the sting of her touch above your elbow. And over a decade later, when your father dies and leaves you unmoored, uncertain of where to call home, you will think once again of your inheritance.

After his death, you will return to this day again and again. But memories, you will soon find, are not pristine recordings of events exactly as they happened. In the coming years, remembering will feel more like playing a game of telephone with a chain of unreliable narrators: each one with their own voice, all of them whispering in each other’s ears. And as these moments are told, forgotten, remembered, and retold again, you will begin to question the truth of these stories you have been telling yourself. 

Eventually, you will recall the story of Julie Vega but not how or when it was told. You will remember the feeling of your mother’s hands in your hair, and then you will wonder if they were her hands at all, or if they were someone else’s and she was simply a figure in the room, a reflection in the mirror. And you will try, over and over, to recall Tito Jim’s exact words, but in the end, you will remember only that he had offered a softer, kinder voice.

Origin Stories by Frankie Concepcion was selected as the winner of the 2024 HoneyBee Prize in Creative Nonfiction by Teri Youmans. Here’s what Ms. Youmans had to say about the piece:

What I loved about “Origin Stories” is that it revolves around a particular experience of childhood, but through that experience the writer effortlessly explores relationships with beauty, with the maternal, with spirits, with fear, with longing and inheritance. I also appreciated the strong sense of physical place in the story, but even more so, the child struggling to understand her place in that world. All of this happens as an unfolding, rather than a forcing.

I felt the invisible cuts on my skin made by the sharp grasses, the grip of the mother’s too firm a hand and the fearful child’s reckoning with the ways beauty can lead to one’s demise. Each reading brought new pleasures.

More about the author:

Eloise | Kelsey Ferrell

Waiting for the guy to arrive was always my least favorite part. I was leaning on the edge of a concrete wall in front of a coffee shop, one of the new ones in town. Ben was coming from “over the hill,” which is what we said about anyone who drove into Santa Cruz via Highway 17. 

The last text had said: I’m on my way now! Looks like it’ll be 45 minutes. Now at minute 41, I felt self conscious with every car that drove past, knowing that any figure gazing through the windshield could be Ben. It had been many years since I’d enjoyed a date, so I felt that statistically, chances were this one with Ben would go well.

When we first started talking on Tinder, I’d been the one to turn the conversation suggestive, but it had been Ben who had asked me what special things turned me on. 

Like a kink? I replied.

Yes, he messaged, what could I add that would make this better for you?

I kind of think I might have an impregnation kink, I responded. 

I’m actually really into that too, he said.

He said he’d never told anyone about it before; I hadn’t either. 

It’s a tough one to backpedal from if not taken well, he wrote during one of our late night conversations. 

Haha, I know right? I replied.

To be clear, I absolutely do not want a kid, he texted.

Me neither, I said. And it was true, kind of. 

There was only one person I’d wanted kids with: my first boyfriend, the only boyfriend I’d ever had, Theo. 

“Do you want to have kids with me?” I had asked him repeatedly. “Someday,” he had always replied. This was maybe a lie, maybe not. It felt true, but with a fancy East Coast college picked out, he was already planning his future without me. 

“Imagine seeing me holding a baby, and it’s ours,” I said to him. The way he looked at me was a little nervous, but he seemed to care about me enough to play along. “Would you help me take care of it?” I asked. 

“Of course I would,” he said, “what do you think I’d do, leave you on your own?”

“I hope one day we live in a house together, and you come home and see me sitting in a rocking chair with my shirt undone feeding a little baby we made together,” I said. The house was already built in my mind, painted yellow.

“What do you think when you close your eyes and imagine that?” I said, gazing up at him from his mattress, my head propped against my arm.

“I’d be happy to see your boobs,” he said, turning away from his computer screen to smile at me.

“I could show you those now,” I said, “What about the rest of it?”

He looked off into the distance thoughtfully. “I guess the words I would use to describe that would be that it seems emotionally attractive.” 

After our breakup, he came back to town in the summer. We made plans to get lunch at the diner we had been regulars at back when we were together in high school, perhaps both under the delusion that we could be friends.

“You know how I was never certain about wanting to have kids?” he said to me. 

“Yeah,” I remembered, stirring a cup of tomato soup. 

“Well, I figured it out. I really, really want kids.”

I have no doubts that the love Theo and I shared was so deep it changed me on a chemical level; the oxytocin we cultivated together steadied my nervous system in a way that no amount of yoga or xanax ever could. Of course, I lost this when he left. And I wondered, later, if his admission that he wanted children now that he no longer had to picture me as their mother was the moment testosterone and cortisol began to overload every single cell in my body. It struck me as a kind of Shakespearean irony that after this conversation I developed polycystic ovarian syndrome, otherwise known as PCOS, otherwise known as the leading cause of infertility.

When the doctor said, “you’ll have to work with us closely when you decide you want to get pregnant,” I didn’t react. No one was in the waiting room to join me when I exited. I walked to the parking lot alone. I drove home alone. When I opened my front door, no one else was there. I laid in bed by myself and thought of the name I carried in the back of my head for a future daughter. Eloise. 

***

I shifted my weight against the concrete wall and glanced at the coffee shop behind me, then at my phone.

Let me know when you park, I typed, I’m wearing a blue skirt. Ben replied moments later. I just did! I’m wearing salmon colored pants. I suppressed the cringe that salmon colored pants brought forth. He rounded the corner moments later and we hugged. I realized it had been months since anyone had hugged me. 

“I thought you might not recognize me with a shirt on,” I joked.

 “I can still tell your boobs are nice even when they’re covered,” he laughed.

 I was grateful for a compliment on my appearance. The telltale signs of PCOS were acne, hair loss from the scalp, facial hair growth, and weight gain—50 pounds, in my case.  “In case you’re wondering why I’m so pretty,” I used to say when explaining it to people. 

Ben had seen my naked photos though— recent ones too, not just Kelsey’s Greatest Hits— so I knew he knew what I looked like, and he wanted to fuck me. That’s why he was there.

“How’s packing going?” I asked. “Are you bringing fly fishing gear?”

We were both on the precipice of moving out of our parents’ houses. We shared the shame of lingering in our childhood bedrooms for an intolerably long period after getting our degrees. I was going to Los Angeles, and he was going to Alaska. 

“I’m not homesteading,” he laughed.

He bought a sandwich and I bought a salad; I nearly always did that, because when I was younger I read The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, wherein a character mentioned that a salad was the best meal to order on a first date. 

“Do you want to eat at the beach?” I suggested. Though as a local I didn’t go there too often, I knew people from over the hill loved the beach. “Natural Bridges is really close.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I’ll drive. I know that beach.”

It was a quick drive; we could see the glimmering ocean from where we were before he even started the car. The road took us past my old school and I gazed at its empty front lawn.

There was a group of seniors that had always eaten lunch at the edge of that lawn. When I was 13 I wanted nothing more than to be like them; they had a celebrity status earned by their car keys and ability to kiss each other without blushing. The biggest event of eighth grade had nothing to do with any of us eighth graders: two of the seniors had an unexpected pregnancy that provided endless struggle for the two of them and endless entertainment for my friends and me. Lunchtimes were spent watching Hailey and John eat together on the grass or fight in the parking lot. At the end of the first semester, right before the baby was born, I watched across the lawn  as John rubbed Hailey’s stomach for a while. At some point he slid his hand up and started rubbing her boobs instead. Hailey laughed, John smiled just for her, and across the lawn my heart ached in a way I’d never felt before. Of course, now, staring at the lawn, the memory was replaced by the knowledge that Hailey and John weren’t together anymore; they hadn’t been in years. 

“There’s usually parking down this street,” I said, pointing Ben away from West Cliff Drive and down Swanton Boulevard. “Don’t enter the gate or you’ll have to pay.”

He parallel parked without difficulty and we exited the vehicle to walk to the gate, where the cement turned to sand. 

“Look at the bridges; did you know there used to be three?” I asked. 

We looked out at the ocean where the lone stone arch stood, a result of millions of years of geology, the only one still standing after storms collapsed the others.

Ben was charming and our banter flowed as easily in person as it had over text. He had been my favorite recent Tinder match; he wrote the longest paragraphs and talked the most about going down on me.

Theo was the only reason I even knew there was such a thing as women receiving oral sex. When my high school friends talked about sex, they’d usually whine that they had given some guy a blowjob, and now some other girl was giving him blowjobs, and now they felt sad. I knew more girls who had had abortions than girls who had experienced cunnilingus. But the day I agreed to try it, Theo passionately dedicated himself to the task for an hour, and at the end I shrieked in newfound ecstasy. I spent the rest of high school walking around feeling very sophisticated knowing my boyfriend was better than everyone else’s. 

When I got to college, I was certain that when I slept with someone new, they could make me feel the same way. But each guy I slept with at best left me baffled as to how such similar mechanics could be so unsatisfying. At worst, they left me downright traumatized. Theo had always paused and asked, “Are you ready?” before he entered me. Everyone else just assumed I was ready. Slowly my dating life turned into sleeping with people on the off chance it might be fun, as a way to mimic something I’d once loved. Like a chess master who had retired, I still played an occasional game with someone I knew was no match for me.

***

The wind on the beach had picked up, and I had finished my salad.

I stared at Ben’s mouth while he chewed. 

“I’m having a great time,” I said to Ben, “and I think we could have an even better time in the hotel room you booked.” 

He grinned immediately. 

“Let’s go,” he said. 

In the car ride, Ben mentioned again that he was tested a week ago. He texted this the night before, but I thought it was hot that he was extra conscientious.

 “Everything was fine, I’m clean,” he said. 

“Me too,” I said.

“So, do you want to use a condom today or do you want to go without?” he asked. “I mean, it turns me on to actually cum inside you, of course. But I brought some and understand if you want to use one. We can just pretend.”

“I think we’ll be fine without one,” I said, surprising myself. “The IUD is super effective. They say it’s more effective than getting your tubes tied.” Besides, I’m probably infertile. 

I’d gotten the IUD after being with Theo for five months. I was still a virgin when I went to the clinic— the speculum did the honors of popping my cherry. Because Theo had flown to Istanbul for vacation, I went to the clinic with a friend.

The pain when my cervix opened was so immense that I fainted, woke up, threw up violently, and then lost consciousness again. When I woke up the second time, my friend told me I’d been out for 45 minutes. 

When I left the clinic I video chatted with Theo.

“The doctor said that the only other time a cervix dilates is during childbirth,” I explained to him. “That’s why it’s so painful.” 

 I waited for his response, but he had fallen asleep on-screen. There’s a ten-hour time difference between California and Turkey. It was late. He was tired.

***

The queen-sized bed at the Ramada Inn had a sizable stack of pillows atop it, and the fabric of the duvet had a luxurious sheen under the soft lamplight. The room faintly smelled of lemon and the floors were so unscuffed they had to have been recently installed. 

I took a seat on the bed and cocked my head at Ben, who was still standing. “Did you think I looked hot when you first saw me today?”

“Yes, I was hoping you wouldn’t notice how hard I was staring,” he said.

“Do you want to come kiss me?” I asked. 

He was a good kisser, which surprised me. Usually I hated kissing the guys I slept with. I’d only ever liked kissing Theo. It just felt wrong with everyone else. But Ben felt the closest to right. With other guys, I usually stopped the kissing after a few seconds and asked them to do something else—anything else—as long as it wasn’t kissing. But I let Ben kiss me for a really long time. 

“Can I kiss you somewhere else?” he asked.

He was really good at kissing somewhere else. He was so good at it that I remembered how much I missed it the past six years. I wondered if this was going to be the pattern of rarity for the rest of my life: getting eaten out by someone who actually knows how only once a decade. 

“That was so fucking hot,” he said 45 minutes later. “Can I do it again?”

Okay, twice a decade. 

When I finished he raised his head and told me how good I tasted. He kissed me. He asked me if I could taste it on him. We both smiled when I said yes. 

“I can’t wait any longer,” he said. “I want to be inside you. Do you want me to get a condom or are you still okay with not using one?”

“We don’t need to use one,” I said, laying back with my legs closed. 

He leaned forward towards my body.

 “Tell me what you want,” I said to Ben. 

“I want to be the one you let finish inside you.”

“Tell me it has to be me,” I demanded. 

“It has to be you,” he affirmed, pressing his skin to mine.

“I’m ready,” I said quickly, as he leaned in. 

“God, you feel good,” he said. “I’m going to fuck you so hard that there’s no way you don’t get pregnant.”

  “You want to be the one to do that to me?” I asked.

“I’ll feel so powerful knowing that I did that to you,” he said. 

“Then fucking do it to me,” I said. 

His breath went heavy as he came, and he stayed inside me until I told him my hips hurt.

“I’m cold,” I told him as he finally pulled out and laid next to me.

“Come here, I’ll hold you,” he said, opening his arms. I ducked into his embrace and felt the warmth of his bare skin. He pulled up the blanket and ran his warm hands against my back. He was a lot taller than me, and I felt comforted and protected leaning my head against his chest. I used to ask guys to tell me I was safe when they were inside me. 

“Just tell me I’m safe with you,” I’d say.

“Um, you’re safe?” they’d say.

“With you,” I’d add.

They didn’t like telling me that. I was pretty sure it made me look really pathetic so I stopped asking. 

Ben reached over me with one arm to check his phone. 

“Dude, we’ve been here six hours,” he said. 

“I can’t believe you spent half of it eating me out,” I said.

“Of course I did, that’s the best part,” he said.

“It is?” I asked. It was fun to make him say it over and over. Besides, I didn’t know how many years would pass before I’d get to hear it again. 

“It’s seriously my favorite,” he said.

He started putting his clothes on. 

“Is it getting dark outside?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I gotta get back home. But don’t worry, I’ll drop you off at your car.”

He drove me back to where I was parked by the coffee shop. It was now closed, dark with chairs overturned on the tables. He was nice enough to get out of his car and walk a few yards to mine to say goodbye.

“That was really fun,” he said. 

“Tell me if you’re ever in LA,” I said.

“I will,” he said. 

“I hope you mean it,” I said.

“I would never pass up the chance to taste you again,” he said, and he kissed me goodbye, leaving a hint of just that to linger on my lips. 

The sky got darker and darker as I traveled down the highway. When I reached my parent’s driveway, I looked up at the stars as I slowly exited my car, comforted that they’d been blinking down at me my whole life and sad that I was going to lose them in the light pollution of Los Angeles. 

When I opened the front door, the dog barked and my parents glanced up from the television. As usual, my dad sat on the couch and my mom sat on the floor. I never saw them both on the couch at the same time, not even at opposite ends. 

“You’ve been gone all day,” my dad said.

“Yeah, I was hanging out with friends,” I lied. 

I reheated leftovers and ate them in the kitchen. There in the dark, I tried to think about whether a life with Ben seemed desirable, if I could slip into that fantasy. I wanted to want him more than Theo, to become enamored with a different impossibility. But my visions of him were strangely ersatz, the difference between the two of them troublesome rather than refreshing. 

“But wouldn’t it be possible to love someone else, even if it were different?” said my therapist. Judy, the one I had in college.

“If it’s different, then it’s no longer love. Being different makes it something else.”

Judy looked a little disappointed. We’d been having this conversation twice a week for three years and she’d never been able to make me feel any hope.

“Being without him feels like when you have a really long day and you just want to go home,” I said. “You know how that feels?”

“Yes,” said Judy.

“I have that day everyday,” I said. “But I can never go home.”

In the dark kitchen, I pressed my fork against a piece of pasta. In my mind, I’d already opened the door to the yellow house in my head. I went there often, knew it well. I saw Theo in the kitchen, making us dinner. I raised more pasta to my mouth and imagined it fresher and hotter, made by him. My mom walked into the kitchen.

“Are you really going to eat all of that?” she said. 

“I had salad for lunch,” I said truthfully.

I watched her walk back to the living room to sit on the carpet again, where she did sit-ups as the TV flickered.

***

I drove down to Los Angeles at the end of May. 

Moving south was supposed to mean finally feeling fulfilled: my first grown up job, a place where I could pursue my dreams, a queen-sized bed. But I got fired from my job as a legal assistant after a few months. My blood work got worse; I was at risk for diabetes. “50 percent of women with PCOS get diabetes by the time they’re 40,” said the doctor. My skin erupted in eczema. I didn’t look anything like my dating app photos.

I got hired at a cat cafe in West Hollywood. When someone came by to collect a cat they had adopted, I always picked up the cat and held them to my face. “You’ve had a very long day, and it’s time to go home,” I’d whisper. 

My time in the city was punctuated by doctor’s appointments. I was touched often, but only by latex gloves. The little black dots on my ovaries frightened me when I saw them on the ultrasound. They looked like boba pearls spilled inside my body. Every single one was an egg that would never mature. As I counted past twelve on the screen, I realized I had lost more than a full year’s worth of fertility. 

My shifts at the cat cafe got harder to bear as I grew attached to an orange and white cat named Poppies whom I could not afford to adopt on my minimum wage salary. I wasn’t working the day he got adopted. I’d whittled my dreams of companionship all the way down to delivering a whisper, and even that was out of reach.

I left Los Angeles after exactly one year to go to graduate school, landing in yet another new city for yet another fresh start. Two weeks in, I lay sweating under my ceiling fan in the desert heat, too hot to do anything but look at my phone. When I scrolled past a meme about hotel sex, I decided to send it to Ben. He replied right away. The haha reaction. Good memories, he said. How are you?

Good, I said. I got into my first choice grad school, the first quarter just started. 

What! That’s awesome! I’m so excited for you.

How’s Alaska?

It’s beautiful. He sent some photos of the Northern Lights. There was a girl in one of them, under the arm of a guy. The lighting on the back of their heads was dim but he looked tall like Ben. I was pretty sure this was sent to gently inform me he was seeing someone. I was glad I could see so little of her in the image that I couldn’t compare our bodies.

I stared at the green beams in the sky of his photo, thinking about how our night together was just as evanescent. I hope you like it up there. Enjoy the last of the sunlight!

Let me know if you want to text at night sometime ;), he said. 

I pressed the question mark reaction for the photo with the couple in it.

Those are my friends!!! I’m not in that photo! he said.

Hahaha, okay! Yeah I’d love to text you at night. I still think about that day in the hotel, I confessed.

I still look at our old messages sometimes and touch myself to the memory, he said. I’ve never had the guts to bring up that kink with any other girl. 

You should have texted me for new messages, I responded. 

When do you ovulate? he said. 

I hesitated for a moment.

Send me a screenshot of the app that tracks it. I wanna know what date. 

Haha are you serious? A screenshot? I typed back.

That or a photo of your beautiful body. Either one would be hot. 

I scrolled through Kelsey’s Greatest Hits and sent him a photo. 

He heart reacted.

October 15th, I added.

I’ll remember.

When the night came, I looked up the local animal shelter website while I waited, gazing at pictures of cats. I paused at each one: fat, orange, fluffy, gray. With each one I looked at, I wondered if the name Eloise fit. The sky continued to darken. There was only a one-hour time difference between California and Alaska. But it was getting late. I was getting tired. I stared at the time right up until 11:59 pm. But I never heard from Ben again, and Eloise just doesn’t seem to work for a cat. 

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Life Must Go On | Cynthia Landesberg

“As the Rabbi says, ‘Life must go on.’”

I found out about my grandfather’s passing sometime in the early morning. My mom’s voice vibrated through the phone – steady, strong, alive, a vitality she’s only ever had after a loss. My eyes fixated upon the creeping sherbert sunrise reflecting on the towering glass buildings around me and creating the illusion of a sun that rose from every direction. I mumbled my way off the phone, and stood before the fiery sun, its blistering light paralyzing me like a gargoyle mid-cry.

A few days later, my family gathered in Florida for the funeral. My older sister took charge as my family sat shiva in my grandpa’s one-bedroom condo. I can hear her signature laugh crescendo over the din of funeral chatter, giving everyone permission to smile amid their grief, and see the dining table, where we used to share a piece of Entenmann’s strudel each time I visited, covered with platters of bagels, lox, and fruit. At least that’s how I imagine it happened. I did not attend. I stayed in my city of glass, ensconced under my law books, stone cold and immobilized.

***

“She told me to go home and that she would see me tomorrow. But tomorrow never came.” 

Sudden, inexplicable loss leaves people in shock, drowning in an oblivion of disbelief. Deep within the folds of our gray matter, signals are released to ensure we memorize all the circumstances of the unpredictable loss, branding us with hypervigilance going forward. As a Korean adoptee and mother of two adoptees, I see this hypervigilance regularly, our bodies overriding our sound minds, telling us to panic, to worry, to lash out to protect ourselves at the possibility of saying goodbye. My grandfather knew this feeling too. Five years before his death, my grandmother went into the hospital for a minor stroke, something we all expected her to recover from. The night of her death, she told my grandfather to go home. He agreed, thinking he would see her in the morning. Instead, she fell, hit her head, and passed away.

I did not attend my grandmother’s funeral either. As a junior in college, I was young, self-absorbed, and horribly uncomfortable in my own brown skin. I stayed away to avoid the discomfort of looking like me in a family who looked like them. 

The guilt over not attending prompted me to write to my grandfather and we began a correspondence that spanned from 2003 until a few months before his death in 2008. We wrote about grief, loss, and life, and the man had before only been the retired Jewish grandpa in Florida, with his white v-neck undershirts, perpetual smell of aftershave, and jokes that always began with “A rabbi walks into a bar…” became so much more. Unbeknownst to either of us, his letters mapped a way for me through the adoption grief I would wrestle with years later.  

***

“I’m trying to cope with the loneliness of my losing my partner of 54 years…The men in my building are also widowers and go out to a restaurant on Thursday nights, so they asked me to join their ‘club.’”

Grief has swirled around me, in me, and through me my entire life. I always felt like an outsider in my own life, imported from a foreign country into a white, Jewish family, my feelings of loss and guilt and loneliness clashing with the role I undertook as the grateful adoptee. So I scraped out the incongruous feelings leaving me hollow inside. It was not until I adopted my oldest son and began learning about all the things he had to lose to become my child that I finally understood the emptiness I felt. 

My grandfather’s grief felt similarly cavernous, the silence echoing off the walls of his terracotta-colored condo. My grandparents had moved to Florida after my grandfather retired, and recreated their Jewish New York City life in the sunshine state. They spent their days gossiping, playing cards, and entertaining friends. Over time, their community began to dwindle with each morning’s obituary report, the news interspersed with last night’s baseball scores and tonight’s poker game, and now it was my grandmother’s turn. 

A week or so after her death, my grandfather received a knock on his front door. A man from upstairs had heard the news and called in through one of the glass slats to invite him to a weekly widower’s dinner. With nothing else to do, my grandfather got his coat and went along. I imagine those men, white-haired and liver-spotted, eating their $6.99 early bird special at 4:45 p.m., their collective grief nestled amongst their chicken noodle soups and strudel desserts, and I see that loss is best held by the hands of many. Though no one knocked on my slatted door, I did receive an email from my adoption social worker who connected with me another Korean adoptee adopting a son from Korea at the same time, and found out there was a club for me and my grief too.

***

“You will laugh when I say that I am learning how to make oatmeal. Cut up lettuce to make a salad, forget it!”

One of the topics in our adoption education class was about how to include your child’s birth culture into your family. As slides flicked by with names of cultural organizations and holidays and artwork from Korea, imposter syndrome squirmed all the way up my spine and back again, yanking me down in my chair out of shame. I barely knew how to find Korea on a map, let alone learn the language, the food, or culture. I had avoided anything Korean my entire childhood thinking that perhaps if I did not associate with Korea, maybe I would finally be seen as American. Now social workers were telling me I had to, in simplified terms, become Korean again. 

After my grandmother’s death, my grandfather had no choice but to learn at least some basic housekeeping skills. My grandfather embodied a depression-era man. He was drafted into the army in 1941. He shipped off to Hawaii with the worst seasickness of his life and spent the summer of 1941 playing baseball and waiting for something to happen. That December, something happened. My grandfather watched the planes come in over the Pacific, screamed as the bombs fell, and ran for ammunition to fight back. After the devastation of Pearl Harbor, he spent four and a half years in the army, just praying to get back home. When he made it, he began working for the Postal Service and as a shoe salesman, comfortable in the classic breadwinner role, leaving my grandmother to manage the kids and the home. Now, my grandfather was being asked to go grocery shopping, to cook, to do the laundry, and to clean up around the house. Eighty-plus years of doing none of these things, and here he was trying to learn how to make oatmeal.

As I waited for my son’s adoption to be approved, I decided that if my grandfather could learn new things at 88, then I could try to learn something about Korea at 31. So I began learning Korean. Hana. Dul. Set. I started eating Korean food. Bibimbap. Kimchi. Galbi. And I began watching Korean television shows, learning the culture, and learning what my life might have been had Korea not sent me away. And with each step I took towards reclaiming my Korean identity, I thought of my grandfather learning how to make oatmeal. One cup of water. Half a cup of oats. Boil. Stir. Step by step, we can do anything. 

***

“I just miss her so much.”

On my grandfather’s 90th birthday, my parents and I drove to Florida to celebrate with him. We sat together in his living room, no lights on because my grandfather was frugal to the end. We cycled through the typical topics – health, baseball, and the latest free giveaways he collected from the racetrack. In an elongated pause in the conversation, the place where my grandma would usually tell a story about cousin Yetta or the new widow in Number 204, my grandfather’s eyes settled on a picture of my grandmother on the side table. He reached over shakily and adjusted the gold necklace draped over the picture frame, the one she always wore, which bore four interlocking doll charms, her grandchildren’s names etched on each one. 

“She loved that necklace,” he whispered, his perpetually watery eyes at risk of overflowing. 

“Yeah, I remember her wearing it,” I said. 

Silence.

“I just miss her so much,” his voice cracked, and we all gazed in different directions and bore witness to his grief. 

A few minutes later, he removed his thick brown-framed glasses, wiped his face with a handkerchief, and began to talk. And talk. And talk. About his childhood, his time as a soldier, memories he had locked up for years. Hours went by while he held court and we all soaked in the newly painted picture of my grandfather, a man who had suddenly become a complete, whole human before our eyes. Then, as suddenly as he began, he stopped talking. He looked at the clock. 4:30 p.m. He got up without a word, rummaged in a drawer in his bedroom, and came out with a buy-one-get-one free coupon for the local diner. 

“We better go soon before it fills up,” he said with a chuckle, as he slid on his brown loafers and his periwinkle jacket, a smile still adorning his face as he locked his slatted door and padded down the bubbly sandstone walkway to the car. 

When I think about the person I was when I began adopting my son, and who I am now, eight years later, the fundamental difference between then and now is the urgency with which I tell my story. I have shared all of it. The parts I am ashamed of, the parts I am proud of, the parts I still do not understand. I tell my story because of the look on my grandfather’s face that evening of his 90th birthday, the smile he had on his way to dinner– lighter, freer, and more at peace than ever before.

***

“Cyndy, I have no excuse for not writing you. You may be out of sight, but not out of mind. Have a great birthday and many more healthy ones. As ever, Grandpa.” 

This was the entirety of the last letter he sent before he died. His handwriting had progressively become shakier, his letters shorter, but this was the shakiest and shortest of all. Brief, as if he knew the end was coming. Succinct, as if he knew what mattered most– more time. 

With the time I received that he did not, I finished law school, got married, began my career as an attorney, adopted two sons, gave birth to a daughter, and went through the grieving process for all the losses of my adoption for the first time. And as thoroughly disorienting as that experience was, sitting here on the other side, I realized I was never alone in it. I had followed the path my grandfather had walked before me, through grief and back again.

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