MEGAN XING

Ouroboros 

Ouroboros: “an alchemical symbol that expresses the unity of all things, material and spiritual, which never disappear but perpetually change form in an eternal cycle of destruction and re-creation.” -Britannica 

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to-do list 

• reset email password 
• submit insurance waiver 
• buy bubble mailers 
• psychiatrist appointment 
• therapist appointment 
• wisdom teeth 
• find meds 
• fold shirts 

* * *

I am at a birthday party. 

The host is a girl who was my best friend in eighth grade. She used to be a ballet dancer, skinny and slender and tall for a girl. Now she has grown slightly fat, but I don’t tell her this. Instead I hand her a gift, a bag filled with the least used-looking products from my sink cabinet, and tell her that her breasts have grown. 

She beams at me and says I know, right? It’s the birth control. 

Now she is whispering by the bathroom door with her friends from high school, slender and tall and beautiful ballet dancers named Lily and Annie. I am sitting in a circle of her college friends, holding a can of spiked lemonade and avoiding direct eye contact. 

I think about how many college friends I have. It’s not a hard count. 

One of the girls, a tall, slightly heavier girl with a full head of coppery curls, leans in close, her breath heavy with sangria. I think her name is Elsie because she is the one who brought cooking wine, mistaken for soju. 

I’m bi, too, you know, she says. Her eyes are on the cute lesbian who I had earlier mistaken for a boy undergoing late stage puberty—Anna(?). Anna(?) currently has her arm curled around the back of Lily’s park bench and is leaned in close, pointing out every intersection between Manhattan and Brooklyn, tracing them across the phone screen with a meaningful finger.

I just can’t compete with Anna, says Elsie, and though she punctuates the statement with a sardonic eye roll she looks somewhat mournful. 

I don’t respond because she is correct. Instead I accept the bong from the host’s boyfriend, a white boy of average height wearing cargo shorts and a black Michael Kors polo. He tells me to guess what he’s studying as he packs the bowl. I say finance. 

He pauses and then smiles and asks if his girlfriend already told me. 

Sure, I say, and then take my first pull. His brow furrows as he watches. 

That’s motorhead, he warns. 

This means nothing to me, but I nod sleepily anyway. About five minutes later, I understand. There is a burn in my chest, a dull, heavy burn, like I have recently attempted to swallow a live grenade. I need water, I think, or oxygen, and then the tremendous urge to get away from other people swells like a cresting wave. 

My dad just texted, I say to no one in particular. He wants me home. 

The boyfriend looks genuinely disappointed. He says, It was really great to meet you. He says, I hope we see each other again. This, I think, is probably because he wants to marry her. He offers me a handshake and offers to tell her goodbye. I feel almost guilty as I stumble to the path, trying to decide whether I want to vomit on public property or potentially wake my parents. I spend the next half hour crouched over a shrub.

* * *

My psychiatrist has advised me to drink more water. Each day I nurse one cup, conserving the energy required to get up and refill the Britta. My roommate hates this; she hints constantly about the unequal distribution of labor required to maintain our room, standing at the sink and sighing at regular intervals. In response, I dial the thermostat up thirteen degrees while she’s asleep and she reports me to our residential advisor. 

Once a month, my psychiatrist calls and goes through a list of questions. How am I feeling today, on a scale from one to ten? Am I in danger of hurting myself? Am I in danger of hurting others? Then she asks why I no longer see my therapist. At first, I lie and say I do, but she has logs spread in front of her, ready for consultation. Finally I tell her it is because I don’t like to talk about my feelings. It is unproductive and wasteful and deeply uncomfortable. She asks me what I think we’re doing now, and I tell her that’s her decision, not mine. 

I don’t tell her I lost my Prozac a month ago and haven’t taken it for twice that. I don’t tell her that I have replaced my dosage with two Advil, a blueberry drinkable yogurt, and a dill pickle, taken once a day. I don’t tell her that they work about the same. 

* * *

to-do list 

• reset email password 
• submit insurance waiver 
• buy bubble mailers 
• psychiatrist appointment 
• therapist appointment 
• wisdom teeth 
• find meds 
• fold shirts 

* * *

Sometimes when I am feeling lonely, I call my best friend. When she picks up, we don’t speak and then one of us hangs up. When she doesn’t, I leave lengthy voicemails that ultimately culminate in some form of an existential threat. 

I don’t tell my psychiatrist about this, either. 

* * *

Now I am home again, and it’s summer. I’m walking through SoHo with a boy who dresses like my introductory calculus professor and smells like clean linen. I am two and a half hours late and sick from undercooked chicken, but he says it’s okay and waits in the bookstore until I arrive. The time we spend together feels comfortable, but I still feel like a reluctant child being pulled along by the tide. 

Later, after the sun sets, we sit quietly on the park bench, observing the still black waters of the Hudson River and the city lights across the opposite bank until an old Chinese grandfather stops directly in front of us with five fishing rods, folk music blaring from his pocket. He turns it off when he sees us and fishes in silence, competently and diligently, reeling in slick eels that twist and writhe on the warm cement. When we get up to go, he lights a cigarette, struggling slightly against the wind, and on the subway ride home I think of my own grandfather and cry. 

* * *

I am leaned out across the pier, waiting in line for the Ferris wheel. Weblike lightning flashes in syncopated bursts across the hazy gray skies, the horizon and clouds blurred into a thick black line, occasionally broken by spidery rays of violet-white light. Foam-crested waves gain speed and force, rising above oily waters, a path leading straight to the moon, before crumpling against packed sand. 

A strange sense of peace floods through me, making my arms and legs heavier, my brain sluggish, like my body is moving, dreamlike, through the same waters I am currently watching. The wind whips up like a tornado, blasting my skin, grains of stinging sand slamming into my body like pellets, like airsoft beads. We go inside the nearest building, an opulent hotel with a red canopy, and sit on the steps of the casino until the security guard comes over and asks us to leave. 

* * *

This summer, I go to Europe and spend a month looking at slender, beautiful women who do everything with perfect elegance. This applies especially to smoking. European women smoke like American women drink coffee; recreationally, socially, but the difference is that they never treat it as a weakness, never admit that this is the thing that they crave, the thing that is killing them slowly. Instead they pinch long, thin white cigarettes between long, thin fingers and lean against walls, stairs, café chairs, blowing out fumes of smoke like they do not know what they are doing to themselves. 

After I return to the city I immediately set out to purchase some of my own, armed with a fake ID that does not belong to me and the knowledge that these elegant white instruments are known as menthol cigarettes. The ID belongs to a girl I do not know. She is four inches shorter, twenty pounds heavier, and several shades darker, but it has yet to fail me. 

Upon reaching the smoke shop the cashier looks at me wearily and informs me that no, he does not have Virginia Slims, and do I want 100s or shorts? Stumped, I choose one at random and find myself with a box of stunted cigarettes with white filters and slightly transparent bodies, an ugly dual-tone of gray and white. They are short and stubby and taste like tobacco with a drop of mouthwash. I pawn them off to a friend at the first opportunity. 

* * *

to-do list 

• reset email password 
• submit insurance waiver 
• buy bubble mailers 
• psychiatrist appointment 
• therapist appointment 
• wisdom teeth 
• find meds 
• fold shirts 

* * *

I am once again drunk in a bathroom somewhere and my head is pounding in time with my chest. I press my hot forehead against my arm and breathe against my skin, sticky and warm and then cool again. I type in home on Apple maps and cry because it no longer takes me to New York. Because at some point, even without my interference, it has updated to Atlanta. And even though my childhood has been over for a long, long time, this is the first time it really feels like it. 

* * *

One day after French I enter my studio apartment to find everyone I know sitting on the floor in a haphazard circle. There is something strange and unsettling about the sight; my friends from the literary magazine sitting with my friends from freshman year, everyone mixing together like a strange, discordant cacophony of strings and woodwinds and drums. My roommate is not present. I’m not sure if it’s because they didn’t think to ask her or she just had somewhere more important to be.

A girl from my first year writing class lays a hand on my arm. It gets better, she says kindly. Her foundation is smeared with sunscreen and sweat. Mascara smudges beneath her eyes, raccoonish and unkempt. The dye has begun to bleed out of her cheap top, an unseemly blush pink peeking out from streaking sections of dark gray. 

I smile at her with too many teeth, and she swiftly retracts her hand. 

In the end, I promise to schedule a session with my therapist. Satisfied, they begin to trickle out of my room. At the end of the line is my best friend from freshman year, the girl whose existence I do not recall when I am at home. 

I’ve been where you are. She says this like an assurance, like it should comfort me. Other people have lived this life, have had these thoughts. It gets better. 

After she’s gone, I smash my phone against the far wall. My roommate returns ten minutes later and asks me, slightly more accusationally than usual, why there is a crater on her side of the room. 

* * *

Sometimes things appear to be more complicated than they are. Reality distorts and with it truth, and everything you see filters through a lens crafted to fit your narrative. Everywhere you look you see intentionality, subversion, rebellion. Truth is a perception, not a fact, and the first time I watch Oppenheimer I think Cillian Murphy is so in tune with social inequality that he smokes white cigarettes, filterless cigarettes, cigarettes made for women in order to reject the social hierarchy, reject the crown with which he was born and create a new, true society, one that is equally kind, equally unkind to all who inhabit it, but then I realize that no, cigarette filters were simply not invented until after World War II, and Cillian Murphy simply smoked the same cigarettes as everybody else. This realization–that not everything is done with calculation, that Oppenheimer is at heart a conformist–deflates my ideology. Cillian Murphy has made me a cynic, and even this has not been done intentionally. 

* * *

One night, I return home after work to find my roommate piping bright pink buttercream into fragmented cookie shards, pushing sticky scraps into small masses and gluing them together with meticulous care. She offers me one, so I take it. The heavy filling is cloyingly sweet, the meringue simultaneously dry and sticky. I wonder what it is that pushes us to fix what is so clearly shattered, that drives us to repair what is broken. Perhaps it’s hope, a cruel and congenital optimism unique to humanity. My psychiatrist is driven by this same urge, I believe; each visit is like a building eruption, and yet she invariably jots down notes, tears prescriptions off her bright yellow legal pad, reminds me to drink water and sleep more. 

My roommate asks if I would like another. I eat it alone in my room, and later that night I vomit into the bathroom toilet, specks of painful, familiar pink dotting the water. 

* * *

On the subway, I start a new book. It’s a terrible book but it’s about love so I am reading it anyway, just so I can feel the kind of emotion I am too selfish to feel in real life. The girl in the book has many faults, but she knows her limits, at least, and she is capable of love. When I flip to the last chapter the train arrives at my stop and I get off, the air hot and heavy on my bare skin, the emptiness of the station ringing in my ears. 

On my way out I pass a train that looks asleep; a long string of blacked-out cars, orange lettering marching across the display, declaring that the train is out of service, entirely unavailable. I peer through the glass from several different angles, but the blue benches and speckled rubber remain perfectly concealed. It strikes me that this is me, and the train I just disembarked, the living breathing E train that will keep on running for as long as the city moves, is the girl in the terrible book. 

I climb up the stairs leading to the exit and cancel the appointment with my therapist.

* * *

Beauty as an abstract idea is a fascinating concept that varies greatly depending on its beholder. In Kurt Vonnegut’s eyes, it is an object, quotidian and unremarkable and easily bought by powerful men. In Sally Rooney’s, it is an ideal, something vastly inferior to intelligence and yet sought out by those who do not possess it. Oscar Wilde sees it as a kind of genius that exists above genius, something beyond questioning, as ancient and wild as nature itself. In this way, through analysis and through art, beauty is granted consciousness, mutable and ever shifting, so powerful that its very nature can provide contrast between benevolence and maleficence. The general consensus, however, is that it is above all else a commodity, cheaply purchased and transient. 

Sometimes, late at night, I look into the mirror and do not recognize myself as a sum of my parts. Instead I see individual features through an alien lens: dull eyes, dull hair, lips a touch too narrow. Face too wide, features too close together. 

When I was young, I took it as an absolute truth that I would blossom into someone both intelligent and beautiful. I was ahead of the curve, I thought, smarter than everyone I had ever met. And even when I wasn’t, I put my faith into the future. One day, I asserted, I will become beautiful. Surely it will happen. I am growing closer and closer to the expiry date for these kinds of self assurances, but somehow I never seem to outgrow hope. 

There is a Japanese myth that states this: if you fold a thousand paper cranes, you will be granted one wish. After reading this, I search up a tutorial for origami cranes and leave it open on my computer until the power runs out.

* * *

to-do list 

• reset email password 
• submit insurance waiver 
• buy bubble mailers 
• psychiatrist appointment
• therapist appointment
• wisdom teeth 
• find meds 
• fold shirts 
• paper cranes

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