why did I why did I why did I why did I why did I:

sit all day on the couch with my underwear pulled around my thighs so that my bare vagina was all sloppily spread on the leather couch and by the time the cloud parted around four pm and by the time the sun really started to come in my freaking vagina lips were all smushed and clamped onto the leather and all the pubes that had gotten smashed together and stuck on each other, held in binding finity by the glue of the dried discharge that comes rushing out of my vagina every morning—actually, not rushing, more like a slow oil leak like when my father would take a near empty bottle of canola oil and instead of throwing it away, he would set it upside down on a frying pan and leave it to drip for days and days until every drop of oil leached down from the bottle and onto the perfect spilling circle of oil on the frying pan, which he then used to make me and my mom fried eggs on a Saturday when the smell of those eggs and that oil, that bottom oil with all the swirgly ugly black bits and the bits of my saliva from when I would spit into the bottle when no one was home because… well, I wanted to…(Mom: why did you spit that huge hocking wad of mucus out right when I was introducing you to the host of the party? Me: I wanted to. Mom: That’s not an answer. Me: Why not? I thought an answer was just whatever you choose to answer a question with. Mom: No, an answer has to be satisfying. Me: But it was satisfying. Do you actually have no idea what it’s like to walk around with a massive block of mucus in your throat? Mom: I should have never brought you with us. Me: Well, that’s your fault now, isn’t it?)—all those pubes were not only stuck on each other but stuck on the couch and my golden fleece of masssshy was too ugly to separate one by one?

why did I why did I why did I why did I why did I:

get pimples that needed several weeks of draining, and that had to be popped several times over the course of a few months, like a pimple nested inside a pimple that had not totally drained the first time and then another pimple sprouting inside another pimple and so on and so on and so on until it was just layers and layers of scabbing over not fully popped pimples on the hardest-to-squeeze part of my face which was where my nose met my cheeks and anyone who does not find that part as the most definitive reason why we suffer has never been a chinese girl with no boning whatsoever in her nose, and my having always been a chinese girl with no boning whatsoever in her nose has always been the reason why my glasses always slipped down my nose until they were all the way down by my nostrils and also why when someone was like, Hey, pass me that pen, I would throw it too far or too close and everyone would say, Who can’t even throw a pen, and I just wanted to say, Um, for one, people with virtually no bridge on their noses, and no, I don’t mean the kind that gets you from one island to another, I mean the thing that makes white people look so good in profile, the thing that I had to draw in art class when we did a unit on silhouettes and how to draw a forehead and a nose and a mouth that looked realistically human and I drew a virtually bridgeless nose that protruded very little and a forehead that was completely flat and my teacher was like, Next time, pay a little more attention in class, and I swear on my crusty vagina discharge, I said to her, Next time, pay a little more attention to me, which she took as me mouthing off to mouth off, which admittedly, I did do like every single day that she was my teacher, but also, I meant, Try and include other human beings beside the ones you noticed in your idea of human, and maybe if she ever bothered to see me, like really see me, like actually take me in the way I was always taking her in, like how I tried to imagine how it felt for her when she bumped her nose into a wall or how it must have felt when she rubbed her eyes because her eyes were set so deeply in the hollow concave of her eye sockets, another thing we chinese girls did not have, and if I could say something to her now, if I could write her a note, if I could somehow send her this message that has been on my mind ever since she reprimanded me for not following instructions and then sending me to the principal’s office after I talked back, it would be this: I want you to stop punishing me because you can’t imagine being me?