“Hey, how are you?”
She releases the tension in her vocal cords. Her lips press together. Pop. They part and sinews stretch across her mouth like supple stalactites. It sticks to the walls and nestles between her joints.
“I’m good, how are you?”
She tilts her head slightly to the right, gracefully and smoothly. It lubricates her vertebrae. A slow breath in, eyebrows raised. Her pupils are varnished and glossy.
“Good! Good, it’s been so long. What have you been up to? I saw you were in Vietnam. You did the Ha Giang Loop, right? It looked beautiful.”
“Oh my gosh, it was beautiful.”
The words arrive first. She hears herself say beautiful. It is appropriately breathless.
“I mean, it just, it changed something in me.” A calibrated pause, long enough to suggest she is still processing but short enough not to lose the room. It moved through the hinge of her jaw, slow and thorough. “We got so far off the beaten path. Local food. You could feel how old everything was.”
She leans in slightly. Good. Intimacy. The sharing of a secret.
“And everyone I know is doing Nice, Kyoto, the same three cities. And I just —” a small laugh, self-deprecating, warm — “I needed something that hadn’t been excavated yet.”
She can feel the compliment approaching like a pressure change, and waits, very still, in the place behind her eyes. She tilts her chin, receptive and modest. She does not think about the other girls on the loop with the same Arcteryx jacket. She does not think about the guesthouse owner who had memorized the English word for authentic. She does not think about how she had composed the Instagram caption before she had looked up from the valley.
She smiles, and the smile fits perfectly, and something underneath it presses very quietly against the back of her teeth
A nod. A twinkle. She uncrosses her arms slowly. The deer is always about to bolt. She has learned not to make sudden movements.
“Wow, that sounds amazing. I can’t even imagine what an experience like that would be like. Like, spiritually, you know?”
She puts a hand to her mouth, chewing a strand of rice noodle. $45 dollars for real pancit, family dinner pancit, side of the road, plastic stool pancit without the microplastics.
“It changed my life. I mean, seriously. This one lady I met, she’s 42, child free and single. Backpacking across southeast asia. She was so wise. Gave me so much life advice.”
It brims her pharynx and slowly fills the area under her tongue.
“Oh my god, honestly? You’re so adventurous. I could never.”
She receives it the way a lock receives a key. A small, precise give, and then alignment. It moves through her in a long slow wave, filling the soft places, the hinges, the spaces between. She feels herself settle.
“I mean, you just have to do it. You have to stop waiting for the right time.”
She hears herself say this and notes, from very far away, that it is exactly right. The warmth in her chest is real. She is almost certain the warmth in her chest is real.
The deer has not bolted. The room does not smell like calamansi. It smells like yuzu.
She reaches for her water glass, and her hand moves gracefully, and somewhere behind her eyes the lights are on, and no one is checking anymore.
–
“I love your shoes, they’re so unique!”
Yoo-neek. The last phoneme moves from the tongue to the throat, and with a click, the slickness dissipates.
An embellished, theatrical gasp. “Thank you so much! They’re vintage, archival Galliano. SS 1983. Off the runway. I got them from this amazing luxury curator in the lower east side. I heard she’s dressed Leah Kateb.” Am I picking up a transatlantic accent?
“I’ve just been really invested in my closet. Curated. Niche.”
Neesh. It sounds like ‘unique’ if you pressed down the lift rod in a sink halfway through the word.
–
“Has this changed your opinion of New York?”
We walked side by side, hand in hand. The brim of her sun hat was so comically elongated I couldn’t see her eyes.
“No,” she said, after a long pause. “This city has a sickness.”
