Not Yet, Tuesday

The smaller version, so I can breathe: Hye-jin handed me a notebook. I read it. I cried. I went to bed.

But I didn't go to bed. I went to the floor. That's a different sentence and I want to remember the difference.

The first line says she wrote it because I gave her permission. I don't remember giving permission. I remember saying something on the phone about my wrist hurting, something small and stupid, the way you tell someone about a paper cut so they don't see the knife. She heard the knife. Eleven pages. If I decide she is wrong, she will be wrong. That is the most generous sentence anyone has written for me since my mother stopped writing my name on the Chuseok cards.

I called Yu-jin and said I have something. Not yet. I don't yet know what I have. I have paper and a pulse and a jade plant that trembled when I set my palm down too hard. I have the memory of someone else's thumb learning the vein in my wrist.

I called Maa. I said I can't come to Chuseok. I hung up before she could make it about the hotel, or about the job I picked over the one she wanted for me. The silence since the seventeenth is now the size of a Chuseok table I will not sit at. I am the worst daughter in the building and I am relieved.