Ten Bad Feelings
By Jane Kim
After being told I needed Benzoid
There weren’t even any triggers, but they started getting more frequent and severe. But even though doctors and pharmacists gave diagnosis and prescriptions that defined certain symptoms, that didn’t explain why my body did what it did, didn’t help me make sense of the shaking or involuntary contractions or hyperventilation, not in the moment, not after; why, how, why;
If not why
After her first visit to the local gyno, she was put on birth control pills for her cramps and irregular periods. When she told her boyfriend, he asked if they could stop using condoms. She needed her boyfriend to be as fearful of pregnancy as she was, even if it was her body; when she explained this logic, he seemed unhappy, but didn’t push the matter.
This wasn’t why they broke up, but later she wondered if that was when they had begun to break up.
No Reason
It was at a party, not exactly black tie but formal, that a woman I didn’t know said, Can you hate someone for no reason?
I glanced at her, but she wasn’t looking at me, she was looking at a woman wearing a silky grey dress across the hall, who I recognized as one of the speakers from the dinner reception earlier that evening. She seemed to be laughing but we couldn’t hear her from across the hall, and she managed to look lovely ladylike even as she laughed through a mouthful of crudités.
I wanted to say you probably have a reason, maybe it’s just not a very good one, but instead I nodded vaguely, and said, I guess, and realized that too was true, because just that moment I hated the woman in the grey dress. I hated her because the woman I didn’t know resented her, and that was probably no reason for me to hate anyone, but I did, so I stood sipping prosecco with the woman whose name I never learned in our brief shared unreasoned dislike.
Inverse and Irony
Have I been to someone what you have been to me?
Habit
The first time he gets migraines, he goes to see a doctor with a pale grey face. He slips on the flat surface of the floor a few times, throws up a few more, and is put to bed in a dark room on some dissolving pills.
He later picks up the migraine meds they prescribe. Imitrex. When the migraine revisits, he puts the Imitrex on his tongue, and within minutes has a throat constriction, he can almost feel the sternum closing in against his heart. It turns out he is allergic to some component of Imitrex, and they change his migraine medication to rizatriptan and zofran instead. He is secretly glad the new prescription is cheaper than the last, no particular difficulty breathing.
This is how he develops the habit of perusing every word in patient education and drug information printouts. He knows reading them won’t reduce any risk, his body is his body and it’ll always be allergic to its allergies, but then again, no habit is reasonable.
In the produce section of Whole Foods
What are you looking for? I offer. The woman says, green onions, and I point to the scallions in the produce section, but she shakes her head, apparently they aren’t the right size or the right variety, though I don’t know what she’s looking for and can’t tell the difference. This is the largest local grocery store, so I tell her to perhaps look for them on the weekly farmer’s market. She nods, looking crestfallen, but remembers to says thanks, and with an awkward smile, says, there aren’t a lot of recipes from home that don’t use them. I want to say I’m sorry, I don’t know what I can say or do that would help, but she looks so apologetic, and both of us end up repeating, No, I’m sorry.
Leave
My roommate tells me about his friend, who is on medical leave after being diagnosed with PTSD. She had to take time off from work because she needed breathing space, but the irony is, as she takes time off at home she can no longer seek therapy or treatment because her family cannot, will not, does not know, and so on the medical leave her family thinks is simply a leave she tries to touch a different word of her diagnosis each day by herself, nursing her invisible illness in solitude.
She would eventually like to get to what disorder is and how exactly it has tweaked or broken her apparatus, but she hasn’t yet gotten past what it means to be Post-anything. My roommate looks grim when he says he isn’t sure whether his friend should extend her leave, and I am thinking of how she will process what trauma is supposed to mean, post, past, or present.
I don’t care enough
On her first date with a guy who could sport a beard and actually pull it off, she didn’t discover he was vegan until after she had ordered her food, the unfortunate choice of protein chicken rather than tofu. She hoped he would have straight up told her, but he didn’t. He flashed her an innocent grin over his kale and she wished she had thought to ask about his dietary restrictions before they chose the restaurant, or at least before she ordered the food. Having lost all appetite for the strips of chicken, she forked her meal less than eagerly.
The conversation went fine despite her lackluster replies and he delighted her with his manners, but she had been too out of it to hope for a second date. She did the math in her head and thought perhaps one in four of her friends now were vegan, or at least vegetarian. And though she recycled religiously and didn’t use to-go cups or plastic straws, she wasn’t either, she hadn’t really tried. The unusual September cold felt like another accusation of her failure, so she rolled up her car window, and thought to herself, I don’t care enough.
Relationship
After dating Ben for a couple months, with whom things remained shockingly stagnant–sex remained satisfying, conversation interesting–she put him in exhibit B. He was getting dangerously close to the center, but there was no sign of either deterioration or progression in their relationship, and by this she suspected she might belong in some other, more peripheral category of his diagram. She was beginning to miss the simplicity of her relationships in exhibit A.
Musician
A few nights ago I was sat at a bar
chatting to a poor old chap getting
mellow drunk with whiskey, and I do
not know if he plays music for a living,
but he did ask if I knew anyone kind
who does not love useless things.
About the Author:
Originally from Seoul, South Korea, Jane Kim started writing with the Vancouver-based Creative Writing for Children's Society since 2005. In 2014 she published a 400-page novel, Fallen, on Amazon Kindle, and currently explores experimental short stories and creative non-fiction. Her short story “Broken” has been featured in STORGY magazine in 2018, and her personal essay, “Umma, How You Break My Heart,” was published in Cherry Tree Literary Journal Issue V in 2019. After receiving her B.A. in Literary Arts and History of Art and Architecture at Brown University, she is currently completing her master’s degree in English at St. Peters College, Oxford.
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