This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,93

fatigue in the slope of Mr. Wu’s shoulders as he props his head up with his hand, in Miss Zhou’s distant stare as she sucks the last threads of chicken off a bone. Not much is said during the meal, and it would be easy to watch the shot and find it depressing, but there’s something about the way Priya frames it that captures how it’s almost a sacred ritual, this last breaking of bread of the day.

I tag the best clips and, instead of just uploading them to our Facebook site, I share them with Jocelyn in an e-mail, just to make contact. Just to create an electronic link between the two of us, a digital lifeline to remind her of me. Maybe it’s pathetic. Maybe it’s exactly what she needs. I guess the fact that I only spend ten minutes freaking out about it is a sign that the thousands of dollars that my parents have spent on Dr. Rifkin haven’t gone to waste.

This Is My Brain on Edge

JOCELYN

After I leave my shift, I sleep for thirteen hours and am still exhausted when I wake up.

My room faces east, though, and I was too tired to draw my curtains when I fell into my sleep-wallow last night, so I drag myself out of bed just to get the sun out of my eyes, which are so filled with sleep grit that it hurts to squeeze them closed.

At first, I think the hole in my belly is left over from the yesterday’s disappointment, but then my body growls like a disgruntled cat and I say, fine, I’ll feed you. I didn’t eat dinner last night, what with all the weeping. I grab a cover-up, lumber over, and crack my door open, listening. It’s quiet enough that Alan’s probably already on his way to summer school with one of my parents. Which just leaves the other one, and Amah.

Please let it be Dad’s day to drive Alan, I think. I can’t face him yet. Not that my mom will be much better, but our lives are too small to avoid them forever.

In the kitchen, I brush past my mother, who is already at the sink washing dishes, and make a beeline to the cabinet where we keep our cereal.

“Zao shang, Xiao Jia. Ni yao xifan ma?” My amah calls out from the kitchen table, gesturing at me with a bowl of rice porridge. Our kitchen table is crammed full of small plates with dried fish, salty egg, seaweed paste, fresh-cut scallions, rou song, and fried onions. I look at the cereal box in my hand and realize that I can’t answer the most basic question about what I want to eat. I’m gripped by an inexplicable panic, like I’m going fifty miles an hour on a highway that’s forking and I’m headed straight for the median because I can’t figure out where my GPS wants me to go. It should not be terrifying to have to choose whether you want a hot meal or a cold one. And yet here I am.

Amah takes one look at me and wordlessly starts making me a bowl. I collapse into a chair, watching her swirl the porcelain spoon in the porridge to get just the right consistency, and for this one moment I am so grateful to be taken care of. So I watch Amah use a fork to scrape the salty egg into tiny flakes that don’t overwhelm the other flavors; she skips the dried fish that I’ve hated since I was little and gives a generous dollop of the seaweed paste, a handful of scallion, and onion for texture.

Amah fumbles a bit putting the lid back on the jar of the seaweed paste. The lid’s a little too wide, her fingers not quite nimble enough to manage the twist. Tears form in my eyes—again with the waterworks, dammit. I rub my face as if I’m trying to wake up, trying to hide how much the simple act of someone serving me food breaks me. As empty as I felt when I woke up, suddenly I’m so full of conflicting emotion it’s overwhelming. Love. Gratitude that there’s someone, anyone, who knows me so well they can make me a congee without asking. A sudden stab of awareness that I don’t know how many more breakfasts Amah will have with us.

Warm food was a good choice. I close my eyes and focus on the flavors mingling in my mouth, salty and neutral and