Chapter 3: Goodbye, Cruel World

Like most Asian kids born from immigrant parents, I spent my Saturdays learning Japanese in the morning and math in the afternoon while my white peers were busy doing white people things like watching cartoons, riding bikes, and getting into stranger’s cars. I can’t speak for anyone else but I have never, not once, ever had the inclination to talk to, let alone follow a stranger but from what little television my parents let me watch, this seemed to be an endemic problem families faced during the 90’s. Back then, stranger danger and D.A.R.E. was part of the curriculum. Every kid learned it along with stop, drop, and roll. Those were simpler times. Then of course, 9/11 happened, school shootings skyrocketed, and now I’m afraid of everyone and everything.

Ohhh. So this is where I get my trust issues from.

Anyway, I lived in room 1725 on the 17th floor of Constellation Heights and I was positively drained by the time I made it back home. I don’t even remember when I grabbed my keys but there they were, already in my hands as I turned the knob and opened the door.

“Tadaima!” I said to no one in particular.

When I was in grade 2, Mr. Yamada, my Saturday Japanese school teacher, impressed upon me that certain words like “Tadaima” and “Yobai” were common everyday phrases that I needed to learn. Experience however, taught me that I would never, ever, have to use them in any conversation – not as a kid and not as an adult either. My parents were surgeons and largely absent from my life while my brothers just didn’t like me very much. I suppose part of it was the age gap and the other part is my personality but I can only falsify my age.

The inside of my apartment was exactly what you would expect it to be from a 30 year-old woman on lorazepam, minus the cat because of allergies. I don’t have company or anyone else to impress so the crossover between my home and the den of a moderately successful neckbeard is pretty high. People would probably ask me how I live like this if people cared enough about me to ask, or so I imagine. I don’t know; people’s imaginations are usually drawn from past experiences and no one’s ever cared enough about me to ask me about my living situation so vicarious accounts from Vtubers are really doing the bulk of the world-building here.

That said, even depression has standards because most of my garbage was already neatly wrapped up inside of garbage bags – my main problem was that I hadn’t gotten around to disposing of it by chucking it down the garbage chute so my 3 month-old homies were still lying around my condo like they paid rent. As for the rest of the clutter, well, that was mostly dishes and laundry because my Roomba is the hardest working Roomba in the state. Ganbare, Roomba-san.

I took off my shoes at the door and slipped on some slippers, not because I’m Japanese but because it’s the only rational thing to do. Then, I locked up the door behind me with both the deadbolt and the chain, not because I believed it offered me adequate security but because I had already paid for it. No, sir. The only security measure I deem safe enough to protect my personal well-being is my Beneli Nova, which I keep next to my nightstand because I am a small Japanese woman who only weighs 101 lbs. Please do not shit on me for using a plastic gun because I will cry.

I never turned off the lights because utilities was covered by my landlord and she was a bitch. Is it bad for the environment? Sure, but so is living. A few extra kilowatts being spent here and there isn’t worth much in the grand scheme but me being petty will go a long way towards maintaining my mental health. Besides, I was stimulating the economy and helping preserve jobs through my tiny act of civil protest so really, who’s to say it’s not a net positive? Anyway, I walked over to my cramped but fully-illuminated kitchenette, dropped off all my crap onto my tiny dining table, got a pair of chopsticks from a drawer, and retrieved a beer from the fridge before circling back to the table and collapsing into my favorite wooden chair to eat my meal.

“Itadakimasu,” I said to no one in particular.

I don’t know who I’m thanking. Farmers and fisherman probably, but globalization makes it difficult to put a race on it. I mean, this rice isn’t Japanese – that’s for sure and this salmon is probably a Chinnock but it could be from New Zealand for all I know. Who grew and harvested these things? Rice is a cereal, not a tender crop so it can be harvested by a combine. If I were Shinto, do I thank the machine, the white man, or the multi-ethnic farmhands for this meal? What would be a fair accounting in terms of gratitude distribution and would a pie graph be involved? Or would I perhaps thank a corporation because they are legally a person? Who the hell knows and why am I thinking about this? Just eat the damn sushi.

The sushi was on par with what I expected so if there’s anyone to blame for my dissatisfaction, it would be me so I’m not going to do that. Sure, the rice may be cold, dry, and slightly crunchy while the slivers of salmon were exactly that but this is grocery store sushi. Blaming this sushi for being what it is is like walking into a McDonald’s washroom and getting mad when you see poop sticking up against the walls. That’s just par for the course, you know? People are disgusting, thank you very meth.

I was about halfway through my tray of sushi when I heard a notification buzz from my phone. Even though it was late and almost to midnight, it was still technically my birthday so my stupid and academically disputed reptilian brain got its hopes up, even though the rest of me didn’t want it to. Half-hesitantly and half-anxiously, I reached into my purse and retrieved my phone before turning it on to see what the notification was. Imagine the overwhelming love and affection I felt when it turned out to be from my mother, who had texted me to remind me to feed Maru, the family cat, while she and my father were away on their Caribbean cruise. Then, she posted an album of photos and videos on the family group chat. Just imagine the love; God knows I am. You can really tell that she almost cares.

Believe it or not, helicopter parents are selective about whom they hover over. I was never particularly smart and my grades, which hovered stubbornly in the mid 80’s reflected that. Parents might think they hide it well but children pick up on a lot of things and I could tell that I was a disappointment very early on. How could I not when I was constantly being berated and compared to my two older brothers? My super brilliant brothers who both ended up being doctors, just like my parents? I knew I would never be able to achieve what they could but I’m a trooper and I soldiered on because I wanted to make my parents proud. Turns out though, hard work doesn’t matter – only results, and by the time I was in middle school, my free trial of parental affection expired.

I pondered that phone in my hand and contemplated whether or not I should write anything back in acknowledgment. As the only daughter of the Machi clan, I was probably the biggest disappointment to my mother because I don’t think my father ever cared. Fine – Japanese culture might be sexist but to put the blame squarely on my parent’s cultural upbringing feels like giving them an out for personal responsibility. Sure, I may not have lived up to my parents’ expectations but do I really occupy less room in my mother’s heart than the family cat that I’m allergic to?

In the multiverse theory, every possible outcome is postulated to exist somewhere within the grand set of possible universes, which is collectively known as the multiverse. This means that according to the multiverse theory, somewhere within the multiverse, there should exist a version of me where I’m loved by my parents. This happy, bubbly, and overly optimistic copium may have sustained many a philosopher but not me because I can’t fathom how such a universe can possibly exist.

But I digress.

It was 11:55 pm and the end of my birthday was fast approaching. While I didn’t want to keep eating this sushi, I also didn’t want to throw it away either because if there’s one thing 90’s infomercials taught me, it’s that there were hordes of poor and starving kids in Africa. I couldn’t say no to peas and carrots after that. I’m not sure how much World Vision has contributed to the development of American obesity throughout the years but what I can say is that to this day, I still feel compelled to finish every bite.

And so, I did. I forced myself to eat every morsel because if I didn’t eat until my stomach was distended, then all those hungry children died for nothing. But even if the spirit was willing, there was a difference between eating a tray of sushi and eating a whole chocolate cake by yourself.

To be honest, I hadn’t given eating this cake very much thought. I mean, yes, I had purchased the cake with the full intention of eating it but now that I’m looking at it and I mean REALLY looking at it, I don’t see how I can possibly finish the whole thing by myself. Once slice sure, but eating a cake of this size requires loved ones and I just don’t have any of those with me right now.

Oh well. That’s what Tupperware and freezers were made for.

The bigger problem was that I didn’t have any candles or lighters.

After scrounging around my drawers, I managed to find my sundry bag of spare candles, matches, and lighters. They were the leftovers which I had kept from office parties – parties which I had been forced to plan over the years. From the bag, I withdrew 3 blue candles, affixed them on the cake, and then quickly lit them with a lighter.

I don’t know why I bother with this asinine tradition when literally none of my wishes have ever come true. They haven’t! Not a single one, whether it’s by birthday, fountain, wishbone, or shooting star. I know that logically it’s just a stupid superstition but I place the candles on the cake all the same. So why do I do it? Why do I make the wish when the magic has already died?

In the end, I suppose it’s because I want to believe.

Why else do people buy lottery tickets? Everyone knows the odds and yet, hope is purchased for one or two dollars at a time. So why? The only conclusion I can draw is that despite everything, despite the cruel, indifferent, unfair, and whimsical nature of the universe, despite the miserable disappointment of life itself, man cannot be sustained by bread alone.

And so, I made a wish. I looked at the candles, saw them flicker, took a deep breath, and then blew them out.

Maybe next year I’ll have someone to spend it with. Wouldn’t that be nice?

I took the candles out of my cake and placed them on a nearby napkin. Then, I retrieved a big-ass knife from my knife drawer and proceeded to cut myself a big-ass slice of it. It was at this point that I realized that I didn’t have a plate to put it on, nor the SSRI’s to gain that inclination and so, I improvised and reused my sushi tray instead.

You know how some non-Asians use forks instead of chopsticks? Well, I’m like the Asian version of that in the sense that I replaced the fork with chopsticks when it comes to shoveling cake into my mouth. I’m not a particularly big fan of chocolate cake and I never have been. I mean, I don’t hate it but I don’t think it’s great either. Personally, I prefer creaminess in a cake rather than sweetness and chocolate cakes tend to be on the sweeter side than say, vanilla or strawberry. I suppose it makes sense to try and mask the essence of chocolate because pure chocolate tastes like fancy dirt but at the same time, I also wonder why people bothered adding chocolate to anything at all. What is it about the cocoa bean that people actually like? Or is it like homeopathy but for pâtissiers?

Well, as I was thinking about that, I choked and then that was it. That’s how I died. It was painful. In the beginning, I still had my senses, which quickly turned to me freaking out because I didn’t know how to Heimlich myself and Youtube kept loading ads. I fell at some point and then things started getting dark.

I wish I could say I died with dignity. I know the coroner's report will state that I died of asphyxiation but honestly, I think I died of embarrassment. As I lay on the cold and hard linoleum floor, my vision gradually faded as the pounding in my head slowed until both eventually stopped. Then, like a whirlwind, my life flashed before my eyes and it looked just like the world’s worst cereal commercial. And I honestly thought that this would be the end of my story but it was not the end.

No, it certainly was not.

In fact, it was only the beginning.