Jenny Zhang

I felt like this was the reason why I never wanted to get older, because why move forward when it was so brilliant to just remain as we were?

“We’ll always try to be ahead but we’ll always be behind. We’ll be like this forever.”

Surely there was someplace where it was safe, where who you thought you were matched up with how others treated you, where there was forgiveness in great abundance, never to be depleted, and as far as I knew, the first step to getting there was to have a boy who loved you and only you.

I wanted to live a dreamless life in my unconscious and be full of dreams in my conscious life

What allowed him to be at peace with the world when I was still so behind, waiting for the next several years to hurry up and finish so I could show everyone that I, too, would turn out this way, poised and so incredibly well-adjusted that I was a marvel to be discussed and openly pondered, perhaps even kept in a glass case rimmed with gold in a museum somewhere that charged exorbitantly for admission to see me, the special exhibit people traveled far and wide for.

“When adults are sad, they bury their feelings in drink.”

All I had wanted for so long was to be part of a family that wasn’t mine. To have an excuse to love mine less, an excuse to run away instead of staying so close all the time.

I worried about a world where my existence barely mattered. A world where I did not exist at all. Maybe that was the world I was headed to. Maybe that was the world I deserved

I worried about how I was seen, who I was seen with, and what kind of abysmal creature other people thought I was—these fears disfigured me though the damage was invisible to my parents, whom I could never compete with as they were always a hundred times more worried, more fearful, more occupied than I could ever be.

That was the secret to being me back then: if you never say a word, people will think you don’t know anything, and when people think you don’t know anything, they say everything in front of you and you end up containing everything. On the inside, I was vast. But on the outside, I was a known idiot.