College student gets their first job and learns how to be a human. And gets contacts. And writes about it.
“Ah you’re early today,” my boss remarked offhandedly in Korean, her hands moving swiftly tying up a plastic bag of someone’s fried rice takeout. She glanced at the clock. “By two minutes.” I smiled sheepishly.
Walking in from the quiet of the late afternoon street, I was met with a symphony of conversation, forks clinking against plates, pitchers of ice water shifting as men in winter jackets poured into styrofoam cups. A warmth of sound and activity that enveloped my senses in this tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant, a welcome shock to the system.
Walking down the length of the linoleum bar tables and bar stools, squeezing through in my winter coat and backpack, I made my way behind freshman talking about classes, medical students complaining over their shifts, Michigan alumni and old friends catching up on how they’ve been and the lives of their other friends. Frat boys talking about girls, old ladies talking about forgiveness. International students from China, some from Korea, they laughed and showed each other pictures on their phones, “It sounds so shallow, but I wanna get vaccinated so I can go clubbing in Hong Kong.” A military family, a portly, kindly man with a beard and baseball cap with his Korean wife and their daughter. A coworker waved to me brightly as I took off my sweater once I got to the back, I joined her quickly and she asked me how my classes have been.
Months ago, a hot summer evening, walking home to my apartment with takeout in my hand, it was my first summer living on my own, spending my days back and forth between my apartment and the research lab I started volunteering in, fumbling with pipettes and rows of bright purple solutions in small tubes. Back in the early stages of reopening since the start of the pandemic, back when it still felt bashful and tentative to take off your mask to eat. Back when I lived on an island, living within the four walls of my room, that evening I had come back from lab tired and heavy from a one-hour-turned-three-hour procedure, my roommate having gone out with her friends to go eat at a Mediterranean restaurant several blocks down, and...I wanted to take myself out to dinner. Through the warm, growing darkness of evening as I made the walk back home, I saw a sign taped to the window, printer paper and Helvetica, “Now hiring Korean-speaking servers! No experience necessary!”
Soon there is little room for thought. A flurry of dishes, moving in and out of the controlled chaos of the kitchen, carrying trays with steaming, hissing hot stone bowls of angry red stews, steaming up in a passionate plume that fogged my glasses when I first started there.
“You’d like one kimchi?”
“Yes, one kimchi.”
I cocked an eyebrow.
“Like just one piece of kimchi?”
He caught my drift. He laughed in mild embarrassment.
“Sorry, I meant one portion, thanks”
A girl who hid the check suddenly brought it out in a flourish for me to take before her boyfriend could take it, her smile bright as well as mine in return. I laughed quietly as I went to swipe her card. On reflection that night when I came back to my apartment, I couldn’t remember a period in my life where I smiled as much as I do now.
The microscope imaging room, the shuttering of the microscope changing lenses, thin glass slides on the stage illuminated in colored light, the hum of the computer, blue light glow, sitting in the darkness, red plastic box in my lap, rows of glass slides tinkling as I shifted in my seat.
"Yeah, we're just getting the lay of the land at the moment," she told me over the hum of the microscope as she shifted the slide around the stage.
Exploring regions of the brain, genuine feeling of exploration, colored stains of green, red, and blue, the elegant curves of the hippocampus stretching across the screen, paused for a picture.
Several months ago, I blink from under the covers, tentative sunlight trickling through the blinds. A clock blinking the time in white digits on my desk. My breath, steady and rhythmic. The old tension of inertia seizing my limbs, setting in like paralysis.
That moment of alchemy, the mixing of equal parts anxiety and anticipation, where you feel electric as a live wire, the shedding of what is heavy and old, where you feel an inner tether dissolving and you’re breathing, maybe for the first time in your life. You feel the fear, but “the feeling’s fine to betray,” phone in my hand like a pacifier, playing Iron and Wine.
Bare feet touch the carpet, hands wrapped around the cord to pull up the blinds to the shock of a clear blue sky. I see the smokestacks in the horizon of the cityscape sprawling around me, clouds of white idly curling into the sky. Cars run past under the street below, families milling around on the street corner, children holding pizza smushed in the folds of paper plates, crowds roaming languorously from white tent to white tent stretching along the length of the street, rainbow displays of oil paintings, windblown glass, antique clocks. I grab my jacket and the backs of my worn tennis shoes.
The restaurant is quiet, and my coworkers and I mill around behind the counter bored out of our minds, eating stroopwaffles, shooting the shit and talking about school. A flurry of texts and emojis of support after a dance performance and the warmth I felt walking back home at night seeing my phone light up.
Eating rice cakes in between taking orders, my boss, an older Korean lady with round glasses and a brightness to her eye (her husband is the chef), she sat on the stool and talked to me about her daughter who’s visiting from Chicago, how she went to this coffee shop down the street this morning and wondered if I’ve ever been there.
“You dance?” I nod. “Show me! Do something!”
Dancing at the back of the restaurant, my coworker collapsing in giggles as my boss tried to follow along. My coworker leaning over the counter showing my boss a video of the performance on her phone.
My boss seeing me push up my large, plastic frames that never sat well on the bridge of my nose, “Have you ever thought about getting contacts?”
“Mind over matter, it’s mind over matter, Jackie,” he laughed, leaning over the counter, the corner of his mouth upturned in amusement. The soft, smooth plastic of my new contacts slid off the tip of my index finger to land on the table again, and I swore, blinking at the ceiling. He scooped it up. “You’re doing great!” he said brightly, cleaning the lens with more contact solution. Later he would tell me how I picked it up much faster than others did. That explained the excitement and amiability I was feeling from the doctor even as I poked and prodded at the whites of my eyes with painstaking inefficiency. Even as my eyes watered in discomfort, the whole endeavor was softened with the feeling of having someone believe in me so fully.
I took a deep breath, resting for a minute at the side of my inner oasis. I can do this. Round three.
Walking into the chill morning air of autumn, I made my way down the decrepit stone steps from the house into the wooded courtyard and was met with the crystal acuity I could make the outlines of individual leaves and branches of the wooded backends of the property. The world in all its detail, clear-eyed, unfiltered, straight from the source.
“The good and bad mind both exist inside you. The goal isn’t to kill the bad mind; it’s to wrap it in a hug,” she told me. She gave me a knowing look. I felt my smile grow under my mask. Just the day before I had gone to Korean church upon my boss’s coercion, and as nice as the service was, the warm community, the music the praise band and church choir gave, the lunch they held for college students and the girl that insisted I be first in line, I had the strange feeling that I wouldn’t meet God in church. No, I met God in conversations over the linoleum countertops in lulls between lunch hours, when I saw the way faith can become inner strength, when I saw the reason for the brightness in her eye.
A different week, it was the end of my shift on a Saturday night. Just a few hours ago, I called my boss to call in sick, feeling nauseous. The sun was harsh as I stood behind the glass door of the science building, my phone sticking unpleasantly to my cheek. My nausea more likely from anxiety than food poisoning. The procedure I was running that morning at the lab took longer than it should have, and anxiety grew with my fatigue as well as shame for struggling with something that should be easy. My boss hmm-ed and hummed on the line. “This isn’t good, we don’t have anyone else working tonight. Come anyway! I’ll see you soon!” Click.
The shift came and went in a blur. By then, I had gotten used to bearing the internal stress that comes with being thrown in a high-pressure environment. As I bore my anxiety and collected myself to do what was to be done, it was already the end of my shift. As I took off my apron and reached over to put on my coat, she grabbed my arm and set me down on the stool before leaning over to grab a small plastic box. Before I could ask what she was doing, she asked me if I had eaten anything weird, pressed a thumb to the center of my hand, and massaged the back of my shoulders. With efficiency, she wrapped my middle finger with a white thread. When I understood what she was doing, a softness came over me in surprise. She pricked my finger. She gasped, “So dark! Must have been bad!” With equal efficiency, she cleaned my finger and put away the needle and thread. Gingerly, I rubbed my thumb over the center of my palm as I stared. “My dad used to do that for me,” I started, “When I was nine.” I hesitated. “It’s been a long time since someone’s done that for me.”
She didn’t seem to think much of it. She sent me home with instructions to eat small meals and to drink warm water before bed.
The end of a long shift, walking into the street, takeout in hand, bell tinkling behind me, sky in warm cotton candy pinks and tangerine. My heart is bright and warm, my flushed skin no longer fazed by the cold. The world looked different at the end of these shifts, the mill of people and the round street lights full and luminous as stars. Again, some tension in me had unwound and I could feel my heart beating, but this time, it wasn’t the comfort of being cocooned and shielded from the world. As I sat on a bench to relax and let the sweet evening air replenish my tired limbs, I could feel myself taking on flesh and bone, and I felt as bright as the sun.