today i walked with my mom to the grocery store two blocks from my sister’s chinese school that used to be mine and took pictures of the water stained tile like i was someone that did photoshoots in this supermarket, voyeurs to an identity i’ve constructed, pretty and seeping a kind of ill-fittingly into my skin like the grease that sits atop hot pot cooling, speaking back your face in fractures rippled through and then, there i mopped up the corpse of my childhood self, already six weeks dead because i’d been too busy last week and also the week before and before i knew it six weeks had passed—or maybe six years, not too sure— and i’d shed the body who hated that filthy water stained tile and the supply closet that spilled out of the wall in the dairy aisle and the product boxes stacked into the sky in the space above 2.29 ngo om (rice paddy herb) with the words product of the usa circled on the tag, because in the kitchen appliances section the ceramic soup spoons are kept in cut up shopping baskets red like beginning, still rough around the edges and some six winters ago i was dragged through these halls in a shopping cart, the kind that eats a quarter when you steal it and spits it back out when returned, though it does forget sometimes, and in that time i’d complained in a drum drowned out by the rolling of wheels against the tiles in heavy vibrations, disjointed and boneless like the beef shabu shabu swelling out of styrofoam for 9.99, and i never want to come back, i’d thought to myself, and yet here i am, six weeks or six years later, trying to choose between five different brands of tomato-flavored hot pot soup base while my mom scrutinizes the list of ingredients the way she looks at me sometimes when i’ve done something she doesn’t like and somehow i know i’ll be here next week, and the week after, to lift the grocery bags into the car, three on one arm, the remains of my childhood self tidied into a bucket and embalmed in the back of that supply closet in the dairy aisle, dead.