Little White Pills
I used to visit the bougie suburbs of Scoul to see you. Your neighborhood was the home
of Gangnam Style, nightclubs, and the settings of those disgusting romance dramas we used to
watch, where the main character always happened to be the heir of a chaebol. Your high-rise
penthouse overlooked the sprawling, piercing orange and red lights of the capital, and the visibly
polluted Han River. Your childhood home slightly resembled my second-floor two-bedroom
apartment in New Jersey-but we were still worlds apart. Though the Hudson River was equally
polluted and high-rise buildings held hands with the suffocating light pollution soaring into the
skies nearby, I lived near the green lady clutching a lamp and a book instead of a giant radio
tower. I used to imagine you two living in one of those high-rise buildings just across the river,
instead of across an ocean. A thirty-minute drive away, instead of a fourteen-hour flight.
We spent weeks at your house every summer, back when I couldn't reach the faucet in the
tall, cracked marble sink of your gaudy bathroom, back when you had to grab my waist and lift
me so I could wash my hands, back when I struggled to ride a skateboard, and so you had to
nurse me when I inevitably fell and scraped my knee, back when you used to push my float tube
out to the beach much further than you were supposed to, even past the orange buoy lines,
drowning my mother in panic and paranoia.
You and your sister were seven and nine years older than me, a younger brother and older
sister duo, aged 14 and 16, dressed alike: black band t-shirts, ripped black jeans, black eyeliner,
and tattoos of blatantly gothic symbols: skulls, bats, and black roses in bloom. Two rich kids
wearing clothes that my high-nosed mother would look down on maybe even spit on-as
low-class and inferior. It was just one more reason to adore you.
I remember all the little white bars you two popped, how mystical and colorful your smile
suddenly became, your eyes never settling into the same shade of dilated dark hazel. The
massive TV screen spouting bright, inorganic lights around the walls of your private theater,
distorting your faces. The dramas were always about young, attractive, and wealthy heirs to
fortunes with Snow White skin, slim, high noses, and big eyes, finding love and happiness. Like
mirrors, your faces reflected the glare of stories you would never live up to, and of expectations
in a society constantly romanticizing the lives of those in gilded cages.
We'd watch episode after episode, until you flashed your teeth and curved your lips at us
in that ridiculous way Hannah and I would always giggle at, and stumbled around as if the room
was the Loop-the-Loop we'd insist to ride at carnivals. Under the spinning spell, you could
barely even pronounce our names: Juno and Hannah became Juju and Hanny- nicknames that I
loved. Nicknames that I now hate. Xanax was their name, you told me. I laughed when I first
heard it. These mini rectangular bars, with a much funnier name than my vitamins, made my
edgy, lonely cousins happier and relaxed; how could they be bad?
I know your dad was always away on business, and your mom traveled overseas to save
struggling children who weren't her own. I know you only had each other, and Happy, your Shih
Tzu. Did those little white pills fill in all those gaps?
She was only 21, I know. I'm sorry I wasn't able to come to Seoul for the funeral -- time
off is a luxury we middle-class people don't have.
It was never the same without her. You came closer physically, when, like I had always
wished for, you moved into your new apartment in those high-rise buildings across the Hudson,
but you felt farther away -- chasing emptiness, oblivion, forgetting the image of her in that
flipped car lit on fire, an escape from a story written a thousand times. Are you free now?
The Leather Tag
It's probably the earliest memory I have in Korea. I was nine, Hannah was seven, you
were sixteen, and your sister, who was about to leave for college, was eighteen. We wanted to do
something special-the four of us together, one last time. Of course, the two of you agreed to
Hannah's idea of making basic matching beaded bracelets instead of my much cooler idea of
drawing matching tattoos on our faces in Sharpie.
Out of all our bracelets, the one your sister left with that day was the most memorable.
When Hannah found a little brown leather tag at the bottom of the box containing beads of every
color mirroring the pollution of the cars and roads below, she exclaimed "You need to have this,
it's special," before spinning it tightly, measuring it, and cutting it short to the end, handing it to
her oldest cousin, sealing her fate.
Your sister would always rub the tag with her thumb and index finger. I don't know why
she loved the bracelet so much, but in the three years from then until her death, I've never seen it
wear down or chafe, no matter how much she rubbed at its leather end. When she died, you wore
that bracelet like a reminder, wrapping that guilt permanently around your wrist. I'll always
remember how when you went back on those evil white bars, you would shake that guilt off of
your hand, revealing the scars and bruises of your sober mind, a blank, vacant smile on your
face. You would even forget where the bracelet had come from, why you had it. You called it
girly, and made fun of it. I never liked being around you when you were like this. I didn't like
seeing you disgrace the memory of your sister, of my cousin. I didn't like seeing you degrade
something so precious to her, a gift from my sister to yours.
When you came back to me, I knew you were ashamed of taking off that bracelet. As if
carrying that burden was some sort of duty you had temporarily relieved yourself of. As if it was
your 19-year-old self's job to live out the memory of your sister in any way possible. You would
resolve to keep that bracelet safe and cherished. But the cravings would always come back, the
leather tag once again flung off.
The Lunch Tray
I don't know what it was that got you to stop taking those pills, maybe the shame of
trying to forget and escape finally got to you, but you should've gotten real help. You knew
better, you knew that the concoction of anxiety, loss of appetite, psychosis, and seizures could
kill you. Was that the reason why?
I clearly remember my mother's ashen face when she got that call from Mount Sinai
Hospital. I still remember her frantic evasion of all traffic, somehow arriving there, and parking,
in under thirty minutes. I remember how you looked after you "recovered." I didn't realize how
thin you had gotten, the shade of purple those puffy eyebags became, how empty and glassy your
eyes had grown, or how you started hallucinating when the withdrawal sunk its teeth into your
mind. I didn't realize how clammy and cold your hands had become. The sweat beginning to
chafe your sister's bracelet, the dark brown shade darkening and dilating.
I remember bringing you the lunch tray from the cafeteria, with the apple, the ham and
Swiss sandwich, and the blue raspberry Powerade you loved. I remember seeing my futile
attempts to help go to waste as you refused to eat. I remember how tightly you gripped the lunch
tray when the muscle spasms, the discomfort, the pain, and the cravings for "just one more pill
doc please." became too much. I remember how all color drained from your knuckles, grabbing
the lunch tray. You had nothing else to hold on to. You could barely lift up your neck to blow on
the spirometer but somehow you managed to bend the plastic tray with just your fists. You had
nothing else to distract yourself from the physical pain and haunting memories.
My mother would always romanticize the concept of forever, of permanence. She would
always tell Hannah and me that out of everyone in the world, a sibling is lifelong and eternal, and
that nothing should get in the way of our bond. Then I saw your story and realized how
temporary people can be. How those who are taken for granted as permanent, those who promise
to stay, can be gone instantly. I don't believe anybody is in my life to stay, I don't believe
people's words that they will be there for me no matter what, because that's simply not in our
control. What is in our control is how we treat the memories of those we've lost.