It was a difficult trip, one in which shopkeepers ignored me and he happened to speak up for me. This evolutionary adaptation came easily to both of us, yet troubled only me. We argued about whether it was safe to drink the tap water or if there were pickpockets on public transportation. We fucked on every flat surface available to us, including the vertical ones—bathed in equatorial sweat and pheromones, slick as babies. It was our anniversary. Still I worried I was earmarking myself for extinction. Our final evening, we broke a wicker lawn chair and threw it in the hotel pool. Despite his indifference, I never stopped brushing my teeth with bottled water.

So, what a relief it is to be home, where the heart is: to fit myself in the indentation of my favorite couch and rest. I watch my boyfriend dig through his pockets. After a moment, the hand he opens is full of coins, which react to his sweat with the categorical stink of blood. The things we’ve been through with those coins! Haggling and tipping and buying tiny, exquisite llamas. In the hither and thither, I hardly thought about my missed period.

Have any Sacagawea dollars? he asks. These might be able to pass. Slip some in with your real money and see if a cashier even notices.

He isn’t joking. It’s the same old animus carried in my chest, congenital. He’s not a bad person, and I’m not stupid. What slaughters me is my own inertia. Before he and I lived together, I once sat in the self-same indentation of my couch for three days straight, just to give it a try. The pressure sores could’ve been mistaken for syphilis—and this, I knew, too, with intimacy. A rushed timeline is typical for couples in this city. Such an expensive city indeed. Yet he’s the only boyfriend with whom I’ve ever cohabitated, simply because I wanted a witness. I wanted to be, unlike the last time I shared a roof with those who loved me—my parents—beheld rather than beholden. To exist and to owe nothing, except to myself.

Now, I look at my phone once more since ordering the rideshare at the airport. My period tracking app says: welcome to the follicular phase! As with all complications in life, if I ignore it, surely this will go away. My boyfriend lets me fall asleep on the couch, where I ring in the New Year. I appreciate him so very much.

_____

In my earliest memories of wrongdoing, I’m six years old, stealing laundry quarters to spend on the vending machines at school. I was less interested in making than I was in unmaking the mistakes, even back then. What I sought was perfection. The vending machines carried winsome little trinkets like glitter pens and floral pattern notebooks—yet I became obsessed with the erasers, which shot out in plastic capsules I could bend with my fingertips. Erasers smelling of mantou, but shaped like Americana itself: cars, baseballs, teddy bears.

The past has a way of throttling the present. As an adult, I work in quality assurance at a mobile game developer: assuring quality, double-checking everything, endorsing most everything. Because my colleagues are highly skilled, their code surpasses muster—passing with flying colors, often, and the barest feedback from me. They are the smartphone; I am the microwave testing. The crunch of a fat car tire. Already, there are two new projects on my desk, both on which hinge the promotion I’ve been promised since I joined the company. According to my immigrant parents, stress is good for you. If you’ve chosen wisely, if your career is lucrative, the stress ends in early retirement. My gum line is receding due to stress.

In Chinese tradition, a gummy smile indicates poor fortunes and overwhelming carnal and material desires. At our semiannual cleaning, my dentist tells me I brush too hard. She rolls her eyes when I mention my vacation and how I brushed with bottled water.

Fluoride is good for you, she says. Besides, a couple amoebas never killed anyone.

I’m in a hurry, late for work. I hide my uvula away, pondering what’s good for me. Pondering what’s bad. The dental office elevator shuts on views of a slapdash skyline, renowned in this city due to slow development and shade and shadow restrictions—taking me past the lobby, past the underground garage, straight into the earth’s core, it seems, while I drop to my haunches, watching this box of mirrors reflect my own vertigo back at me. I reach out and touch her. She’s crunching what’s left of the cleaning, the cherry fluoride paste, between my molars.

No, it wasn’t long before Baba noticed the missing quarters. He flung the erasers in my face. Beat me with his peeling leather belt. Can we wash our clothes with these? Pay the rent? I cried myself to sleep, and Mama cried with me. She was a cashier at a Chinese fast-food restaurant with an infamously cute black-and-white mascot. Big competition brewed across from her in the food court, exported straight from Taiwan. The next day, she came home with a drink like dirty pond water, tadpole eggs floating at the very bottom. Tasting of, if not succor, then something close enough. Try this. No, slowly. Just one. Careful to chew.

The elevator opens as a train pitches through the station. Warm air shunts itself down the tunnel: what’s static made vital again in a faceful of wind.

I board. My period tracking app says: welcome to ovulation! what are your fertility goals this week? Disembark. The transit exit, a slingshot to the sky. I follow streets I could follow in my dreams to my office. My fertility goals have been the same since I was nine years old and I started my period for the first time: an anomaly due in part, certainly, to America and its abundances. They didn’t belong to us, but they infected us nonetheless. By then, Mama and I had grown to speak different languages. We didn’t warn each other. Instead, a week’s worth of underwear, buried in the back corner of the field at school, nourishing the pill bugs as they decomposed blood and fiber—they bleed blue themselves. Have you ever stepped on a pill bug?

Sometimes I shut my eyes before bed, and all I see are tiny glowing squares. The clack, clack, clack of a keyboard optimized for ergonomics. A year gone by. Ten.

I stop and vomit into a public trash can. The cherry fluoride paste like sandpaper to the sluice of my breakfast. A llama stands in the middle of downtown, holding up traffic.

I am the microwave. Press start. Wait for zap.

_____

The jet lag flakes off little by little, to be replaced by new skin. It’s a brand-new year.

For reasons I’ve wholly forgotten, my boyfriend leaves town once more. Life is short. What carries him plumb across the country is either a work conference or a ’90s revival music festival. The marine layer is heavy today, and I offer to drive him to the airport even though I haven’t been feeling well. In this fog, I am feeling clearer-headed than ever before. We are the same as everyone else on the road: together in traffic by accident, doing our best not to cause accidents. It turns out his parents are celebrating their thirtieth anniversary. I was not invited. They’re likable people, if you can like, or trust, people who demand to know everything about you, to then more fully reject you.

Have fun, I say.

You look awful, my boyfriend says.

He cannot tell a lie, white or otherwise. He plays devil’s advocate with incredible gusto. We are of the age now where acceptance begets love rather than vice versa. Once, sheepishly, he shared a hypothesis that the average Asian girl is cuter than the average white girl. Picture it, he said. Your barista. Any stranger landed fresh off the boat. But have you ever noticed? White women are the great beauties.

And in fact, over the past few days, I seem to have swelled and shrunk in alternately unflattering places. It’s either cancer or an allergic reaction. I drive home bent over the steering wheel, eyeing the foreign coins heaped in my cup holder. Out on the sidewalk, whim-struck, I try slotting them into a parking meter. My boyfriend was right. They pass.

As soon as I’m alone inside the apartment, I feel that anything can happen. I draw a bath. Crank the whale music that soothes me, until I realize it’s probably mother whales being separated from their baby calves or something. I cried and cried watching that documentary, asking myself from the indentation in my couch how they could bear the immensity of the ocean.

The bathwater is hot enough to steam the makeup off my eyelashes. Limb by limb, I submerge myself. I’ve always had difficult periods, but Mama was attuned to when I suffered more. She would fill a bladder with boiling water, sleeve it in knitting, and then push into my abdomen, hard, as if wanting to puncture me. Wanting to staunch the bleeding. By the time I suffered most, she stopped noticing.

The pain intensifies. I sit up, creating little rivulets that crash over the lip of the tub and onto the linoleum. After I finished high school, Mama left Baba and moved back to China to retire. It’s impossible to reconcile the blank-faced woman who calls on my birthday with the one who used to wait outside my bathroom door.

After an hour of agony, I lay the egg—yes, egg. It slides out of me and knocks against the bottom of the tub without cracking. I touch it wonderingly, bathwater cooling around my shoulders. Here is something that is mine and mine alone, to shape into my dear shadow if I so choose. I will never leave it.

_____

My white boyfriend should be the least remarkable thing about me, but I am sorely unremarkable. Together, we make a conspicuous pair—or not, depending on which corner of the internet you ask. In a tale as old as time, it’s whenever he’s in the bathroom that people rush and approach me. Where are you from? Mine is the kind of face that invites it.

Shangri-La, I might reply offhandedly. Or, singsong: the dark side of the moon. Or, deadpan: Where am I from? I don’t know where I am right now.

Whatever the answer, there resides no pain or sadness. My egg is the size of an ostrich egg and very, very white. In this new world order, I who have only ever come up short feel a silky, hormonal satisfaction at a job well done. The human body is incredible, and the precarity of motherhood, surmountable. Resting there on the couch, I can’t fathom having produced something so perfect. So profound. The mere act of draining the bathtub, of watching the blood and scum swirl, its own baptismal reckoning.

Truthfully, my fertility goals have been fixed for some time now. I never knew why I made myself beautiful, or for whom, but it seemed important to try. Because the boys who fucked me begged me, I bought my own birth control pills off the internet. I was desperate for love. Once, there was even an abortion. All this to tempt, and then thwart, the natural order of things. Despite precaution after precaution: life, prevailing!

At first, at a loss for the duties of motherhood, I cleaned the entire apartment from top to bottom. I cooked myself a delicious, vegan eggplant soup. While flossing, I held my dentist in my mind’s eye: thumbs up, approving. To care for myself, I’m coming to realize, is what’s best for my egg by extension—eggstension? In the indentation of my couch, among beige throw pillows, I am a nesting doll, with my egg perched up on the center of my lap like an infant.

In this life, you will never not be warm, I say.

For a brief instant, I contemplate drawing on a smiley face with Sharpie.

I haven’t slept for days, for fear of missing—something. A hatching. The critical period of imprinting. There is, within me, a deep wellspring of desire to do well and share body heat. Normally, I would’ve spent my weekend scrolling through various social media apps. Everyone is more successful than me, it seems. This weekend, when Baba calls and tells me so, I am calm.

Only mothers have domain over the future, I say. They’ve given birth to it.

Who told you to act this way? he demands. Was it that white boy?

Baba lives quite far away, though not across the ocean—not in China. Happy New Year! I say. Then, experimentally, I hang up on him.

_____

Monday rolls around, and I leave the apartment dressed in as elaborate an outfit as ever, in this city without seasons. My pockets are full of foreign coins. I wear a baseball hat and beanie concoction, with my egg inside the baseball hat for security, doubly wrapped in my beanie for warmth. This is not precarious at all. It appears the top of my head is flatter than I thought. I am now the tallest woman in our open floor plan office, towering over my computer monitor. No one looks at me askance, because, I’m realizing, no one looks at me.

In the morning, I join a stand-up meeting that becomes derailed by my manager reviewing breaking update mobile game changes ahead of another meeting. I hike my pants up and sit down, jingling. As usual, without finesse, he name-drops his past job at a social media app linked to the destruction of democracy.

Finalize the front end, my manager says. When I was at Company X—, every view was tested more than twice before it was coded.

The way he moves through the world is intoxicating, like he is at any point primed to be sucked off or to have his throat slit. Because he’s white, he was hired for his communication skills. Everyone on our sprint team is Chinese or Indian, underpaid in comparison, though not underpaid in general. He often confuses me, the Chinese-American, with the only other woman on our team, a Chinese national. There is one Black woman upstairs in marketing. A rock star, corporate agrees, before putting her on all the recruiting materials.

My mind wanders. Under the murky auspices of unlimited vacation, it may be a full calendar year before my manager consents to another limited one. I picture myself, a code monkey: with big-warm-fuzzy-secret heart. During lunch, I step out to call my dentist. Because she has an air purifier in her office, I find her very trustworthy.

A couple amoebas never killed anyone? Are you sure?

How should I know? she says. I’m a dentist, not a doctor.

I return to my desk. For the next half hour, my output is feverish—my egg, like a reverse yoni egg, powering me from the outside in. But it’s because I cheated on the typing skills tests in school that I have to chicken peck my code. My manager looks over, igniting in me a quick shame.

The wife just called. My fucking kid got stung by a wasp. If only we had on-site daycare, like at Company X—!

I relax. Nod compassionately. Childcare is flummoxing, and not outside my realm of possibility anymore. All day long, I’ve been sitting on a secret—or, the secret has been sitting on me. Shortly after my manager heads out, I follow.

I don’t have a destination in mind until I’m underground, reloading my transit card with foreign coins. Freedom in this city, I muse, is an empty bladder and overflowing transit card. Several stops later, I’m at a movie theater inside the mall, paying for arcade games with my coins. My boyfriend was right, my boyfriend was right. Should I try my luck buying popcorn from a real person? A stuffed toucan in the claw machine catches my attention—but I’m too clumsy, too lacking.

At some point, a teenager comes over to help. On his chin, a blond sprouting of whiskers, not unlike cactus spines. Ugly but quite benign.

You’re obsessed with that bird, he says.

Yes, I say.

I was watching you for a while, he says. You’re shit.

I don’t play a lot of games, I say.

No way, he says. You invented DDR.

It’s true, I say. Well, not the DDR part. I didn’t invent DDR. I work at a mobile game developer, but I—

Liar, he says. Stupid chink.

_____

Did I lie? I can’t remember. It may have been a Chinese guy I dated who said that thing about Asian girls and white women. He rattled off the names: Angelina Jolie, before she got old. If you go further back in history, Marilyn Monroe. If you go back to the beginning, Helen of Troy.

_____

Not everyone has a witness in life, but somewhere along the way, I’ve begun trying to convince my egg: you are mine, and I am yours. It isn’t by default or out of obligation that we choose each other. In any case, we’ll never be alone again. By midweek, I’ve developed a routine of sorts, talking to it with feather duster in hand or while coring apples for pie. After work, we attend happy hours together on my office rooftop, where I pour myself glass after glass of wine and drink until the edges of my vision become singed with light.

You seem different, my least favorite coworker says, squinting in the vicinity of my rather elaborate headpiece.

How’s your mother? the Chinese national on my team asks.

Since everyone I know has gotten married or moved away, my tolerance for vacant chitchat is now bankrupt. I suggest a quiet game of ping-pong. It’s the chicken or the egg: do I hate my coworkers because I hate my job, or do I hate my job because I hate my coworkers?

I plant my legs, tighten my core, and stiffen my neck. When the ping-pong ball flies my way, I brace myself, balancing. I swing from the hips.

Soon, the mall becomes my most favorite of haunts. As when I was a strange child and then a horny teenager, the amusements are practically endless. A holiday banner near the front entrance proclaims: cheers to making new memories this year and beyond! Sure enough, I get my eyebrows threaded standing up, since I can’t lie down without compromising my egg. I window-shop in department stores where a whole paycheck of mine isn’t enough to buy a felt fedora I covet. There are mothers and children everywhere, without fathers: in line at the bathroom, moseying across tiled walkways, resting on pleather upholstery. Today, I have a collision with a small blond girl in front of the mall directory.

What’s on your head? she asks.

I’m so surprised that all I can manage to say is, Nothing.

Liar, she says, but without malice.

Where are your parents? I ask.

My dad’s in Nebraska, she says, and doesn’t elaborate.

I feel a rush of protectiveness. To be honest, I say, so’s mine. Pretty much, you know. And my mom lives in China.

Do you play a lot of games? she asks. Can you help me with something?

I answer no and yes, in that order. It’s almost closing time. We glide in lockstep across the mall’s tiled walkways, wet still after the janitor’s last rounds. Our stride is brisk. As we slip-squeak in matching tennis shoes, I very nearly take her hand, this small blond girl’s, past the threading parlor, past the flagship department stores, past even the post office some developer had the foresight to install, to capture whatever consumer of forever stamps and designer blue jeans both—who says that malls are dying? (Not this one, not under my watch!) At the movie theater, it’s a romantic comedy that’s just let out, judging by the swoon in the air, by titters from the stream of audience-goers. The girl and I sail through the lobby and into the arcade, which glows vacantly. Then I do take her hand, warm and birdlike in my own. But as we approach, I realize the stuffed toucan in the claw machine is gone.

_____

There was a moment, on sun-spattered vacation, where I was sure my boyfriend was going to propose. At one point in life, what I wanted was love more than anything, or maybe just the company of it. I thought I would accept his company. After all, who doesn’t dream of a hand to hold? Who doesn’t dream of seeing the world, and by necessity with their white boyfriend?

Since he’s due home by the end of the week, I start to get the idea that I must hurry and spend my remaining coins. I must consider how to explain my egg. On Friday morning, I shoot off an email pretending to be too sick to go to work. My pants no longer sag or jingle with excess weight. My egg keeps steady underground, on the careening ride to the mall. In my urgency, I’ve accidentally skipped breakfast. What I’ve been avoiding this whole time is the food court.

It’s on the top floor of the mall, flooded with sunlight, the last of the businesses to open their doors. I wait downstairs by a cluster of fancy jewelry stores. With nothing else to do, I empty my pockets and count.

When I was younger, of course I took the measure of love to be endurance. One parent endured the other, and then they came together, united in their expectations of me. An anniversary with my boyfriend was a big deal: he who loved love, and I who couldn’t find anyone else with whom to mark the passage of time. He’s not a bad person, and I’m not stupid—that is, who’s to say what we do and don’t deserve in this life?

Soon, the food court begins swelling with patrons. I make a fistful of coins and straighten. As I ride the escalator, I spy, relegated to the back corner, the infamously cute black-and-white mascot. There’s no line. It seems no one wants to dine there anymore.

If things were different, it might be Mama behind the cash register still, marveling at Chinese food made sickly sweet, Chinese food gone global. A meal was a meal was a meal. She often risked her job to bring leftovers home. The fixation on food and culture is universal—by now, maybe superficial. Here we are, attempting to divine higher meaning out of the calories we use to nourish ourselves. Here we all are.

When I approach, the cashier looks at me expectantly. I inquire about the fortune cookies. They can be purchased in a pack of eight for $1.50. I place my coins on the countertop.

These aren’t real, she says.

They’re not? I ask stupidly.

No, she says. You’re lying to yourself.

It’s true that being here reminds me of the hours spent waiting for Mama to finish her shifts. How badly I missed something that never existed, to be separate from my strangeness. Flustered, I wheel out of the food court and back down the escalator. I step into a jewelry store on the bottom level. The sparkly wares, swiftly blinding.

It was on vacation, among rolling grape fields, that my boyfriend said he had to go to the bathroom. He kept adjusting something small and boxy in his front pants pocket. We’d endured one year together, hadn’t we? Still I paced nervously. I needed another drink. The man in shined shoes eyed me as if he couldn’t remember filling my glass ten minutes ago.

Where are you from? he asked. We don’t serve Chinese. You’re not capable of appreciating the wines.

At that moment, my boyfriend reappeared. Again, there was the maladaptive loss of my voice. I don’t know what else would’ve happened. He grabbed my hand, and I trailed him out the door like a silly dodo bird. The dear-sweet-stupid man.

_____

Not long beforehand, there was one other milestone. I almost forgot. We’ve entered that stage of life now where they crop up quickly, like multicellular organisms.

Chinese food is coming up in the world, what with all the chili oil drizzled pinkie-up, all the craft cocktails garnished with clothespins and umbrellas. I met my boyfriend’s parents for the first time at a restaurant I chose via two tags on my local review app: ethnic cuisine and trending nearby. It was fusion. Still I couldn’t bring myself to order the shrimp dumplings topped with gold leaf. I kept picturing my most recent trip to China, during which Mama invited me to the town where xiaolongbao had been invented and we ate frantically, one shop after another, trying to taste the difference between restaurants that had been rivals since the 1800s.

Hunger is gouging me. I turn on my heel now, out of the jewelry store. Paneled in glass, the mall writ large shines back heat, ads for apps, the dark underbelly of consumer desire itself. I could devour my own heart. Upstairs, slanted and ghostly, are the illuminated stalls and white blocked tables of the food court I fled. Under copious layers of hat, my scalp is sweating. I walk a bit farther, until the smell of grease dissipates and there’s just the hollow-humming atrium. A burbling fountain and, above me, a shattered view of the sky.

The heartland of America is her malls, where I played at the fountains as a child, plunging myself in up to the elbow for quarters. Where I spent them was still my secret. Every New Year, in the absence of other traditions, we made resolutions to then break them. Mama was to learn English, Baba to drink less. As for me? Someday, I hoped to get a little closer to the sublime: a version of myself that could be known in my entirety, wholeheartedly.

That night at the restaurant, it was vital to impress my boyfriend’s mother—in her frilliness, so unlike my own. I felt tremulous at the prospect of joining their family, one that would demand neither filial devotion nor productive diligence from me. Yet our conversation was stilted. Under lanterns that illuminated all four corners, she asked about my aspirations in life and seemed confused when I explained my job and how artificial intelligence would soon supplant me: an engineer, yes, but an assurer of quality rather than a developer. She asked about my parents, and I said they were still married—not technically untrue! On the subject of hobbies, I grew quiet, remembering how I once wandered the whole grid of my neighborhood, testing QR codes for every event poster and fundraiser, about half of which had expired. I was so desperately lonely before I met her son.

We sat and admired the dishes delivered to us: orange chicken, walnut shrimp, stir-fried rice and noodles. In a moment of whimsy, I’d flipped to the back of the menu and ordered braised pork feet. I’m not sure what compelled me, except maybe the same fatalistic impulse that prevents me from leaving the indentation in my couch sometimes. I wanted this dish to survive the leap from food to culture. I wanted it to mean something. It was the last to arrive, and no one touched it, though everyone stared at it. My boyfriend’s mother shook her head before dropping her fork with a loud clang.

Can I address the elephant in the room? she asked. Or do you eat their feet, too?

In my current, ravaged body, I am very tired. This mall and its fountain, a monument to the land of opportunity. I sigh. Reach up under layers of hat, stroking my egg. In the atrium to this heart, I kneel and pour what’s left of my foreign coins into the water.

_____

The truth, of course, is always more complicated. Mine is only another version of it. What she asked was: Is it my blessing you want? Well, is it?

_____

Later that evening, I pick my boyfriend up from the airport. He says, You know we missed you. He says, Your fucking manager wouldn’t let you work remotely for a week?

I’m wearing my usual mishmash of hats. All the way home, I feel the flit of his gaze, puzzling me over. He’s as attentive as the time I drank too much at my company holiday party and started getting emotional in the bathroom. It was the crippling weight of days, the sobriety I count on, by turns, to obscure me from myself. I don’t ever know who or where I’m from. In the car, my boyfriend stops just short of unbuckling his seat belt and swiveling around at me. I struggle to make small talk.

Thirty years, huh?

He shrugs. You know what they say. The years start coming, and they don’t stop—

I slam on the brakes.

At the red light, he reaches into his backpack. Proffers his souvenir gift. It’s a keychain in the shape of a single cowboy boot, or: Americana itself. He leans over and kisses me squarely on the mouth.

Listen, he says. It’s going to be an amazing year. Our best one yet.

I adjust the brim of my baseball hat, nodding.

His presence is a hangnail after our long week apart—this apartment we share, much too small for the both of us. To help me sleep, I’ve taken to bringing my beanie with me to bed. When the lights are off and my boyfriend reaches for me, I clamp a hand down atop my most precious headgear. Brace my core and squirm away.

What’s wrong? he asks, hurt. Yet in the silence, he soon begins snoring. I dig in the nightstand table and find the engagement ring.

It’s the nicest thing I’ll ever own. It’s beautiful. But if I can make a living being from my own meat, guard it, keep it warm—then I can do anything. I can be the father who goes to work. This time, also, I can be the mother who stays. I can do it all by myself, can’t I? I can do it by choice, by myself.

Gently, I unwrap my egg and admire it glowing white in the half-light. The spackled texture of its shell. Its curves, like that of a child’s bent knee. Even if everything else goes awry, I will have at least given life, in this life. And even though life will be harder? I would like for it to be a girl—a hatchling girl. I’m reminded of what my parents used to say to the other whenever one of them made me cry: You’re looking for bones in an egg. She’s not the daughter you want, but the daughter you have.

As far as bones in an egg, I think to myself, this is it. This is it.

_____

In the morning, the smell of my boyfriend’s uncharacteristic industriousness. I stretch, reaching for my egg. She’s not there.

Go lie down, he says, when I run into the kitchen. I love you, he says. Breakfast in bed incoming.

I’m too horrified to cry. I heave with my whole body. He doesn’t understand. He’s not a bad person, but me? What about me?

I think so.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838280&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#49694288)

1. **Vacation Reflections:** The narrator returns from a foreign trip with her white boyfriend, reflecting on shared experiences, intimacy, and minor anxieties, including her missed period.

2. **Cultural & Childhood Memory:** Childhood experiences with her parents—stealing quarters, obsessing over perfection, and her mother’s care—inform her adult perspective on responsibility and control.

3. **Work Life & Stress:** She works in quality assurance at a mobile game company, balancing career stress with expectations from immigrant parents, and reflecting on her body’s physical strain.

4. **Menstrual Cycle & Fertility:** Tracking her menstrual cycle, she focuses on fertility, linking her bodily experiences with autonomy, care, and self-realization.

5. **Relationship Dynamics:** Her relationship is intimate, supportive, and playful; she navigates love, cohabitation, and appreciation of her boyfriend’s presence while asserting independence.

6. **Symbolic Egg:** She produces a large, white egg, which becomes a metaphor for agency, creativity, fertility, and nurturing, central to her sense of identity and empowerment.

7. **Daily Routine & Freedom:** She integrates her egg into daily life, commuting, work, and leisure, finding autonomy and routine while interacting with the urban environment.

8. **Family & Cultural Memory:** Reflections on her parents, Chinese heritage, food, and childhood experiences influence her understanding of care, independence, and personal history.

9. **Self-Discovery & Autonomy:** The narrator negotiates between desire for love and self-sufficiency, emphasizing the ability to nurture and protect life on her own terms.

10. **Acceptance & Future Aspirations:** She contemplates motherhood, career, and identity, embracing responsibility, possibility, and the metaphorical egg as a source of agency, hope, and continuity.

If you want, I can also create an **ultra-condensed version in 3–4 sentences** capturing the emotional and symbolic arc.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838280&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#49694541)

1. I hate my race and crave white cock.

2. I hate my race and crave white cock.

3. I hate my race and crave white cock.

4. I hate my race and crave white cock.

5. I hate my race and crave white cock.

6. I hate my race and crave white cock.

7. I hate my race and crave white cock.

8. I hate my race and crave white cock.

9. I hate my race and crave white cock.

10. I hate my race and crave white cock.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838280&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#49694583)

The modern world is honestly too bizarre for words at times (read: at all times, hence my self-identification as a golden retriever who only communicates through woof-to-text performance art-centered platforms)

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838280&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#49694585)

I couldn't get it up for that.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838280&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#49694535)

Cute librarian next door vibes in this picture IMO if you're into AZN women, and honestly writing straight up erotic fiction is far more sane than most of what passes for "creativity" these days in a post-Tom Wolfe world, but then again Im gay and really like it here, so YMMV

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5838280&forum_id=2\u0026mark_id=4593694#49694598)