I had to reschedule a final that fell on my fourth anniversary, and I felt guilty because I had to construct a family emergency. The same thing went for the fifth anniversary in my junior year. And my senior year sixth anniversary.

But at least I graduated after that anniversary. I might have had zero pride, but I had a degree in something I loved.

I didn’t bother to look for a job like all of my classmates. There weren’t any good animation houses in Rhode Island, and I knew I couldn’t leave the state. So it was the total opposite of my senior year at Mount Holyoke.

Instead of going out into the real world, I spent the following year animating the project I eventually used to get me into RhIDS’s graduate Experimental Animation program. No more slice-of-life for me. This project was the beginning of a much more ambitious narrative about all the epic ancestral and world history that went into my father and mother meeting in Korea and falling in love.

I could only imagine what my mother would scream and hand sign if she knew about me using her and dad’s love origin story to get into grad school for a degree in experimental art. She still wasn’t talking to me.

I’d managed to buy a burner phone a couple of years ago when the day guard had stopped at a gas station on the way back from Young Souls. I’d slipped out of the car, telling him I needed tampons as I ran into the station’s store. Luckily, he hadn’t followed me.

I’d been calling Mom on that phone for every Mother’s Day and birthday ever since. But she never answered. These days, I only ever heard my mother’s voice saying one thing: “Hello! This is Gyeong Kingston. I’m sorry you missed me. Leave a message, and I promise to call you back.”

But she never kept her promise. At least, not to me.

“Aw, she’ll come around one of these days,” Byron assured me after I called to tell him I got into the MFA program at RhIDS. I’d also made a habit of talking to Byron during my visits to the library near my house. Out behind the building where the day guard couldn’t see me.

It often felt like a hostage exchange. I gave Byron information about me which he reported back to mom. And she gave him information about her that he reported back to me.

“She made some progress with dad,” Byron reported between Mother’s Day and my seventh anniversary. “She says they’ve been talking about him retiring. Maybe even moving back to the East Coast.”