noted things

          I have a longer history with rooftops than I do with romance. I had an incapacitating phobia of heights for most of my early life, instilled by the hours my older sister would lock me out on the fire escape of our sixth-floor apartment the second our parents left for work. The fearful parts of me superficially dissipated the second I stole sips then gulps then glasses of manischewitz wine at a bar mitzvah when I was thirteen. This adolescent version of myself was obsessed with applying theories to situations; constructing absolutes and conducting field tests to determine if I had discovered a new truth. I now know that nothing is certain and everything has exceptions but even through an adult approach, it was admittedly more exciting to believe in the theories untested by harsh realities. One of my beliefs was that spirits flip us upside down, reversing our constitutions in the way our eyes cast an inversion illusion with our field of vision. Conservative Christian girls would habitually take off all of their clothes at house parties, the quietest classmates would escalate into the loudest drunks, seemingly stoic statues would sob shamelessly, and I would systematically shed my acrophobia and climb everything in sight whenever a drop of liquor touched my lips: trees, ladders, spiral staircases, formerly formidable fire escapes, and even the parkway sign hanging over FDR Drive; but mainly it was roofs.

         I think roofs are reserved to a specific place in the heart of any kid who’s grown up in New York City. We all have a repertoire of recollections drinking on rooftops underage and tanning with our friends and sneaking up to watch sunrises or steal sloppy kisses. With so much nihilism and noise and bustle and buildings and people and pressure at street-level, there’s nothing like climbing up to compress the intimidating infinities of the city and survey it all as sovereigns rather than subjects. My most frequently revisited reminiscences all occurred on rooftops; the time I blew out my candles after sneaking onto the roof of my high school with my closest friends to initiate sixteen, the time I threw a failed house party with a tepid keg in the bathtub because I was too poor for ice or air-conditioning so everyone but the best people left early and our survivor club drank warm beer all night before climbing up to the roof via fire escape to watch the sunrise together, the countless sleepovers I hosted on the roof of my suburban home with my best friend and the bong I made out of a honey bear bottle and how we would wake up every morning to my mom screaming at us to come back inside before we broke our necks, and the day I realized both the doors and windows to my humanities class were left unlocked so I returned with my little sister at night and we snuck out onto the Gothic revival roof of our university and shared a joint before hiding behind the conveniently thick turrets; desperately muffling each other’s giggles when campus security walked past but couldn’t ascertain the source of the smell.

         Even now, when I feel like I can’t breathe, there is a certain spot I seek where my shallow breaths swell deeper and my palpitating heart finally slows to a still. It’s not exactly a roof but it’s the closest I can get to carving out my own personal space on such unfamiliar turf. Korea is one hundredth the size of America, so the entire country is built upwards instead of out. The foundations of sprawling American shopping malls and civic centers would shake at the sight of the slender stories of their Korean equivalents, where even hospitals feel like apartments and I had to travel in between three floors during my last medical exam. I get overwhelmed by my inadequate Korean when I see skyscrapers with signs for ten to twenty businesses and I’m not sure where to begin or where to go or what it is I want or what my destination will look like when the elevator doors open because I’m unable to prefatorily peep through the glass like I can at ground-level. I doubt I’ll uncover an unlocked passageway to the rooftop of a commercial building that I can access whenever I come undone, so the turquoise bridge over the highway will have to do.

         Recently, the chronic thrumming of my heart has quieted from the minute you saw me wringing my hands and told me I had nothing to be anxious about. You’ve noticed I do everything too quickly; forever in a rush, never in the moment, and always holding my breath. You drag the stillness out of me; fighting years of indoctrinated inclinations by forcing me to pace myself instead of always running and never allowing the heels of my feet to remain rooted to the ground. I compared the second boy who broke my heart to “home” – the corner of my universe where I would sneak out of the house to smoke Marlboro Reds on my forbidden roof – but you’re not home at all. You’re impossibly foreign and hard to read, you’re all the rooftops I’m too rattled to reach while I settle for a low-lying overpass bridge.

         Since I met you, I hardly recognize myself. I have to bite my lip to keep from grinning when I walk down the street and I dance to Green Day while I wait for the traffic lights to change. I spend hours analyzing the texts you send me, trying to discern the slightest semblance of interest beneath your professional veneer and overthinking the intention behind every casual interaction. Has your life changed the way mine has after we met? Was that song about me? Did you wear that cologne specifically for me to notice? Do you wait two hours to text me back as to not seem overeager or is that just coincidence? Maybe the two hours is another theory of mine, but I’m sixteen again after liking someone for the first time in six years and I’m not sure what to do when your fingers brush against mine and I’m convinced you can hear the audible thump when my heart slips out of my sweaty hands.

         I wish I could see myself through your eyes; so tongue-tied and tattooed in a place where both traits are taboo. I wish you could see yourself through mine; how exceptionally patient you are, how you untangle the intended meaning from my mess of misused words to truly hear me instead of brushing off all the things I’m trying to say. I wish you knew how it feels whenever I find you in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar country, and you look up at me and smile in recognition. I wish you knew how it feels when you remind me to stay anchored and I’m unable to tell you that you’re the one who keeps me tethered to this place instead of drifting in the opposite direction. I wish you knew the way it feels when I run out and clamber up the steps to the overpass and breathe in, big and deep, at the top of the bright blue bridge until my temptation to turn into a tornado trifles away and I’m left at the eye of an abandoned storm; reminded once more that I’m just human.

         There’s a reverberation that resonates in my bones as herds of cars zoom past underfoot, a tell-tale sign that I’m only capable of feeling grounded when exceedingly elevated. There’s an anxiety that comes hand-in-hand with feeling this alive; an exhilaration that’s solely granted by climbing to a place where I am reduced to trembling. I’m fearful of falling, of losing my footing, but a part of me feels punch-drunk and empowered in full view of you; a feeling fortified by every admonition you provide whenever you’re fed up with the way I enter a room with my head hung low and a heart full of fear. Maybe one day I’ll get drunk enough to climb all the way up the highway sign like I used to; finally seeing you eye-to-eye at such great heights instead of settling for pedestrian bridges, but for now I feel like I’m gazing up at you from a distance that feels impossible to span and it’s simpler to resign myself to peering through dirty glass at street-level.

         I forgot how it feels to like someone; how irrepressibly giddy and intoxicated you feel despite your best efforts to fill in the cracks of your blooming heart with concrete. I forgot how all-encompassing it is; how you can’t sleep or think straight, how it’s the only thing that’s ever on your mind. I forgot how full of teen angst you become; the stuttering, the overthinking, the theorizing, the assuming, and all the potential possibilities playing out like a fifties film in your mind late at night. I’m consumed with how much I want to see your face, how much I want to know what you might like in a woman, how much I want to know if you’re thinking of me too. Do you feel like you’ll never stop reliving the second your eyes met mine? Do you smile the way I do when you text me? Do you put as much thought into perfecting your casual responses? Do you construct a list of things you want to tell me the day before we’re meant to meet?

         Anytime I like someone this much, it’s never ended well because my infatuation drowns out my partner’s reciprocal interest in overwhelming tidal waves. I’m no longer sixteen. In fact, I’m nearly twice the age of who I was when I relied on alcohol to feel brave and my heart to dictate my actions. I’ll relegate myself to remaining a distant poet, an internet cowboy, recording these confessions for the sole sake of my sanity and never uttering an unprofessional word to you; ensuring this part of me goes undiscovered because I can no longer attribute my impulsiveness to adolescence.

         All I want is to climb high enough to see the city beneath me instead of feeling so small, but I refuse to ascend to the point of melting my carefully-constructed wings and plummeting into the depths of an unsympathetic sea.

          Time is the strangest thing; or maybe its people who are the strange ones. We take on the fundamentally immeasurable and task ourselves to makes sense and schedules out of the impossible, measuring our worth and identities through the span of something that is nothing more than a construct – something less real than the bones that build up our bodies or the flesh that binds us all together. I still find it hard to believe that I’m already 27 or that my sister is so afraid of 30 or that my mom maintains that she’s lived her whole life at 60 or that moving to Korea has propelled me a full 14 hours ahead of my loved ones bound to their own time tables in America; that I am living one day ahead of them as though I exist in the future.

         I never thought these would be the circumstances that would bring me to this place that feels too unfamiliar to be the origins of my blood. I feel suspicious that so much of my identity is founded in this land and carved from these mountains – that maybe the joke my family would perpetuate when I misbehaved, the one about me being found in the snow on a cold day in February, that somehow that farce is the truth when the place I’m supposedly from feels this disconcertingly foreign. I guess some naïve part of me assumed I would feel an instinctive connection to my motherland; the same part of me that found my brother’s indifferent shrugging so shocking – like, how could you not be curious about where we’re from? – and the same part of me that wondered how my mother could stay away for so long after emigrating some 30 odd years ago, when I feel like I can hardly stay sane if I’m away from New York City any longer than my 2 year limit.

         I made a promise to her, as early as I can remember, that we would come back together. Her; too intimidated to travel to an entirely transformed land as anything but a tourist, reneging any claims to this country as a native, and me; foolishly assuming that my life would unfold according to this perfect plan in which I would be able to afford 2 first-class tickets to South Korea thanks to my fulfilling dream job and professional success. I’m here now, unemployed and uncertain, without her; unable to prevent myself from feeling like I’ve failed both the expectations of my mother and my past self. It was hard for me to let go of my her hand before getting on the plane; forever 7 instead of 27.

         My mother brings up our old promise casually, or maybe it was me, something we talk about often with my move so imminent and the time we have together so scarce. We both laugh about how immature my promise now seems in the face of the reality we’ve lived but we both know it isn’t remotely funny; more a chortle we share because it’s easier than crying. My mom can be annoying when she gets melodramatic about her supposed old age, more of a guilt trip for me to get my shit together than it is an acknowledgement of her literal lifespan. She always reverts to this self-pitying rant about how she’ll never be able to go on the trips I’ve avowed to her because she’ll be too old and feeble to walk anywhere when in actuality, she’s still young and sprightly and works on her feet seven days a week. Our conversations about Korea circle back to this constant contention that she won’t be able to fully experience anything if she visits because she’s “too old.”

         I never enjoy exchanges like this, however offhanded, because even the possibility of prematurely losing her is too much for me to ponder. I know I’m 27 and I know I technically have a stepfather and two older stepbrothers, in addition to my big sister and little brother, but I relegate myself to an orphan whenever I contemplate a life without my mother. So, I grasp her firmly by the hand and insist she lives until she’s 100 years old. I am unwavering, unsmiling, as my mother laughs openly in my face. She retorts that she has no interest in living that long; trapped in a decrepit body, unable to move at her whim, disheartened and deteriorating and waiting to die. I reply that even if she’s braindead, I’ll refuse to pull the plug and keep her on life support an extra 20 years if I have to; if only so I can continue to fall asleep beside her warm body and revert to being her baby girl on the days when adulthood gets to be too much.

         My grandfather is currently 85, 15 years away from the age of my mandate to my mother. I’m not sure if Koreans have a word for Parkinson’s Disease or if it’s just something else they refuse to acknowledge in the way they disregard depression, autism, and homosexuality. Regardless, I was unprepared for the version of the man I met when I got off the plane and first arrived at my grandpa’s home. I am incapable of conversing nonchalantly when my grandfather can hardly feed himself; to glimpse the intellectual who was once so respected now reduced to this helpless invalid in an adult diaper. I wipe the sleep dust from his eyes, mop up his mouth after every meal, hold a tissue to his nose and cajole him to blow three times, rinse his kimchi off in water and cut his food into bite-sized pieces the way you would for a child. My grandpa thankfully still has a healthy appetite and walks faster than I’m able to with my injury, but the hardest part is watching the light fade from his eyes when I try to engage in conversation and he clearly isn’t home.

         He’s the best in the mornings; bright and alert and cracking jokes mid-conversation. But every evening feels like the end of A.I. – a film I can never watch without sobbing from start to finish – where the main character is allotted just one day to spend with the mother he so fiercely loves and you’re left to wonder if 24 hours of happiness is worth the endless years of pain. I grow accustomed to the man my grandfather is when he first wakes up and find myself staring down at my hands when by mid-afternoon, my questions grow unanswered and he stares at me blankly no matter how many casual conversational cues I cast in his direction.

         He stills like stone, as if mesmerized by Medusa, as if he’s alone and I’m not there and I often grasp his hand that remains frozen from the action he had been doing minutes earlier; clutching a handful of pills or grabbing a spoon or holding the remote – his stiffened digits insistently clasping an invisible object from a task already completed. A ghost holding a ghost. And I just hold his hand, unfurl those fingers, and try not to cry when everyone tells me that this is him doing well, that this is healthy for 85.

         All I can say is that I love my mom enough to let her go.
         100 years is too selfish to coerce her into such a cursed promise.