Tag: Korea

        I meant to write this last night when our interaction left me heartbroken in ways I should have predicted. I’m not sure how many more times I can withstand all the times you break me down just to build me up again. I’ve already told you how my friends are my family, a love I expressed so sincerely that you called me an angel. I shook my head, vehemently, because I’ve never been described as someone remotely seraphic or even innocent before.

        “It’s not that I’m that good of a person,” I said, “It’s that they’re all that incredible.”

        I can’t believe how lucky I am to live with the love that I’ve found, to know that I am unconditionally understood when my own blood bullies me into believing I’m badly blemished. But you stare at me with this look in your eyes, like you can’t believe the love that you’ve found, and I never return your gaze or glance at the mirror behind you because I’m afraid to see what’s written on my face in response.

        Every time I’m convinced I know how you feel about me and choose to be braver to compensate for the courage you lack, or keep stifled with a self-control I can’t seem to access, you suddenly grow cold and speak to me in a way that makes me feel uncertain. I know you well enough to have moved past my former stage of insecurity, but I hate this awkward two-step you’ve caught me in when you know full-well I can’t dance. I take a couple steps forward, you take three steps back. I respond accordingly, after lengthy talks with myself to give you up, when you pull me closer until my resolve crumbles and I’m left relying on your grip to stand.

        My friends, who are forever rooting for me to find love, would hate you interminably for what you said the other day. They’re left in puzzled anticipation, inquiring daily, “So what happens next?”

        I shrug coyly, but the truth is that my response is a calculated silence because I don’t want them to stop rooting for you. I can’t come to a conclusion about whether the cold persona you revert to is a rare glimpse of the real you or if the man that observes me so intently is who you really are. I hesitantly opened up to you about the traumatic experience I had in the taxi when I was convinced the driver had bad intentions and I prayed with the entirety of my being for the heavens to alter my fate. My whole body trembled as I relived my ordeal and I was shocked to see you didn’t take me seriously at all. You assessed the situation too pragmatically, mansplaining that my instincts had misled me to believe in a bigger danger and advising that I avoid unsavory situations by heading home before dawn.

        Then you said, “You shouldn’t feel afraid – if you ever fall victim to unwarranted advances, all you have to do is pull up your sleeves to reveal your tattoos and scare them off.”

        My ears rang with your words for the rest of the day, well into the night, and echoed in the dawn of the following morning. I felt too numb to feel hurt, instead feeling like I had finally received the answer I was too afraid to seek. I’ve always wondered about your perception of me – you’re someone so wholesome and unblemished while I wear my heart and my scars and my stories on my sleeve for everyone to see. My family members insist that my ink is a revelation of my lack of self-love, that each new piece is a form of mutilation because I hate myself so much. I wondered if that’s how you view me too, especially when you asked if I don’t regret the fact that I’ll never see the skin beneath the ink in my lifetime again.

        The truth is, my tattoos are a form of armor, so I can’t disagree with the tactic you proposed. I’ve felt vulnerable for most of my life; objectified by the Korean practice of unfiltered criticism about my body, oversaturated with impossible standards perpetuated by glossy teen magazines, and subjected to offhanded comments by the men who’ve seen me naked – including one particularly cruel golden-eyed monster who publicly compared my flat, yellow planes to a pancake and put me off my favorite breakfast food until I realized “FUCK HIM” and ate a whole stack while half-drunk off whiskey and self-reclaimed power.

        I told you that every time I get a new piece, I feel as though I am sustaining this trajectory of self-empowerment. Each body part I so harshly criticized prior suddenly becomes beautiful when viewed in this new light; less flawed and more a vehicle lovingly adorned with art. You smiled and told me that in that case, I should never stop accumulating more pieces and I felt impossibly seen by someone who had told me just mere moments before that my skin was akin to a weapon.

        I told him what you said, partially unfiltered by painkillers and partially overwhelmed by the unending loop of repeating your callous words in my head. He listened in a way you never seem to, more receptive to my heartache than how your face visibly tightens when I share less than angelic confessions with you. He told me you must have been joking, especially when he witnessed the aftermath of my trauma in my trembling hands and took it upon himself to make sure I made it home safely every night following that incident.

        But I know you and I know you were sincere, that you shrugged off my fear as another way in which I was over-reacting or being hyper-sensitive; another trapping of the emotional woman. I stubbornly insisted, remembering how to speak in your absence, about how my fear wasn’t a joking matter nonetheless. I informed him about a terror he’s lucky enough to never experience; having been blessed with being born as a man. I spoke about how he’ll never know how it feels when all the hairs on every inch of your body is raised in high alert and your blood is screaming in your ears to get yourself the fuck out of there.

        I said, “Even if he was kidding, I don’t understand how anyone could see me shaking and decide that a joke is the appropriate way to respond.”

        I said, “Even if you think he was kidding, I don’t understand how anyone could interpret what he said as a joke when he followed up his statement with – Well, I know you so I understand your tattoos but anyone else would find them scary.”

        And even now, as I write this, I imagine how my friends would react to me falling for a person who could say something like that about me – someone so cherished and protected and fully seen by them, someone so flawlessly and fully beautiful in their eyes – How could I give my heart away to anyone who could look at me and possibly think otherwise?

        Then today, you traced your finger around the circle on my shoulder and I blushed as I had to explain the Neil Gaiman tattoo in which I had to look you in the eyes and call myself beautiful. I felt instantly vulnerable, as if my skin was unmarred and all my formidable ink had been washed away. I felt conflicted about how someone, who just days before had likened my tattoos to terrifying trenches, could instantly cross that divide to disarm me so carelessly.

        You spent the day asking about each piece in earnest, marking your progress across the map of my skin, dog-earing the pages of each story I shared with you as your eyes widened in rapt absorption. You confessed that since the day we met, you’ve had to fight the urge to ask me about each and every single one with a building curiosity that has now become impossible to suppress. I laughed and told you I have a novel written about each one and that a week would be insufficient to explain them all to you. Then we both paused, realizing that today marks exactly one week before I leave, and you said quietly: “Time goes by too quickly, doesn’t it?”

        You glanced down and saw my fists were balled when you brushed the part of my spine that’s still swollen with unresolved tension and said, almost to yourself: “I wish you weren’t in pain anymore,” almost your parting wish, almost a prayer, and I felt my heart tighten with that all-too-familiar ache that’s attributable only to you.

        You continued to press along my spine, taking inventory and asking if my swollen disc or my troublesome lower back hurt more. It became a game, “Which hurts more – your leg or your spine?” “Your right shoulder blade or your left herniated disc?” “Your back tattoo or your ruptured cyst?” “Your body or your heart?”

        How could I tell you that none of the physical ailments you handle in your hands compare to the ways in which you unwind me with your words?

        It’s so wrong how you hurt me so deeply, but I still can’t help but wish that you liked me every time the clock chimes 11:11.

        Every time I want you to care, you’re never there. But each time I lose my balance, you anticipate the fall before it happens.

        I reread everything I’ve written about you in an effort to better understand what you might be thinking, to elucidate if it’ll be a mistake to share with you how I’m feeling. I’ve uncovered an unmistakable pattern in which you draw closer when I’m full of light and laughing but whenever I make the mistake of showing you how much I’m struggling, you pull back and treat me with a kind of indifference I’m convinced couldn’t be disingenuous. I wish you would exhibit the kind of emotional concern you express over the state of my broken body; always reaching out instinctively when my weak leg buckles and I lose my footing. But you habitually retreat into yourself whenever I show any weakness, in the same way you glow with pride when I exhibit signs of strength.

        I’m not a tattooed harpy and I’m definitely no angel. It’s impossible for me to smile for you every time you see me and I find myself missing the person you used to be when I would cry openly in front of you. Your star sign proclaims you’re someone destructively overprotective but I couldn’t find that to be less true. I don’t sense any darkness in you, it’s a kind of nuance you lack having grown up in a small country town with unquestioned roots and no desire to rebel or run away or differentiate yourself from the demands of your daily existence.

        If I could separate my sea from my fire, if I could split my smiles from my tears, if I could shed my skin from my ink; it’s something I would consider doing for you. But such a stupid thought is nothing more than a fleeting contemplation – I am too wholly loved to ever consider being romanced only partially.

        You are nothing more than someone I almost loved.

        Today was the first day I felt a familiar sadness shroud my sight until the skies seemed to reflect my clouded thoughts. I’ve been doing a good job of convincing everyone I’ve been able to keep my depression at bay; despite drinking every day and smoking cigarettes compulsively again. I come home with my hair and my breath and my fingertips stubbornly stained by the stench of my sins and crawl into bed, trying to immerse myself in a fantasy that transports me to sleep the second I sell myself such tall tales and believe that where I lay half-awake is the false reality.

        Lately, this mirage hasn’t been working and I’ve been struggling with insomnia after lying to the one person who has cared to treat me like a human being this whole winter. He traced the scars on my wrists with such understanding, without a trace of the customary pity, that I didn’t flinch at his touch and instead settled into a place more comfortable than I ought to have felt with a casual stranger.

        He asks me, “Have you eaten today?” “Did you get home safe?” “Are you sure you should be drinking so much?” “You’re ok, right?”

        He wears his heart so plainly on his sleeve that my own chest collapses with the contrast of how different he is from you.

        You only ask me if I’m eating out of obligation and no amount of carefully worded inquiries can infiltrate the intentional insouciance you hide behind. You don’t care how much I drink or how I get home or if I’m eating alone. You touch me with such impassivity that I have to clench my fists to keep myself from responding disproportionately. You’re so aloof that I didn’t realize how foolish my illusions were until I stumbled across someone who likes me, unlike you.

        My heart aches in acknowledgement about how apathetic I feel towards someone who cares about me so sincerely; suddenly sympmathizing with how you must feel when your hands graze mine and I retract with a startle while you stare in inquiring incomprehension. I realize now that I have absolutely no effect on you; in the same way he ran his fingers along my wrists and brushed the cigarette ash off my shoulders and I just pulled my coat tighter around myself without a second thought of our interaction.

        Today was a difficult day in which the daily dreams I endeavor to exist within were all too transparently an illusion and the smiles I always shower you with felt too insincere to sustain.

        I allowed myself to be honest about how hard it’s been; wanting you to ask, “Have you eaten? “Did you get home safe?”

        You saw the undiluted despair in my eyes, telling me not to be so hard on myself, and yet didn’t bother to say – “Are you ok?”

        I couldn’t look at you without wanting to cry so I ran into the street and chainsmoked cigarettes, instantly realizing that quitting isn’t a promise I can keep, scrambling to keep my eyes from growing empty and my heart from growing hollow because that’s the most dangerous place I can be around these sleepless streets and a frameless floor to ceiling window on the twenty-third floor.

        I wandered foreign avenues aimlessly for a few hours – my eyes wide and blank, my thoughts in tandem – smoking intermittently whenever I needed a palpable reminder that I was still alive. I felt so tired and my body was in so much pain but mostly I just felt exhausted from trying this hard, thinking this much.

        It’s dark now and I’m going to bed soon and I know you know how early I sleep so I’ve officially given up on hearing from you.

        What hurts more than your indifference is knowing how instantly he would’ve responded, had he known about my bad day. He would’ve dropped everything to walk on my right as a buffer between my mindless body and the careless traffic. He would’ve lit each of my cigarettes in a pained effort at chivalry before inevitably smoking more than he should in synchrony with me. He would’ve immediately ascertained the look in my eyes and instinctively sympathized in a way that wouldn’t make me feel embarrassed or exposed. He would’ve recognized his reflection in my regret and unselfconsciously shared it in silence.

        From the first day we met, I’ve known he has his days too.

        I shared as much of myself as I could in the short seconds full of possibility between us just yesterday; presuming that by revealing it all, you’d finally be able to see me as a woman. I had so much I wanted to tell you; things I had rehearsed all night and memorized in the morning, unable to keep myself from smiling as I did my makeup in the mirror while thinking of seeing you soon.

        But when I finally saw your face, I felt so fucking stupid. What the fuck was I doing to myself, all over again, smoking cigarettes and falling in unrequited love as though I were fifteen and not almost thirty?

        I saw myself the way you do; flighty, full of excuses, overly emotional, and constantly inconsistent. I can’t believe I thought unraveling my unadulterated heartache might make you feel protective over me, rather than exasperated. I can’t believe I thought you would witness my widening eyes and palpable despair and feel something human in you. I can’t believe I waited for you to save me, for you to tell me that you’d be right there, for you to follow me outside as I lit my infinith cigarette and care enough to coerce me into quitting. I can’t believe I thought this was different from the last time, the one-sided love I nursed for six years in the same way my eyes are filled with a different version of you from the truth.

        All I wanted to was spark the static shock from your fingers when your skin makes contact with mine. I wanted to see the same thinly-veiled hunger in your eyes before you abashedly avoid my gaze. I wanted to feel the mirrored magnetism my gut masks when there’s inches between us and I have to fight to span that space with a single inappropriate step. I wanted to be more than a serial novelist spinning fairy tales out of impossible misperceptions.

        I can’t help but compare you to him; that constant perpetuation of mild interest that makes me run towards you at a mile a minute. But the second I toe the gap between you and I, it widens into an impassable chasm – you’re entertained by me, but not enough that you take me seriously.

        Eventually I’ll become nothing more than a lovelorn girl leaving you drunk voicemails at 3AM that you habitually ignore with no guilt after growing too exhausted to deal with composing emotionally-warranted responses.

        I thought it was time to open myself up to vulnerability, but I forgot I’m incapable of compartmentalizing parts of myself until it’s too late and I fall apart at the sight of your smile or your slighted silence. It’s my turn to take imperceptibly small steps backward until I’ve matched your safe distance instead of teetering on the edge alone while everyone else watches in disbelief.

        I’m tired of being a spectacle, I’m sick of being a one woman circus.

        I’m tired of being called brave because I followed through on something you were too afraid to do.

        I’ll keep myself to myself; be it saving him from heartache or protecting myself from the likes of you.

        Every time I’m foolish enough to forget, I’m reminded again and again of why I eat all my meals alone.

        I feel like I’m the only person who looks up at the sky as it rains. Everyone else around me scurries past with their hands over their heads or protected by the plastic canopy of an umbrella but I love the feeling of light drizzle misting my upturned face; nothing separating my skin from the saturated sky. The only time I felt an exception to this restorative receptivity was when you walked me up the stairs and paused beneath the eaves of the building doors. I stood; absorbing the warmth emanating between us in that narrow entrance on a rainy January afternoon, suddenly feeling grateful for this excuse to avoid the rain instead of characteristically running into it, wondering if you were also relishing the short seconds spanning such a discernible lingering at the end of our conversation.

        I’ve always asserted that I was built with equal parts fire and water, a Piscean balance perpetuated by the ink tattooed onto my knuckles. But when I’m with you, I vacillate between an irrepressibly roaring pyre and a restless squall assailing the sea; a state of constant chaos with no semblance of equilibrium. I surreptitiously sneak glances at you to see if you can secern the catch in my breath when you take a step closer and I feel my entire body burst into flame. I wonder if you can feel the reverberating tremor in my bones when your fingers brush my shoulders and I fight to keep myself from melting into your hands; a glacier reduced to a rush of dangerously rising waters.

        I realized today the depth of how I feel towards you, that it’s not something purely physical or putting you on a pedestal. I want you to know all the smallest parts of me. I want you to see what a black and blue mess I am and I don’t want you to let go of my hands. I want you to know that my blood always runs too hot and how much I loved the way your face lit up when you heard your favorite song. I want you to keep worrying about me and getting annoyed at my lengthy excuses and laughing at my brazen admissions. I want you to know how often I lose my phone and how much I miss my mother. I want you to know when I’m having a bad day and how much I depend on my friends. I want to keep making you laugh when I describe myself too honestly and confess just how much discipline I lack. I want you to realize these are my concessions that I need someone like you in my life; someone to slow me down and keep me from falling and steady me when I lose my balance and hold onto my phone so I don’t misplace it and remind me to stop drinking so much and get frustrated whenever I sell myself short.

        I love how you look for me in a room when I’m always hiding and how you seek me out and sit beside me while I curl my arms around my bruised knees to keep myself from reaching out and touching you. I want our fingers to brush, our shirt sleeves to graze, our knees to buckle, our eyes to exchange. I love observing your chin in between days of shaving and wondering what it would be like to trace a trail along your stubborn stubble. I wish you knew what it meant when you walked me outside after weeks of self-torturous speculations, all the nights spent analyzing your responses to my advances and deciphering how you might feel about me.

        Today, with every step you took beside me, I felt you growing closer and closer; walking in parallel strides instead of in ever-opposite directions. I wish you knew the feeling in my chest when you paused for a breath, just standing still for infinite minutes with no one else but me, while I wracked my brain for ways to expand such a brief moment into another length of forever.

        I want it to rain for an eternity, a vaporous veil dividing the rest of the world from you and I.

          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.