07/19
These jottings, which were once a screenplay and vignetted dreams, have begun to resemble a memoir or novel. I adore novels, though I’m embarrassed at the idea of attempting one. Even now, I’ve noticed that it’s harder to be funny in this form. I feel less playful alone, too. This is a side of me that I’m grateful to get a chance to share, so please ignore my awkwardness in navigating it. Still, here I have the chance to think.
Occasionally, when I write characters in songs, I ask my friends questions not about those characters, but about some real person in their lives. For example, I’m thinking about one person, a friend. I asked them how couples in their life had met, so my friend told me a story about their parents’ relationship. It was almost a decade before either of us became alive, to set the scene. Their mother had had a crush on their father, and they both worked in the same office. She was too proud to tell him how she felt. However, she was also sure he liked her. So to get him to confess, she started putting anonymous love letters in both her mailbox and his! Then the next day she would make a show out of finding the letters. Soon, words around the office spread that both of them were receiving similar letters. Her thinking was this: they would have to talk to each other about getting the letters. He would get jealous, and she could assure him that she wasn’t interested in the guy she ‘suspected’ of sending it (poor unsuspecting coworker!). Of course, nothing goes as expected, and she eventually confesses to the whole thing. I thought that if I wrote the per‐
spective from my friend’s mom’s side as she feigned ignorance with her crush, it would create a puzzling song where her questions become a confession of her love. I never finished the song, though I’ve always liked the idea.
It’s stories like this that define people by sounding unbelievable if they were attached to someone else. In particular, real stories are not only messy, but they may also reproduce their content as if they were analogical. In rare situations, if two people are peculiarly aligned, they form an endless mirror that reflects the past and future of their entire lives.
When I asked the boy in the dream, I expected that he existed in this way, waiting to become tuned. I thought often about the logistics of his life. He would’ve lived in an American suburb yet planned one day to move to a city. I ran into a snag when I realized he wouldn’t know Korean. However, there is technology to smooth things over online, and so that would’ve been how he met me. Then in our dreams, I suppose that it’s okay to speak another language, because language is not a fixed capability inside our minds. Language may be old, but it’s not as old as dreams.