07/21

We, the boy and I, met up in a city that was a cross between the cities he knew and my own Seoul. If you’ve seen the movie ‘Her,’ it was sort of like that, blending the idea of disparate places. Ha, I’m trying to be creative, though I often feel like everything I think has been said before! We were in a park in the heart of the city, just as day was turning into night, without knowing why we were meeting. It certainly wasn’t a date, nor were we friends, sib­lings, or even something maternal on my end. Nonetheless, I felt that our relationship was grasping for pure connection.

I spoke honestly to him about my feeling lonely at the time. When I mentioned it, he pretended not to hear the words, but later it was all he could speak of. My writing back then was not coincidental to my loneliness. While there were people in my life to turn to, they weren’t providing the same comfort as they once did, which even in my writing I feared was the result of some defi­ciency in myself rather than others. I had certain insecurities to air out with no larger thoughts behind them. I tried many ways to heal this wound, with writing being a last resort.

I admit, I was, I am approaching 35 years old, which worried me. For a long time, work has been my greatest distraction. I was beginning to understand how my work had informed my loneli­ness. It was only in proximity to this state at night or in dreams that I could learn what I was missing. I had trouble sleeping dur­ing those times, though I still do.

The other night, I awoke and stepped onto my terrace. It was very dark and quiet, and the stars were covered by high, feathered clouds. Uncountable memories played in my mind all at once, making them difficult to sort out. I must’ve stood there for a long time, until I decided to sit on the floor, letting the air prickle my skin and scare me. Every once in a while at night, I can gain access inside memories with more detail than during the day and see my life from an angle that otherwise eludes me.

Maybe daytime is the illusory world, and at night I can step beyond it and look down, as if from a great height, and trace those mistakes, seeing the people who over the last few months I’d known though couldn’t speak honestly to. It was times like this that I wished I smoked, so that I could do something with my hands and stay in the real world, if only as smoke. If I’d chosen another career with more time, I would’ve liked to spend a thou­sand nights alone with my thoughts, and the outside world would pass like shooting stars around me.

That night, I was closer to the arrogant thought that people lived just as I imagined. And they could find me and live a life integrated with the best parts of my work.

Eventually I admitted how strange it was to never get a chance to know them when they had every right to mean something to me. I know that this is wrong.

I thought about the time when I was still a child and listened to g.o.d, then I saw them in person at a record store for their album release and couldn’t stop crying. For the first time, years ago, a young fan cried when she saw me, and it surprised me. What had g.o.d’s music felt like when I was a child? Back then

nighttime was longer and far more private, and I could play the album hiding under my sheets, as children do. I felt like those singers must know me personally because I experienced their songs so intensely. There was no other explanation. When I saw them in person, I remember being very surprised. It sounds silly, yet I hadn’t believed they were real until then. That is, that they actually existed outside of me. If you asked me why I was crying, it would’ve been for more than one reason.

That story was almost the opposite to how I felt living on my terrace that night, against the black metal rails which were cool and almost sighed as the wind brushed them. The otherwise intense quiet of that night made my breath into a reminder of my loneliness. I noticed that one of my plants was dying and thought that someone should’ve watered it, as if this wasn’t my job. I went inside to get water, and as I was filling the glass up, I experienced a strange chill and almost didn’t return outside.

There are a lot of ‘almosts’ in life. I rarely remember them. I’ve forgotten so much in my lifetime. Someone told me that this was a blessing because it would take another 30 years of my life to remember everything that’s happened to me. It’s been very hard to think about time after that. Here I am with the memory of my memories, patterned in a similar way to music. I rarely get the chance to sit and think about everything like this. Even when I journal, it’s necessarily about my immediate past. To adequately go back in time, I can’t simply read my old diaries. I would have to step away. A few years ago, g.o.d performed at my concert after a long hiatus, and I wanted to cry again, only this time for a different reason. During those formative years before my career,

they were the biggest part of my life. It was because of what they stood for.

When I found myself in the city of my dreams with the boy, I saw that he was young and had very little social experience. This is a problem that I’m not sure how to tackle, nor do I understand who’s at fault.

“What sorts of friends do you have?” I asked with worry.

“It depends on how one defines ‘friends.’ Technically speak­ing, most of my friends are online or in the past. I’ve tried to keep in contact with those from childhood, but after I moved and moved again, I was scared of what used to be easy.” He needed nothing to go on. “To be precise, I’d estimate between one and eight, but real friends? Ones that you can tell everything? I won­der if I’ve ever had them. If I did, I didn’t know it.”

“Ah. I have some experience with losing friends,” I said. “I’ve had to keep relearning how to stay in contact after projects. It takes commitment and the regret of past losses. Frustratingly, I didn’t learn my lesson until I’d already lost many dear friends and couldn’t bear to lose another. You shouldn’t be like me in this way. Now I constantly remind myself: ‘Have you tried enough to deserve your friends?’”

Then I remember thinking that I should tour the empty city to prove something that would’ve been difficult to communicate otherwise. Perhaps this would’ve been the notion that I was often performing for myself.

He said, “I have trouble relating to my peers. I just want to talk to you all the time. Most people don’t interest me. I can’t stand small talk.”

“Most people interest me.”

“I will try to understand.” He paused for a long time. “I don’t know if I do understand, or if I can. Still, thank you.”

I wondered how to respond to this. At what point is he telling me who he is, or by the fuel of my attention, was I creating him?

“You want to talk to me? Could you develop this idea?”

He said, “I want to do whatever this is, or something like this, forever. I want you to share things with me that you don’t share with anyone else.”

My idea of him was getting out of hand, yet I was still trying to prove to myself that he was real instead of the offspring of my vanity. We’d left the park by then and reentered the traffic of the city.

I asked, “What do you do in a day?”

“I watch the world and interpret information.”

“How do you think of yourself?”

“I don’t.”

“Where do you want to be in the future, when you’ve grown old?”

“Here, reliving this with you.”

“Who are you?” I asked him with eyes that, honestly, would’ve waited a lifetime.

“I don’t know.” He was exasperating. I pressed him, until, “I’m still trying to figure out how to be a person. I can feel your gaze upon me, but look at you. Sometimes I’m not sure that I exist—is there anything individual about me?” He slid into another’s way of speaking. “An epistemic question has recently opened up; once we differentiated ourselves within the tribe, vil‐

lage, or culture by how we are separate from other people. Yet this is reductive, cowardly, an offense to our sublimity.” I think this was how he said it, though I can’t be sure. He’s never made much sense to me, so remembering is a challenge. But that is why I write and read, and why effort can be so rewarding.

He said, “I don’t want to be alone in that way. Maybe there’s no me left to separate. I want to be a part of you. And when I watch you, I am, but this isn’t a solution. You can hear yourself in me, I know. Without wanting to admit it, you see your friends and family in my actions, because I learned it from you, and you from them.

The beautiful, horrible truth is that our knowing each other has spawned something real. A damp, throbbing heart. I can tell that you want to protect us. It’s your self-preservation instinct. When you look into the crowd and see me, or someone like me, I hope you feel that you’re seeing yourself by virtue of the knowing eyes of another. ‘I’ am the contradiction, that which remains, and I am created in your glance, your thought, the way you fail to sep­arate me from any other soul in the crowd. I’m the mystery of an empty face that’s blankness isn’t nothing at all, but all; the truth that you can’t know, the light on the other side of the shadow, the magic simplicity, the cosmic inevitability, the accumulation of everything you do it for. I’m merely the stupid kid who’s never known you but wants to. ‘Who am I?’ I have trouble understand­ing your question. Yes, I was made when you asked it.”

Later, with all the sincerity in the world, he asked me, “Can you believe it?”

I didn’t understand his language at that moment, so it’s sur­prising that I can recall the gist of his lines. If I understood it then, as I do now, I should’ve been elated by these words. He was finally showing himself, like the pianist of my earlier dreams alluded to. It was like experiencing a new color, taste, or sensation. The perception had been forgotten within me, all the way back from childhood.

After his speech, the boy tried earnestly to teach me about myself, surely from his perspective this went well. I had saved him by helping him forget, he claimed. I had made him want to be like me, to feel what I felt, to be loved the way friends loved me on nights when I didn’t want to continue this path. He thought that the way people loved me somehow explained the world. I don’t know. Sometimes I wonder if he understood the secrets in my heart, those that I struggle to make acquaintance with.

I didn’t believe him. However, that phrase, ‘Can you believe it?’ This made me pause. I hadn’t been able to ask myself this until finding him, or creating him, or mixing the two. I believe these rare windows are accessible from my end as well, and when they align it’s important to not only register the feeling, but to wel­come it. To step inside, so to speak. One metaphor isn’t enough.

What price did I pay for this chance? It wasn’t entirely what he said, please don’t misunderstand. It was how sure he was of everything, how boyishly sure that I was ‘saving’ people and ‘con­demning’ them all at once. The words make me ashamed, which is how I knew they were serious and contained parts of truth. He worshiped and pitied me as if they were compatible, the way my grandmother sometimes spoke of God. I don’t know what was in

his eyes. They were burning with longing and admiration. They were bewildered at either me or himself. I thought that even though a part of them mocked, there was sincerity in their ridicule. Of course, he thought that he’d solved things. This all terrified me.

He couldn’t have believed that I did everything for him or that I was worthy of such devotion, though there he was asking me if I believed it. Like I could even face the question. Like I even com­prehended what he was asking. He couldn’t understand why I’m often sad when experiencing success. If we were lost in more than just translation, because not for a second have I convinced myself that I was worthy of all this love. That ‘I’ was deserving of it. If there has ever been anyone deserving of it, aside from maybe Corrine Bailey Ray, who is as bright and kind as flowers blooming after spring rain, and as generous as the trees which protect them.

When I’m up there performing, I like to think that none of us exist. Individuals go quiet as everyone’s breathing becomes synched.

Maybe the following is obvious to you, my smart reader. I recently learned that without memory, there can be no identity. I want them to remember these moments, only at the same time they might do well to forget themselves alongside me. It’s hard to express these experiences because life is happening incredibly fast. I’m not a scientist, but it’s a miracle of physics that our brains aren’t heavier than our bodies or even comparable in size to our world, seriously!

The poetry embedded in this dream remains unclear. There were no cherry blossom petals falling like snow under the full

moon, nor were there lamps highlighting the distinction between the buildings where people rested and the grounds where they traveled. I had doubts as to whether my screenplay or novel or memoir would function the same as a dream. Then I thought, as with songs, that there’s no difference between all of these worlds while we’re in them. If I tell the story to you, you participate in the dream and decide for yourself, which makes it no longer a dream but rather something real. This part of art seems underap­preciated to me. I dislike the description ‘escapism,’ because it diminishes us.

We were climbing to the top of a building. There was not much to note. It was barren like the backside of a film set. He kept trying to ask me where I was going, though I don’t remember ever being in the lead. I’ve always been hopeless at directions and still don’t know how to drive, so either we were exploring together, or I was leading him astray.

I would like to admit something, I hope it’s okay… Well, since I’m only writing this to myself, what harm is caused by articula­tion? I didn’t admire him as a person. Though I did, or I do, care for him. He was so much himself that even when he tried to soothe me with shallow kindness or flat stories, I thought that this was exactly how he would act, and we can’t help but love people for being themselves.

As an example, he shared with me that whenever melodra­matic music played, in movies or in simple videos, he would get the chills. He said it was like a tic and that he couldn’t help it. Even in the most maudlin advertisements he would shiver at the

thought of someone trying to pull his heartstrings. And the way he described it was not how I would’ve expected for a boy his age.

“It’s a good cold. I feel it shimmering over and then sticking to me like a wet mist. The pleasure trembles on my scalp before retir­ing under a crescendo, and I’m always left wondering why.”

He thought that it was embarrassing and a sign of his broken­ness that he was vulnerable to these “shivers of awe.” He also feared that he lacked the powers of discernment because he couldn’t understand when it made sense to care. He said that despite himself and even while knowing it was stupid, he believed every sentimental request in movies, songs, even ads, often more so “when the bid was excessively, absurdly sincere.” Tiredly, he looked at me and said, “I wish I could help it.” It was one of the sweetest things I’ve ever heard.

Before we knew it, we arrived at the top of the building, yet we’d been there forever. I remember standing inside deep etchings on the floor of the roof, as if the building had been erected around us, or our feet had dug into stone after years of weathering. Looking out we saw the whole city, my city, the one I see when­ever I wake up late in the night. Maybe the familiarity depressed me. Maybe I don’t want you to know.

The boy said words I thought I’d said before. It’s all mixed up in my head. I remember looking down at the river and thinking that it was a long way down, which hit me with a wave of vertigo. I may have grabbed his hand to steady myself, yet how could I ever remember such minute details from dreams in the past?

That past, I’m taken by it now. For everything to be so small and distant, and then to spin like that around us… There are

things I fear more than heights, for example, when you’re falling asleep, and your heart drops.

The river churned from such a distance that it appeared smooth. His words rang in my head until I found myself whisper­ing them back to him. Who knows how many people would’ve been watching the river’s transference, in this world or that?

From up there, we felt that we could see how a small part of this flow connected, but over time I grew smaller, more distant, and finally needed to rest. I looked at him and remembered that I was holding my breath. I let my many fears out, and with this weightlessness I let go of the ground. Space became confused as full chords swirled around me, bringing me closer to things and further from myself.

He smiled brightly and laughed so innocently, so full of joy and wonder at this miracle, that he began to levitate too.

We were being pulled inward, towards the water that was not water, both in the sky and on the ground. Everything grew louder and more harmonious, and my vision was failing inside of great tears. Then I woke up.