I've got a new kind of lonesome, a new kind of longing: A Seoul diary

It was 10 p.m. by the time I got to my hotel in Seoul. In the three months since I was last here, winter had given way to spring, but I had missed it entirely and walked right into the beginnings of what was already a moody summer. 

I had chosen to stay in Sinchon, at a boutique hotel opened just last year called Mayven. The hotel was on a steep slope of road: uphill when you’re coming, downhill when you’re going. It was close to midnight, but when I left my room after checking in and getting settled, the neighborhood still bustled with laughter and neon lights, the crowds young and resolute. I thought I could get used to it. 

Back at the hotel I had a burger for dinner. (Lunch on the plane was lemon garlic butter fish with fried rice.) And over the next few days I would come to swear by the Mayven. They had a collaboration with photographer Koo Sung-soo, which I had thought would be a little gallery like at the Orosie Hotel, but his work adorned the elevators, the hallways, even the rooms. There was also a welcome gift on my bed consisting of a set of prints and postcards.

The room I’d gotten was more of a suite, and the TV was in front of not the bed but a lounge area with traditional floor seating, including soft mats all over, floor cushions, and a little table. As someone who has refined my packing style from what I’ve learned as I travel, I found it so thoughtful that the bathroom had rubber slippers and a disposable shower towel for the body wash. 

I unpacked, hung up my clothes, and read a little in bed before falling asleep. 

Of course I was my usual tailspinny self, obsessively checking and updating my planner to make sure this sojourn would be the best, least disastrous it could be. I still wasn’t doing it from the mindset of a tourist and deliberately avoided creating an itinerary; now that I had a multiple-entry visa, there would be time for me to focus on travel eventually. This was a trip, one with a specific purpose and I only had enough energy to deal with that. 

But about a week before my flight, I learned that both Lee Haesun and LEEGOC, two Korean visual artists I adore, would be holding exhibitions that coincided with my dates in the city. There was even a RIIZE exhibition at a cafe. I only had enough time to visit one of them, though, so I chose LEEGOC’s solo show “Sweet Home” at Chung M Art Company in Jongno. 

Seeing where the Sinchon Station entrance was the night before—just two minutes from my hotel—left me with less jitters about figuring out the subway system. I was confused about why there were seemingly two end-of-the-line destinations trains were bound for on Naver Maps, but I quickly figured out that the other one was the next station from your origin. 

I’ve always been good with directions, something I got from my dad. I’m hardly ever lost. Not in a physical sense, anyway. So I walked, and I kept going, trusting my instincts (and, okay, the signs) to guide me. I got to the turnstiles and found the correct platform, quickly hopping on the next train. I used the Hope on the Stage Seoul commemorative Namane card I’d bought as a souvenir, never imagining it would actually serve its function for me. I pre-loaded it using the app on my cousin’s phone since mine doesn’t have an NFC reader, and I found the process so convenient and cool. 

I can’t describe it, how good it feels to find my way and get to know a new place independently. To take up space on public transportation and be just another person in the city with somewhere to go and something to do. 

It was also great practice for my commute to Goyang the next day, since this was the same line transfer I would need to make.

When I emerged onto the street in Jongno, the air was cool and crisp, carrying leftover traces of spring. It was a nine-minute walk to the gallery, everything a lot to take in in the best way: plenty of chic white storefronts with the occasional oddity lining sloping roads, the solid, clean lines of modern architecture coexisting with modular wood finishes and stone details. Galleries wherever I turned my head. Pure and elegant, but it also had that Cubao Expo hidden-gem charm about it. Like Karrivin on steroids. All flanked by greenery and mountains. All that contrast was dizzying, but instead of birds flying around my head, there would be hearts. 

I fell in love instantly. 

I steeled myself before coming into the gallery, admiring its all-black brick exterior that really made the colors and starkly soft shapes of LEEGOC’s work stand out. The exhibit reminded me of this game my parents would play with me (and my sister and cousin, if they were with us) when I would come with them to inspect clients’ houses. They often lived in upscale villages we knew we could never afford or belong in, so we did the next best thing and played pretend, pointing out these beautiful homes as we passed and daydreaming about what it would be like if they were ours, what they would look like inside. Swimming in that pool, taking that Benz out for a road trip, ruminating on that terrace.  

My favorite piece is the one in the window, which is also the one on the poster: a yellow house with a mauve roof and a mint green garage door, clear blue skies giving way to the night with fading pinks and oranges from the final moments of sunset, and a young woman who has just arrived home with her dog.  

Upstairs there was a sketchbook left on the coffee table that detailed her process for this body of work. While flipping through it, I ran my fingers along the edges of the pages and the physical indents her markings had left, suddenly emotional with the humanity of it washing over me. Something made by her hands, touched by the hands that have visited here previously, that I was now holding in my own hands. 

Next to it was a guestbook. I turned the pages until I could find a fresh one and wrote: I traveled here from Manila and I feel so lucky to have experienced your work. 

“This is a series about homes,” she wrote in the sketchbook in both Korean and English, right at the beginning, over much simpler childlike drawings of the paintings downstairs. “Not just as buildings, but as places where memories and emotions gather.” 

The day after the concert I took a two-minute, one-stop train ride to visit the j-hope “And What?” exhibit in Hongdae. I was very excited about actually getting to experience something like this for once, when they would always feel so exclusive and so far away. 

I got a “Killin’ It Girl” gift photocard that I’m absolutely obsessed with and a hard plastic ticket photocard. The latter had a number of random options and mine was from the “On the Street” era (and the one I wanted the most out of the bunch!). The first activity was getting to press a button that would deposit another random card with one of Hoseok’s titles (i.e. the different sections of the exhibit), and I got “Dancer.” 

Coming from an editorial and content background, I know that “And What?” is a nightmare for SEO, but I don’t care, I love it. It’s silly and tongue-in-cheek, it’s cocky and cool, it’s succinct and it raises intrigue. Like of course an exhibition all about his career so far would be all about capturing his versatility, his boundless talent and potential, his ability to adapt and inhabit all these identities and show off all these facets of him.  

The first section, “Pioneer,” focuses primarily on how he was the first to officially debut solo in his group, but to me it’s also an apt modifier for how he has consistently created and broken records and set the standard for promotion and performance in the industry, earning him the nickname Jung “First Korean soloist to” Hoseok among fans. From reinventing what listening parties could be, to raising the bar for tour merch, to posting a homemade encore for a music show win that he can’t personally receive, he’s always defying expectations by being one step ahead. 

I’m probably misremembering some of it, but the infinity box that greets you upon entry was so moving: peer down and you’ll see his endless potential, take it in from another angle and you’ll see that there’s so much more to him than meets the eye. 

The “Dancer” and “Performer” sections show off his work on and off the stage in a lot of fun, interactive ways: a display case with his iconic red microphone, listening and viewing stations for his rehearsals, Hope on the Street lives, and street dance performances, even a room with just a massive projection of snippets from his tour. 

Obviously, me being a writer, I found the “Storyteller” room so endearing. It celebrates not just his work as a songwriter and lyricist, but also this rich lore he’s created around his artistry and persona as j-hope. I would even go as far as to call it worldbuilding. (His mixtape was called Hope World, after all.) 

His own style as a writer will always be so dreamy and romantic in my eyes: balancing moments of mirth and melancholy, observational but introspective, grounded but bright and brilliant and unafraid to get lost in imagination and fantasy. 

The ball pit that took up most of the room was full of fun pastel spheres printed with words associated with Hoseok, from song titles, to the classic adventure stories he wove into his lyrics, to his many, many nicknames. I had half a mind to stuff the “Blue Side” ball into my pocket and walk out of there a thief, but of course I knew better. (That, and the CCTV camera was pointed right at me, and there were also staff members in the room.) 

Before moving on to the next room, there was another activity where you could pick out a paper keyring with a surprise lyric. My first try gave me “Mona Lisa,” and while I love that song, I wanted something that better represented the full extent of what he can do. So I chose again—and got scolded for it by staff, because apparently you only get the one try, oops—and ended up with “Arson” this time. Perhaps the most experimental of his music, a song about leaning into risk and putting it all on the line that sounds like it. 

The “Musician” section was like taking a walk through his eras, complete with costumes from his music videos. 

I couldn’t wait to see these tiny “Daydream” sets for myself and I’d made sure to bring a doll for it. A kitty Hobi doll instead of the usual chipmunk or squirrel, but it really is just my favorite. I can’t stop thinking about the brainstorming sessions for this exhibition and the absolute genius who must’ve been like, “People love bringing their little 10cm babies places, let’s give them chairs and a bed to rest on and take the cutest photos to remember it by.” 

They need to collaborate with Takara Tomy and make this toy CNS car available to the public, like, yesterday. 

I’m gonna stop myself from saying anything about Jack in the Box and how much it means to me (and to culture) before I cry or I’m unable to shut up. So I’ll just say that it’s been divisive, but personally I really love how whimsical and silly and cute, how totally j-hope, the “Mona Lisa” cover is.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really stop for the listening stations since the lines were long and I had this attitude of, I listen to them all the time, probably more than most of you ever will. So I almost missed this chance to hear the full version of “Blue Side”—a.k.a. “Blue Side (Self-Actualized Ver.)” as I’d called it when it was dropped without warning four years ago—a cappella, and I’m so glad I happened to read the sign. 

I fell in line and waited about five minutes before my turn. I didn’t know what to expect, but I quickly learned what “solely through his voice” meant: the audio included not just the main vocal track, but also his harmonies and his ad libs. The vocals are honey-smooth, but the rap parts are more raw, like they’re recordings he did in the moment while writing them. I have to stress here that there is no other credited vocalist on this song, and it was overwhelming to hear layers and layers of Hoseok’s gorgeous falsetto. The only reason I kept it together and managed to avoid crying was the threat of vulnerability in this crowd. Sometimes I think it’s only right that this experience be a once-in-a-lifetime one you can’t find anywhere else—I didn’t even stay to listen a second time since it felt like disturbing a holy grail—but of course I’d do anything to be able to hear it everyday. 

The room where you could leave messages on the walls had no more space, but I made do. I didn’t know if it would ever reach him, if it would even be decipherable, but I needed to let him know anyway: You’re the artist of my life.

My last meals on this trip: a saucy, creamy, crunchy, onion-y bulgogi burger paired with sweet onion shaker fries for dinner with banana split Dippin’ Dots for dessert, and a fluffy little omelette with breakfast sausages and tomato sauce (no rice, sadly) on the plane. 

Another detail I appreciated about the Mayven was how fuss-free it was, a relief for my social anxiety. I’d been looking for a “Do Not Disturb” sign to avoid housekeeping and learned that they didn’t actually offer it for days-long stays unless requested. Reception was on the second floor, so you could skip straight to the ground floor and slink away without seeing anyone. Nobody was at the desk when I checked out at 4 a.m., so I just left my key card with the automatic checkout machine. 

I had a surprisingly blasé, almost anxious going-through-the-motions attitude about going on this trip. I know it’s an incredibly privileged take and so many people would’ve loved to be in my place, but it’s been quite a whirlwind six months for me and I wanted to document it and write through my feelings a little. 

Work has been hectic with the other writers on the team moving on to different pursuits, leaving me scrambling to juggle productions, scripting, and daily programming. Finding their replacements has been taking some time. I’ve been pretty much burnt out and stressed since April and it hasn’t subsided. And it’s been so comforting to focus the rest of my energy on this tour and experience as much of it as I can, but that was the thing—with the rest of my energy used up like this, it left me drained, this supposed fluffy escapism ending up contributing to my burnout even further.

 

I still loved every second of it, don’t get me wrong, but it was such a strange feeling to grapple with. A kind of happiness that became all-consuming. I tried to make sense of it with Alissa as early as April when I flew to see him in Singapore. How I was so tired that a tiny voice in the back of my mind would say: I just want to lay in this hotel room and sleep and not go out. How I was so lucky to have seen him enough times—the fourth by then—that the smallest part of me could ever consider taking a j-hope concert (a fucking j-hope concert! me!) for granted like that. 

And then I was gearing up to go back to Seoul, and some days it felt like I was on autopilot, doing everything because I knew I had to. Because I still knew this was all I ever wanted. Endless logistics, too many hours at the airport, going on a flight all over again. There was almost a sense of dread to it, like let’s just get this over with. Part of it was definitely the depression talking. 

The crash that follows the euphoric sensation of a concert is a well-documented thing, but this is the first time I’ve experienced something like this, and it made me curious if anyone would know exactly what I’m talking about. 

Or maybe this is yet another symptom of growing older, simple as.

By the end of it I swore I would never get on another plane until October.

All I know is, all of this spiraling, it doesn’t negate the beautiful memories I left with, the only ones that will matter in the end. The hard parts were easier than I thought they would be, and this concert was one thing I never could have lived with missing out on. Because it was all worth it: Getting a ticket at all. Finally getting a visa that lets me come back whenever I want. Exploring on my own terms. The sweet onion fries I’m still thinking about. Seeing him. Seeing him. Seeing him. Then seeing him two more times. What I’ve held on long enough to be there for. Every little thing that’s led me here. Every little thing I almost took for granted but never could and never, ever would. 

I miss it all already. And I can only look forward to what’s next. 

(Just let me recover financially first.) 

And while I unravel

“Someday, you will ache like I ache.”

My wrists 

            are in stitches

I’m running

            out of skin 

//

I bought Courtney Love's diaries

secondhand at a Booksale

Kept a torn-out picture of Frances Bean

profiled in Harper's at age fifteen

dressed as Betty Rizzo from Grease between

the pages of my favorite part,

which I thought had said: 

            I can grow a new heart

But I should have been reading more carefully

//

I feel my body 

work to fix itself like 

always

            when all I want 

            to do is destroy it 

            completely

It stings

            and it stings 

//

Books, too, in slow decay

You hardly even notice

I picked one up this morning—

it had ghosts 

            (and a love story)

And, now, spores along

its lavender spine

One last star rise before I go

An earthquake hit Tokyo on my final night, unmistakable with the way my hotel bed audibly hit the wall—which it was set at the very edge of, meaning the earthquake was strong enough to shake it so that it moved and bounced back. I had to find the translation for "earthquake" in Japanese and searched it up on Twitter to see what was going on. I found tweets from locals, and also NCT Dream fans sharing that Jisung posted about the earthquake, because they were in the city as well on tour. 

We checked out the next morning, and for the last time I hit up the breakfast buffet for my favorites: rice with grilled mackerel and fried dumplings. My favorite drinks on this trip, meanwhile, have been a mint chocolate milk I got at Family Mart and Skal. I've become obsessed with the latter for its delicate balance of sweetness and fizz that goes down way smoother than any drink I've ever had, and I was surprised to learn that it's actually a soda and skim milk hybrid since it's so light and refreshing. I loved the cream soda/ramune flavor I first tried in Osaka, but this time I could only find peach. 

Not much really happened on our last day since we had to be at the airport by noon, so I thought I'd use this entry to talk about some pictures from my phone camera. For our final stops we explored the Asakusa Sensoji Temple and Nakamise Street area, then walked along the Sumida River, which I would've enjoyed so much more if it hadn't been so sunny. (You know I'm a big believer in the power of proximity to a large body of water to heal depression.) 

I took the picture on the left as a final-goodbye view from my window. The shot on the right, I took before crossing the street in Asakusa, and the sun was so bright that I hadn't seen my screen at first. I saw it only the day after and was floored by how much I love it. I find the inadvertent composition so dynamic and interesting. 

I saw the building on the right out the window on our drive to Disneyland. Love the idea of an unassuming bookstore out there with these really cute signs. 

The modern izakaya I wrote about in my last entry. I wanted to step in so bad but it felt like a little more than my social battery could handle right then. 

Yuki and I had formed quite a real connection and I was lucky to have met someone so thoughtful and kind. She had asked me about my plans for my free day and when I told her about wanting to visit the Snoopy Museum, we talked about other characters and pop culture we love, like Studio Ghibli and Sanrio. There are decades and thousands of kilometers between us but it's so nice to be able to find common ground in these little things. 

She asked to hug me goodbye at the airport before I left, and I was all too happy to oblige. 

I had amassed quite the collection of tiny keepsakes and trinkets, including a Mofusand banana figure that ended up being a digital clock that even tells the date. I was very excited when I searched up where the biggest gashapon place was in Tokyo and found out that it was literally right at the complex my hotel is in, and I let myself go wild with every 100-yen coin in my possession. Just hitting up every machine that caught my eye, dropping the capsule into the tote I'd brought for this exact purpose, and moving on to the next. The absolute time of my life. 

At Narita I had unadon at the Yoshinoya near my gate for lunch and waited to board at a counter with charging ports, right at the gate. I didn't need to charge my phone, but it did provide something I've been adamant is a basic human right at airports: a free place to sit with something akin to a table, or at least somewhere to properly rest your elbows. [Mark Ruffalo "We are America!" protest.gif]

It was raining in Manila when we landed. I hauled my suitcase to the pickup area and tried not to think about how, whenever I would land and turn on my local data, there would already be a message from my dad telling me where he'd be waiting to welcome me home. This time, no one was waiting for me, and I was booking a ride with a stranger. With my vision blurred by the downpour and my own tears, I cried in public for the third time that day from how I kept missing my parents. (Yes, I cried at the Yoshinoya, too.) 

But I know my dad would be proud of me for doing this on my own and finding ways to be happy and strong and healthy without him, while still keeping him and my mom near. I'm so happy I went and came home looking forward to more, that I've never lost the ability to want and to anticipate. Moving forward and surviving is painful, but I'm doing it anyway, in small steps and in large leaps. I'm already planning what comes next. Spoiler: Kamakura, wait for me. 

Salt, simmer, and stir

The first time I tried to make Marcella Hazan’s tomato sauce I burnt it. My mom pointed out my mistake after: having the heat dial turned as far as it would go counter-clockwise, which I thought was the lowest setting. To get a proper simmer, she said, I had to turn it back to where it’s almost off, igniting just enough of a flame to keep the heat going.

 

Leave it to me to mess up a notoriously easy idiot-proof recipe. 

 

I always meant to try again, but in the end, it took me four years before I got around to it. And I didn’t even plan on it until I was at the supermarket standing next to the cans of whole peeled tomatoes, thinking to myself: Why not? I picked up a 400g one instead of the 28oz the recipe called for, deciding to halve it for now. I went to the dairy aisle and got a stick of butter and cottage cheese, wanting subtlety and creaminess to finish it off. 

 

I didn’t decide to cook it until 1 a.m. on a Saturday, having woken up from a nap that made me miss dinner. I emptied the can of tomatoes into the pot, added half the stick of butter, cut an onion diagonally (not by design, I’m just bad at it) and also stuck half of it in. Added two or three good pinches of salt—I can never salt anything again without thinking of this tweet—and stirred occasionally. Turned the dial all the way to the left again, a full 180 degrees, worried that the bubbling was still too strong before remembering I was supposed to turn it back until the flame was barely there. 

 

The sauce thickened and its flavor filled the air. Its bubbling felt like a mere afterthought, which is how I knew I had it simmering correctly now. I was finally doing it right.

 

Before I knew it 45 minutes had gone by, and in the last stretch I boiled some water and added the packet of Nissin pasta from the Japan aisle that I’d bought just for this, which looked like a thinner type of ziti. It was funny to me, the idea of combining a 45-minute sauce with 3-minute noodles.

The halved recipe made just enough to richly coat the entire pack of pasta, which lasted me two servings: one to tide over my hunger from that missed dinner, and another for the next day when I had no idea what to eat for lunch. I put it in a bowl and topped it with some of the cottage cheese, admiring how chunky and streaky and full-bodied the sauce turned out. And then I got to sit down and eat. 

 

Tomato sauces are usually a hit or miss with me—I’m not a fan of adding olive oil and sometimes it just tastes off to me for reasons I can’t explain. But this sauce was perfect, light and fresh and just the right amount of sweet, with even a little bit of umami. It was exactly the way I’d always wished a tomato pasta would be, and even on the first bite I knew I should’ve made a full batch, so I could share it and, yes, have more servings when I wanted. 

 

I first heard of the Marcella Hazan sauce on Alida Nugent’s now-defunct blog Your Best Worst Friend, and it was during a time when my depression was new and unrelenting and my relationship with food was beginning to get complicated. I avoided dinner with my family and everything seemed like a chore, even just fixing myself a bowl of leftovers. (And don’t even get me started on washing the dishes.) 

 

But Alida Nugent’s post, which I’ve put up here because I still re-read it all the time, made the recipe sound simple, and warm, and filling. Comfort in a bowl, no spoon needed. I’ve been obsessed with it ever since. And now, after having made it myself (Me! Not such a kitchen disaster!), I can definitely say it has healing properties, too. 

 

With my mom gone for over a year now, getting food in my stomach hasn’t gotten any easier. I miss her cooking, and I miss savoring a good meal with her. I wish I could’ve shared what I’d cooked with her. But I’m always thinking about that little mistake I made with the heat dial, and how she knew how to fix it when I couldn’t even explain it right. Now, every time I make this sauce, I think of her when I turn the heat down. And it’s just like she’s looking out for me like she always did.

Something’s gotta give now

I waited until after the One Direction concert to tell my parents I wasn’t graduating. 

By the time they announced the group’s Manila tour dates in May 2014, I was already over it. My “official” One Direction phase lasted only a month: It was January 2012, I was seventeen, and I had moved on from teen heartthrobs (the Jonas Brothers) in favor of edgier dreamboats (Andrew VanWyngarden). I was in a hurry to grow up. 

When my friends from bandom—that subculture of the internet dedicated to the glory days of 2000s pop-punk and alternative bands from labels like Fearless and Fueled by Ramen, my main focus being The Academy Is…, Cobra Starship, and The Maine—began revealing themselves as One Direction converts, I didn’t get it. I was immune to their accents and their glossy, clean-cut, just-shy-of-matching pinup-du-jour looks. But rabbit holes were rabbit holes, and one night, in an attempt to understand the Directioner Mystique, I found myself looking up their tour diaries and the quintessential fanmade “funny moments” (which were indeed funny) on YouTube. And then came the excellent songs from an admittedly solid debut album, and I couldn’t deny it. I was hooked.

For the next four weeks or so, at least. It was enough to get me to spend another P360 (not a small value for someone on a UP student’s allowance) on the latest issue of BOP magazine, something I hadn’t done since I was thirteen, just so I could get the fold-out mega poster and put it up on the wall by my bedside. It was enough for me to tune in to the premiere of the “One Thing” music video and look back on it as some defining point of a year in which I turned eighteen and so many significant, unforgettable things happened. I took a screenshot of a close-up featuring Zayn and Louis and set it as my laptop wallpaper. But by February, I’d become preoccupied with a series of Ayala Mall shows headlined by The Summer Set and A Rocket to the Moon, and it just so happened that my crush on John Gomez at the time was enough to stomp out any remaining embers of what I felt for One Direction. 

So when we found out about On the Road Again Tour in Manila that night in May, I was far enough removed from everything One Direction that I didn’t panic about needing to see them—but I was also still attached in a way that was more about nostalgia and knowing what a huge cultural event it was than anything, and I knew I didn’t want to miss being there in some way. 

An actual photo of Manila Bay from that night in 2014. 

The shows were going to be held a whole ten months later in March 2015, on the Mall of Asia concert grounds. Having attended Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream concert there, I knew two things: one, I didn’t have the means or will to spend on anything besides general admission, and two, general admission gives you shit visibility of the stage because you’re basically on a flat parking lot surrounded by massive heads. It was pretty much a no-brainer to make the decision to stay outside and not buy tickets, since it was an open field and we’d basically get the same experience. The important thing was getting to hear these songs live, because they did have their part in becoming a soundtrack to my teenage years. 

The day before tickets were made available, people started camping out at the Mall of Asia Arena for fear of losing out on the sections they wanted. My best friend at the time, Camille, was one of them. I was nineteen and in the middle of the longest summer of my life, a blue-moon kind never to be replicated again that lasted a total of four months because my university had decided to shift the beginning of its academic calendar from June to August. I was at a crossroads and anxiety-ridden about my future and the fact that I was delayed at school. 

An endless night in the city was just what I needed. 

I don’t even remember what I told my parents regarding where I was going and where I would be sleeping. They certainly would’ve never allowed me out if they’d known the truth. Somehow I ended up going on this overnight excursion, living out my YA novel dreams like I’d read about in Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist or Graffiti Moon. Accompanying my friends as they chased after their dreams of seeing One Direction from the front row was just an excuse. 

We inhabited the coffee shop by the boardwalk until it closed, after which we sat facing Manila Bay in the open air while the skies and the city got darker around us and the clocks eked past 3 a.m. Soon our friends had to go and secure their spots in the line to get tickets, and Rian and I were left with the sounds and smells of the sea and this colossal, magnificent, deserted mall to call home for the night. 

We were nowhere and everywhere, exploring where we could and talking trash and the things we loved, every little thing that connected us and made us whole, together. I can remember none of it now, but I know it mattered deeply and it made sense in the moment. And through it all the mall stood empty: apocalyptic, creepy, grand, surreal. Almost a decade later and I can still feel the way my heart jumped when we spotted a silhouette inside an Icebergs, and the relief and hilarity of discovering it was nothing but a cardboard cutout. I can imagine us sitting on a bench outside a vacant, lifeless SMX Convention Center, nothing but specks in the midst of such a looming structure, laughing loudly and freely against the quiet at juvenile prank ideas and feeling like we owned the world.

Memes and existentialism and the latest episode of SNL (Andy Samberg and St. Vincent, now a classic) on a first-generation iPad Mini at a McDonald’s, Jem and the Holograms and “Dancing Anymore” by Is Tropical and “California Daze” and “Sugarstone” by Peace in the early hours at a 7-Eleven as the sun finally rose over the commercial buildings and concrete. 

We sang bits and pieces of The Strokes’ “Razorblade” through the night: 

I don’t wanna know!

I don’t wanna know—

Tell me tell me tell me tell me

No, don’t,

Okay

By the end of it, we had been awake thirty-two hours. I went home with the strangest sense of jet lag, and knew even then that I’d come away from it a different person, as easy as recognizing the changes that came with a new day. For months after I would see how much had shifted in my life and be able to pin it all on this one night.

Months passed. It seemed impossible that May that they would, it seemed so far away, but they did.

The day before the concerts, it was announced that Zayn would be taking time off from the tour to recuperate, which meant that he would not be appearing in Manila with the rest of the group. My month-long stint as a Directioner aside, I’d come to identify myself as a “Zayn girl,” and I was mildly devastated that three years of waiting had led to this. Still, his health was more important, and it was going to be another fun, endless night with friends nonetheless. 

Camille’s VIP ticket was for the second day, so a group of us were going to spend the first day at the barricades, listening outside the venue. We got there with minutes to spare, securing a good spot away from everyone else who had the same idea we did. When “Clouds” started up, there was screaming all around me. I tried to feign being too cool to react at first, but quickly dropped it because it didn’t matter and this was bigger than me. And because I was so happy, I couldn’t believe it was happening. Nobody saw it, but I was grinning from ear to ear.

It started raining during “One Thing.” I flashed back briefly to when I first saw the video and couldn’t help the emotions that rushed through me—it seemed so long ago. We only sang louder and didn’t even attempt to run for cover. Fireworks exploded with color across the skies as the show drew to a close, and I took shitty videos on my low-fi toy camera that would remind me of Ang Nawawala. 

That Monday, I would try to take a short afternoon nap and wake up in the dark. I would miss everyone. The group would be gone, already jetted off to another city two thousand miles away. I would miss them and I would miss the sea. I would think back to hearing “Girl Almighty” live (for free!) and how euphoric and religious it felt, and I wouldn’t mind that this was what I had to remember, because it was so nice the way only the simplest things could be and I was learning to take what I could get and make it mean something. 

Next time, I would think, I’m getting a ticket. 

But as we all know by now, there wouldn’t be a next time. Less than a week after he announced his break from the tour, Zayn left the group altogether, for good this time, and the rest of the members would go on “indefinite hiatus” by the end of the year. And this is going to sound dramatic, but it led me to question everything I thought I knew. 

Even as my interest dwindled over the years, it became undeniable that One Direction had earned their place as icons for the 2010s. At the time I was unsure of many things regarding what’s to come for me, but I found comfort in the fact that I could be sure of them. I was convinced they weren’t going anywhere, and then they were just gone.

For the first time, I felt like I was getting old. My generation was beginning to date itself, little by little, and our cultural icons and markers were disappearing and becoming obsolete. This boy band was my little piece of fluffy escapism. It was easy to take them for granted; I could be interested in them without being invested. I’d counted on them to remain the same for a little while longer, but deep down I always knew they were meant to fade from those teenybopper magazine covers eventually—that was just the way things were.  

Still, I was twenty years old, and they were the biggest thing on earth. It was never easy to face the end of something you’d grown used to. If they couldn’t last, then did anything else have a chance?

I’ve come to think of these nights, ten months apart, as parallel to one another—two halves that come together to create my own great rock ‘n’ roll friendship movie. Think Detroit Rock City, Wayne’s World, Almost Famous, and, yes, Nick & Norah. One Direction, as it turned out, ended up being beside the point. Despite the hyperbolic gut reactions I’d written about, after seven years I’ve come to find that any feelings or thoughts I ever had for or about them have basically ceased to exist. 

(Except for the generational grudge I hold against Zayn for doing what he had to do just before the Manila stop of the tour, and the never ending rollercoaster of declaring I’m over him until he goes and does something hot like dressing up as Daredevil for Halloween or consistently taking a stand against Israel, after which I’m in love with him all over again. That’s never going away.) 

Looking back on it now, these two infinite nights ironically became the end of several things, even if some of them took longer to fizzle out than others. In the first essay I ever published, which was about Zayn’s departure, I wondered what else I might lose in time, and it wasn’t easy to go through the gradual process of finding out it would be the very friendships that made these adventures so special in the first place. Some of them I can freely admit to being partly my fault, while others are a bit more difficult to explain. 

I could never have survived that summer in 2014 or that precarious period of my life in 2015 without them, and it’s bittersweet to recall what we’ve been through now that we’re no longer in touch. Just another thing that I believed was permanent, only to have it pop like a bubble in my face. Now the best I can do is to wish them well. 

“Maybe this is growing up, learning to live with what you’ve been dealt,” I wrote then. “I think of my past self, how she would walk and feel and live and be, and how she has no god damn idea. Maybe the present is nothing more than feeling blindly for what’s to come.” 

I’ve always regarded the One Direction concert as some sort of desperate last hurrah, if only in terms of keeping up the pretense that I was doing well in school. But I know now that it was larger than that. It became a turning point, the end of an era, a certain finality to my youth. 

That night, just minutes after the concert finished, the streets were already clearing faster than I was expecting. We walked and saw them riddled with paraphernalia, and the physical proof was a relief. It all seemed so ephemeral all of a sudden, like they would poof away and it’d be like it never even happened. (How does “Night Changes” go again?) We waited out the dark at a gas station Family Mart having a 1 a.m. dinner of cup noodles. We tried to take turns napping, but I gave up and read The Disenchantments on my phone—a novel about young adults coming of age against a backdrop of music, temporary places, endings, and uncertain beginnings. 

At 6 a.m. I looked through the window and for some reason was surprised to see it was fully light out. It couldn’t possibly be morning. It couldn’t possibly be over. It couldn’t possibly belong in the past.

Alyssa and I decided to head out then—Camille still had her day-two VIP experience to look forward to. We got on a bus, our exhaustion giving way to a comfortable silence. My mind was already on other things. Neither of us spoke the entire time. 

I was going home, and I knew I couldn’t be stuck in suspension forever. I had to come clean. The days that would follow my confession about my non-graduation would be scary and miserable. I didn’t know then that I would find my way eventually, even if it took a few more wrong turns and plenty of time. I didn’t realize that my parents were on my side. Now that I’m older and I got to figure these parts out, I can recognize the power, bravery, and freedom of facing the coming changes and taking the next step forward, even if it meant letting go of what was safe and familiar.

The bus passed Coastal Mall, which I’d known from childhood. This place that I hadn’t seen in years and years was now dilapidated and abandoned—lonely, eerie, and in ruins. All around it, new buildings thrived, modern and edgy, and all it could do was fold it on itself and become lost in time, in a moment that’s simply no longer. Seeing it, along with the sleep deprivation, the anxiety, and a longing for all that took place only hours before, left me unable to figure out what I felt. But the sun was bright and the skies were clear and could tomorrow really be so bad if it looked like this? Anything could happen, and so many things were waiting for me. 

The future was wide open. 

Crying in hotel rooms, and other occupational hazards

The night before I left for Jeju Island, I had dinner at the mall with my sister who was back in Manila for a few days. My niece was with us, as well as our cousin and a friend. I stopped by the supermarket first for things I would need on my trip: apple shampoo, toothpaste, cherry blossom-scented soap I’d always wanted to try, a plug adapter because the letter from the travel agency had suggested it.

We met up at Scout’s Honor after. I picked at my meatballs as we discussed our jobs and burnout and what we did on our days off, which we didn’t get to talk about very often. Our lives after college pulled us in irreversibly different directions, one of us even living and working in a city thousands of kilometers away. It made catching up a bit more difficult than before.

We had never had a grownup dinner where it was just us, without our parents. It felt for the first time like we were regular young adults having another night out, like I’d read about in novels and seen in the movies. I thought it was something I could get used to.

Dylan was two and just beginning to speak in full sentences. Idly I watched her play with the puzzles and blocks the restaurant put out for customers and my mind was already a little bit far away, imagining all the places I was about to see.

I tried not to think about the time. The mall was about to close. I still had to pack. My flight was early.

I told myself: I’ll just lose sleep.

The rest of it went without saying: So I can have this.

✈

The first song I heard on the street when I arrived in the city, tinny but unmistakable on the loudspeakers of the underground shopping complex beneath Chilsung-ro, was “Spring Day.” At this point, I had probably listened to it hundreds of times in ardent anticipation of the trip, letting it occupy my headspace as I pictured canola blooms and clear crisp weather. A common, meaningless occurrence, hearing a very popular song by a very popular South Korean group in South Korea, but I was always a romantic, and it was obviously fate.

It was my first time traveling alone and I was fretting about it for weeks. My editor had texted asking if I would be free to go to Jeju Island for a story, and my calendar was blissfully blank. I had just gotten my passport renewed — it was exciting to finally get to go somewhere new with it.

I didn’t receive any information and I wasn’t actually sure it was happening until the day before the flight, when the travel agency sent me an email with my plane ticket and the itinerary for the tour. I’d never been on a press trip. I was used to taking my time in a new city until it became like a second home during month-long stays with my diplomat aunt. But now I only had four days and three nights. A change of pace, to say the least.  

I spent that first night trying to get used to my hotel room. I went on my private Twitter account for close friends and wrote about it: i have this whole room to myself (perfect for crying!) and i know i’m gonna miss it like hell already. Patch replied: do they have a tub? cause u really deserve a tub. They didn’t, but it was easily the nicest thing anyone has said to me anyway.  

I went to bed, awkwardly messing up the pristine sheets on one side as I got under the covers. I read a story on my phone, brightness turned low. Something about a writer who travels to a different country for work and falls in love, and it makes him happy, but he’s also sad, because he’s sad all the time. Something I kept coming back to because I found comfort in its muted melancholy.

It was 2 a.m. before I knew it. I had to be up in four hours. I left the story unfinished, watched my lock screen fade to black, and closed my eyes.

✈

I couldn’t fathom trying to muster the energy and commitment to hike three hundred steps up the Seongsan Ilchulbong Peak, so I ducked out of the tour group when nobody was looking and went across the fields to look at the sea instead.

I walked along the streets first, took in the people selling tangerines on the roadside and tried to pluck up the courage to enter a coffee shop or McDonald’s. But I was afraid of seeming like such a tourist, much too aware of being by myself and of the language barrier, so I ended up at the nearby 7-Eleven. I went to the counter with a bottle of pear-flavored Sprite and felt myself uncoil somewhat from being so tightly wound when I managed to avoid messing up “감사합니다.”

I sat at the hexagonal wooden table outside and stared at the brick wall opposite me with a sign that said 해녀민박 — Haenyeo Bed and Breakfast — above it. There was an image of a Jeju woman diver (the haenyeo in question) on the bottom left, standing regal and proud in her diving gear.

It was beginning to rain.

I walked out to the edge of the field that overlooked the water, the wind whipping around me, and tried to memorize everything I could see. There was the peak to my left, looking like the opposite of ephemeral where it stood starkly framed by the morning sun. There was the surrounding town, so familiar already that my heart ached a little at the thought of leaving, at the thought that my time with it had begun to run out before I even stepped off the bus because we were never meant to stay in one place for too long. And then there was the off-kilter shape of the sea. From where I stood, it didn’t look all that different from the bleak, empty skies.

There was a protective barrier on the edge which was barely up to my thigh. The thought entered my head, unbidden as it always was: It would be so easy to jump. My fingers twitched with an impulse to walk up to it and peer at the pale grey depths waiting below. I shook it off and braced myself against the chill, huddling tighter in my leather jacket as I headed for cover from the rain though I didn’t really mind it.

At the airport waiting to fly back home I would listen to “Waiting for My Sun to Shine” by The Maine, and the lyrics would remind me of this moment, somehow already in the past.

And it wouldn’t occur to me until three months later how not normal that was. To be in another country, someplace I’d never been, looking out into something beautiful and only thinking what a nice place it would be to die.  

Earlier that month, Anna Borges had published an essay on The Outline titled “I am not always very attached to being alive,” comparing constant, reflexive suicidal ideation to living in the ocean. In it, she discussed the “nebulous gray space between fleeting thought and attempt,” where there’s a passivity and indifference to the feeling of wanting to die, more background noise than anything.

One of the songs I kept listening to on repeat those days was “Dark Water” by JR JR, its chorus a devastating suggestion that maybe you were always drowning, and you just now realize that you were. So you could say I understood it a little too well, that resignation and recognition that it was just another side effect of mental illness, just another part of who I’d become. Not always an emergency — sometimes the act of it was mundane and ordinary, like washing your hands or crossing the street.

Borges further wrote about learning to tread these unpredictable waters, of trying to keep your head above the surface and stay afloat. Some floatation devices, she said, were like driftwood, “shallow motivators, hardly anchors to life, but sometimes you just need something that will get you through the month. Or the week. Or the night.” Others were life preservers, more sturdy and long-term, helping you swim towards some semblance of a future.

This is something I’ve been doing for longer than I care to admit. My relationship with my own future has become precarious and complicated. An anonymous message I got on Tumblr when I was 17 asked what it was that I did when I felt like dying or when everything got to be too much, and I answered that I sought something to look forward to, that I would regret missing, no matter how shallow (pesto pasta, a new movie) or far-fetched (visiting New York, meeting a celebrity crush).  

An excerpt from one of the last entries I posted on Dayre before I left it for good:

I honestly can’t imagine how there could possibly be anything more, anything left for me, even if I somehow reach a stable plane of existence and become a functional human being.

There are flashes, sometimes: A published novel. A pet cat. Watching my niece grow up. A studio apartment with big windows and enough space for all my books for once.

“The ocean is nice sometimes,” Borges concluded somewhere near the end of her essay. I must have been thinking the same thing as we left the Seongsan Peninsula. Not just bodies of water, but also the state of being suspended. Whether you’re desperately holding on, or letting yourself be washed away. Despite that brief lapse into the unmentionable, I felt more like myself than I had in a while. No longer so concerned with being a tourist, struck instead by a sudden sense of belonging. I always did think to myself that if I had to settle somewhere, it would be a quaint seaside town.

Out there on the field, I spotted a group of haenyeo bobbing up and out of the water, fresh catches in tow. I had read about them once in a magazine: how they were known for their independence and power, some of them well into their 80s, making an honest living diving for fish. And now here they were, right in front of me. Our tour guide had mentioned that we might see them if we were really lucky.

The friends I had made in the tour group were wistful, lamenting what a shame it was that they had missed the haenyeo. I listened to them as I leaned against the window, and made no move to tell them what I had seen. Some magical moments you just had to keep to yourself.

✈

I was moving on autopilot, spending the day trips sightseeing and being friendly with my companions who had no idea how depressed I was. I smiled for pictures and kept up with pleasant conversation. I passed the banchan as we had a meal and laughed along. At night I would go back to my hotel room, drained and boneless, and just fend off the cold and the sudden loneliness while I began sobbing in the dark for no reason.

I was running out of layers.

I wouldn’t be able to stop picturing it for months: the room, every light turned off, no air conditioning because it was spring and the cold slipped in through the closed windows and chilled the hardwood beneath my bare feet. Shadows and lights from passing cars crawled across the bed and onto the ceiling, and I’d lie awake at unguarded hours shrinking under the blankets and quietly wailing.

✈

So far, the days in Jeju had been glacial and unforgiving, the last impressions of winter overstaying their welcome. It was like the weather was my mood ring, the skies coloring the city a palette of blues and greys, the rain seeping through to my skin as though I needed a reminder of how gloomy it was inside.

But everything was different on the fourth day, when I hauled my once-again-full suitcase out onto the street and turned my face up to the kind of morning I’d been hoping for. Our bus pulled away from the hotel for the last time and I watched the scenery change out the window, saying goodbye to all of it the only way I knew how.

When I try to recall it now, I don’t think about the activities we did together or the places we went. Instead I think of the scent of pine and saltwater, the miyeokguk and tangerine juice at breakfast, the greenhouses that reminded me of Burning. Silly, seemingly fleeting details, like using a public bathroom encased in two-way mirrors at Jeju Glass Castle or buying a cactus pen as a souvenir because I found it cheap and cute and discovering months later that BTS’ Namjoon had one exactly like it.

I think about that weird, unmoored feeling of being part of a tour group as a solo traveler and meeting all kinds of people, and how nice it could be to just go along with it and let things happen.

I’d brought my favorite plastic film camera with me to remember it all by. And while I don’t particularly enjoy having my picture taken, the friends I had made insisted on documenting every little stop of our tour. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t turn down their offers to take my photo among the canola fields or next to some mascot at a theme park, leaving me with an album that allows me to say, over and over again, “I was here.”

But the definitive snapshot that I’ve kept in my mind is this: the sun out and bright as the skies bled blue between evergreen trees, radiating warmth and welcomeness all around. A perfect day made even better with a summer latte — smooth, sweet iced coffee topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream. A last-chance glimpse at what Jeju really looked like in the spring.

✈

Four months later I was in Singapore, exhausted after having gotten up at 5 a.m., almost missing a 10 a.m. flight, and heading straight to the indoor flea market event I’d volunteered to cover in Marina Bay Sands, which lasted until 7 p.m.

I met up with my sister for dinner at NY Night Market, worried that we would have nothing to talk about — we’re both quiet people, and we’ve never been all that close or actually spent any time alone together. We both ordered pasta and shared a plate of ranch cheese fries. I asked her about work and she asked about my day. We moved on to other things, and it didn’t feel like small talk.

(“I cried watching Hello, Love, Goodbye because I could relate to it,” she said. “Did it remind you of your previous relationships?” I joked. But she clarified, “No, their lives as OFWs, being apart from their families,” and then I definitely wasn’t joking around anymore.)

The rest was comfortable silence. I hadn’t considered it, maybe forgotten it because she’d been away for three years, but we’d always been able to do our own thing and still count as company. It takes a lot of trust and familiarity to be with someone and not feel the need to fill the quiet.

Unlike Jeju, I knew Singapore like the back of my hand. I lived there for a month when I was 18 and returned a couple of times, and it was an easy city to get to know regardless. It’s taught me independence from the first time I went out alone and found my own way around a foreign country as a teenager. (To meet the bassist of my then-favorite band, but that’s a story for another long-winded essay.)

I had a free day before I had to fly back home, and I was going to spend it revisiting a few of my favorite places and taking pictures. I got an MRT pass that gave me unlimited rides for a day and read Normal People by Sally Rooney, bought at Kinokuniya first thing that morning, on the train or whenever I stopped and sat somewhere.

I started at Somerset Station and slowly made my way through the loose route I had in mind, though I didn’t really venture that far: Dhoby Ghaut, Bencoolen, Clarke Quay, Tiong Bahru. I considered visiting my old apartment block in Queenstown but thought better of it because it wasn’t worth the long walk in the dry heat — if I had, I would’ve seen that the teal and lavender facade I’d adored was gone, replaced with a drab all-over white and the barest orange creamsicle accents.

The main item on my agenda was the art installation BooksActually was hosting at the theater development space Centre 42, which I learned about in their newsletter. Called “The World’s Loneliest Bookstore,” it had a vividly imagined post-apocalyptic concept where a freak solar flare leaves only 4,169 people alive in the whole world, and the one remaining person in Singapore has scavenged paintings and books and set up the last bookstore on earth as she attempts to reach anybody else who could possibly be out there.

The installation itself was just as detailed: a shelf stood lined with eggs, cereal, matches, and odd knick-knacks, an old radio hummed with throwback pop and static, and the woman from the story sat behind a counter, content with her solitude. Visitors could buy secondhand books and pick up printed paraphernalia with poetry. My favorite was the table with dozens of house keys bearing handwritten addresses. You could choose one to take with you, and I decided on one emblazoned with the word LUCKY.

At 1 a.m. I left my hotel room and walked along an eerily vacant Orchard Road to clear my head. (Nevermind that I had another early flight in a few hours.) I went to the basement 24-hour Japanese grocery, walking listlessly through the aisles past other twenty-somethings who obviously didn’t value their sleep. I didn’t have a lot of room in my suitcase, so all I bought were a couple of instant noodles I wanted to try: the Pokemon seafood ramen with tiny Pikachus in the form of fish cakes, and this insanely good salt and lemon yakisoba.

This late-night walk crosses my mind whenever I hear “Better Now” by Disco Hue, one of my favorite bands from Singapore. But at the time I must have been listening to “Song Request” — pretending I were one of those people in its music video, lonely but sufficed in a darkened city.

✈

I sometimes think about what it would’ve been like if I hadn’t gotten into BTS right before I went to Jeju. If any of it would have meant half as much.

Everything was so new. It’s embarrassing to think about now, but it was wonderful timing to be right there as I experienced those first few weeks of obsessing over a recently acquired interest I already felt very deeply for. It was the same rush you got from a school crush: that hyper-awareness of proximity, of standing in place and knowing they’d been there once, too — no longer as hyperbolic, but every bit as fervent. They followed me around; I saw them everywhere without really looking.

I can’t listen to “Spring Day” without being reminded of everything, the song and the memories inseparable, forever linked.

And because I only grew to love them even more as the months passed, they made a significant impact on my other trips too.

I never would’ve made fast friends with another underpaid and overworked Manila writer at the Singapore event who had a Koya keychain and said she liked the Hoseok sticker on my camera. I ran into her outside a train station the next day while having my little adventure but hid behind my book because I didn’t know how to say hi. We shared a ride to the airport for our flight home, and I would’ve liked to, but we didn’t keep in touch.

 

 

I never would’ve made a “delulu” joke that “What if we’re going to the same country?” one month later when I flew out to Singapore again for another story and BTS also happened to be flying somewhere that same morning, only to find out on Bon Voyage that we actually were at Changi Airport at the exact same time, not very far from each other at all. The hyper-awareness of proximity was belated this time, and it’s not like I ran into them, but it’s still a fun and endlessly frustrating story to tell. No one on Archive of Our Own could’ve written it better.

I never would’ve recognized “Mikrokosmos” as it played in the candy-scented lobby of Hello Kitty Island. (Map of the Soul: Persona had just come out and I wasn’t over the novelty of it just yet.) Never would’ve listened to the very same song on the plane back to Manila as I looked out the window at the night sky, crying all I wanted because it was a charter flight and I had the entire row to myself.

The fog and lights in Jeju made it hard to see the stars, but here they were bigger and brighter and there were more of them than I had ever seen in my life.

✈

I’ve been very fortunate to have had jobs that took me places. Writing the article itself was always strange because I had to stick to the relevant details, the half-hearted observations that went towards my word count: The Teddy Bear Museum draws crowds of keen Princess Hours fans. The indoor flea market has a section dedicated to Instagrammable food like milk in cookie cups and White Rabbit soft serve. The elevators at Legoland Hotel play “Everything Is AWESOME!!!” by Tegan and Sara feat. The Lonely Island all day under disco lights.

I had to omit such a big part of the experience — namely, my depression and how it affected the way I perceived and internalized what was going on around me. All that time to myself that was a relief, but could also be alienating. The unease of trying to enjoy myself when I’d grown unaccustomed to it. The detachment that seemed to manifest physically as the slow sensation of being hollowed out. The constant notion that I never thought I’d (still) be here.

Everything was precious and important, and everything was pointless and temporary.

In that story I keep reading, the protagonist imagines writing about the things that actually mattered to him on his sojourn — the raw, haunting, personal traces that exposed too much. In the end, his final piece held nothing about wounds and scars, or an inconsequential grocery store, or the person he’d fallen in love with. But the idea of what he called “becoming a part of a place instead of simply walking through it” remained.

I didn’t keep a journal that year. I came to remember my travels in pieces: stray notes on my phone and scraps of paper, an untitled Spotify playlist labeled only with emojis (a daisy, a cactus, and an orange), bad film photography, tweets I wrote in the moment, tweets I wrote when I began to miss it. I wrote this to unravel the rest of it, the ugly parts I couldn’t put in print.

Depression has this way of making every surreal, beautiful, monumental thing that happens to you feel like it’s something you’ve held on long enough to see. I count it all up. I hold it for safekeeping. Each one becomes so much more poignant, and lands with much more weight, especially after almost a year of not being able to leave home. As though something up there must have known that I couldn’t afford to waste any more time or throw any more of my life away.

I cut my hair short right before I went to Jeju. I haven’t had a haircut since. It’s strange to note that fragments of that version of me are still here. I always came home feeling like I’d lived through something, like I wasn’t the same. Some of it hurts like anything, but when I look back on it now, there’s only nothing but fondness.

I’ve lived through so many things already. It’s not so bad, I know now, to live through this.