Eye Contact

Another week. It seems like the days all blend into one massive stream, just like a river is made up of nothing more than little drips. Just little drips of almost nothing that somehow combine into this great big thing that is life. That takes life, if you're not careful. I don't know how I got here except that I was pushed by days upon days, all of them running after each other as those behind spill into their absence. That's how rivers are made, and that's what turns boys into old men. Will I be a wise old man?

God only knows.

I've come to this coffee shop in my neighborhood called "The Place to Feel Coffee." I was put off by the name at first, but in reality, the place is really about as cute and charming as the syntactic error that it is called by. The lady that owns it smiles at me every time and greets me in Korean. She doesn't try to speak English or ask me who I am or why I'm here. Most of the people here treat me like I'm some sort of celebrity, always pointing, gasping, or trying to ask me a million questions. I love that I'm just another customer to her. It seems like she lives a life of very simple ambition. I think that's where peace comes from. I wish I was a person of peace, but I've never been able to simplify my ambitions. She has a sort of plump face (rare in Korea. Everyone is apallingly thin) a bright smile offset by the plae colors she wears under her apron. If I was 10-15 years older, I'd be crushing hard.

The young lady at the table opposite says something about 왜국이 (forigner) and sneaks a picture of me with her camera phone. I am avoiding eye contact.

Recently I told a complete stranger that the curse of being human is to be continually stuck in the present, with no indication of how our story would end. All we have are questions and trust.

I am not very good at trust.

Am I moving, or are these tiny drips pushing me? If I try to stop, will they find their way over my head, and pull me down with them?

The Moon's Response

First off, an apology: This is something that was promised a while ago, and my camera is broken, so you'll have to make do with a camera phone picture. I would say that I've been hard at work on it, but... well without giving anything away (or implying that I am trying to say anything deep) I guess sometimes when you are waiting to hear back from some great big thing... you have to wait a while for your response. If any of this confuses you, oh loyal reader(s?) check this first.



Do you mistake me yet again,
this deep violet you call black,
and all the simple scurriers
scramble underneath
whatever stones could throw
my evening music back?

I no longer take measurements.
As though one were small
because it is not two.
Count the stars for me.
Dare to say
that they outnumber you.

I will not.

This world is made of tiny things
though few have noticed, like
the particles of light
that paint your body as we
dizzy ourselves with abandon.

The whole of darkness cannot hide it.

I am silence because of noise,
the winter cold because of fur,
and some are naked for the same.
Would you breathe a little longer
when I'm gone? Just like every
dawn follows it's inevitable
sunset, I will find you if you stay.

Yes, let us dance once more
into wonderful, wrecklessness, wondering
weather the night is cold,
and you are small, and I
am hanging by a curtain behind
the world, waiting to wake up?

A Sweater

I have had two glorious days of time to myself. Once, I was too insecure to enjoy time to myself. That's what we call loneliness. These days, I realize that alone is the hand I've been dealt for the time being, and it's actually not a bad place to be.

I'm starting to live like an old man. I go to bed before midnight and wake up before 8 no matter what. The crazy free spin of the weekends makes me long for the starched regularity of the midweek like I long for my morning cup of coffee. That's another habit I've taken to lately. Some days I don't recognize me. I'm not sure now if that evokes a positive or a negative feeling. I use to love not recognising myself, but I think that was because I hated myself. I'm currently developing a mild tollerance for me, that I am hoping will develop into a real friendship. Who knows... maybe a little something more...

I have decided that for as long as I live in Korea, I will brush my teeth while showering. Given the fact that my shower consists of my entire bathroom. I just think it's best to do as much as I can before I turn off the water. Otherwise, it's just cold and wet. Shaving is also difficult, since the steam from the water fogs up the mirror. I think I am going to grow a mustache again. This is my way of saying that I am going to be single for a while longer.

There's a grocery store that I have to take two busses to get to. It has a lot of the sorts of things that Americans expect their grocery stores to have. I am considering a trip there on the offchance that they might have some coffee creamer.

Spring is beginning to show its face here in Daegu, after what seems to be the longest winter I have ever experienced.

I am speaking in purely literal terms, of course. Don't mistake my ramblings for metaphor with any amount of depth.

Anyway, spring is a sort of new development here, so you never know when the weather is going to revert back. I don't know how to dress. I'll just take a sweater and hope for the best.

There will be a wedding this afternoon.

Meredith anf Kayoo.

A birthday this evening.

Tiffany.

I know what insecurity it is that makes me feel lonely, but what is it that makes me feel so strange during all this celebration and living that keeps happening all around me? I have only so much time to figure myself out before I miss it.

Day Of Fools

Today is a day for fools,who duck in and out of coffee shops, Chinese restaurants and libraries, shirking every work responsibility and sacred duty. I have decided that I am a fool, and I would do well to celebrate myself on this day, as a monument to the great inactivity that rests on the souls of such creatures as will spend a third of their lives dreaming.

And if their waking life appears to be no more than a dream? So much the better. That we could travel and attempt in this life for so long, and be at the end presented with our diploma: a blank page.

To have loved. To have lost. To have found because of loss.

Does God love us seperately from our lives, or can He love in spite of them? The very fabric of this world dangles by a delicate string, fluttering in the wind. How strong will it blow? Will we come apart at the end? Why so downcast, O my soul? We have only so long to wander as fools.

My Mess

My desk is a mess of all the things I thought I was going to need someday. I do need them.

Do I need them?

I need them.

The books and teacher's guides for the 4 grades of English I teach. Two sets of Jenga blocks with English words (one is 5th and one is 3rd grade appropriate) for when they get too tired to learn. My coffee thermos. Don't even get me started about that one. Need. Notebooks.

I have so many notebooks, one for each of the things I am trying to be.

A poet.
A musician.
A teacher.
A Writer.
A prophet or a saint (I'm not really sure which anymore).
An artist.

Can I be all those things, or is there just too much clutter on my desk? I'll never know until I start to clean it off, and someday I might look back at my sparkling clean workspace, no pressure but to sit on it and think...

Wasn't there once...

... something?

Of course, that's a silly thing to think, for there to be something. Not when desks can be clean, and people can go home not wondering with all their whats and wasn't theres.

Maybe I should leave it for another day.

Thursday

I have some questions.

Most of the time, they go unanswered. It's usually pretty simple stuff.

"Excuse me, can you tell me where..."

"What time do we start..."

"What is this? Do I eat it?"

I don't mind when the simple questions go unanswered. I'll find out soon enough anyway, but I have some other questions, and when I'm through asking the first lot, I expect to hear some answers. Clear answers.

I'm not quite sure who from though.

I'm waiting for the subway again, rolling through the dark underground, trying to write by artificial light. When does the next car come? 지하철? 언제?

Soon. It's coming soon.

3 more days. I am counting down on my planner every day. Perhaps in 3 days, something really will happen. Maybe not. Maybe it will just be thursday. Maybe the world will end. Maybe it will begin.

The man sitting next to me notices that I am trying to write something while standing in he crowded subway. He makes space and motions for me to sit. He is staring over my shoulder the whole time, as if he can read what I'm writing. I would think that he can, except that he seems so interested.

What do you want?

3 days.

Soon. It is coming soon.

I Have Always Lived Here

I feel like Diggory from The Magician's Nephew. Trapped in the world between worlds. If you asked me, I would tell you that I've always been here. Perhaps that's not even a lie.

Of course, I'm in a real place. I'm in South Korea. I live here. I'm a public school English teacher and a taxpayer on two continents (I still have to figure some of that out, I fear I must do paperwork). There's a glass, a sheen to this world though. I only see it as a casual observer, like through one of those mirrored glass cases where they keep all the deserts. I'm not sure which side of the case I'm on though, or for whom the obvious myrth of this interaction is intended.

The texture and sparkle of this place (or perhaps the sparkle of my eyes as I look at it) excuses me from so many things. I have never had to discuss religion, sign a petition, give blood or even perform complicated banking procedures. It is not expected that I should interact with this world in such a way as to change it, nor that it should change me. I get paid. They built a Mc'Donalds. That is all we will hear on the subject.

My eyes get a little warm and misty at night on the bus. It's not sadness or depression rearing its ugly head again. This is what happens when you're tired and you ride the bus a lot at night, routes you could never navigate during the day. Some places only exist at night with blurry eyes.

This fog spills out of me and into my world, slowly filling it to the very top, where the people would go to breathe if they saw the way I look at them sometimes. And all the words painted on the windows bleeding behind neon light join in the mist so happily, their meaning obscured to everything but the simplest of phrases.

That is a motel.

A Chinsese restaurant.

A PC room.

A bar.

I'm drowsy from the rumble of the bus; the slow, steady, bobbing up and down with the indestinguishable divets in the long winding road that somehow never quite seems to stop anywhere I would call home. Maybe that's my fault, though I know I'm not the one driving this thing.

If I squint my eyes just right, everything numbs and sparks, blurs to a soft red. When I open them again, will the world have dissappeared? Or, will I suddenly find myself transported? Perhaps to that elusive place that I keep chasing, though I am constantly leaving things that I had sworn embodied it? Does it even exist anymore?