a long and arduous way of saying happy new year, i love you and i miss you mother

It’s a grey and anxious January.

The hotel isn’t cold. It isn’t warm. Shivers settle under my skin from time to time. My eye twitches. Hard of breathing. I immediately think of Omicron, but my test result the other day was negative. Nothing detected. Even the doctor said nothing is wrong with me, and yet, I feel all the wrong in the world.

I go out for walks to fill the day, confuse the hours, morning or afternoon, it didn’t matter, the nausea followed me around. No appetite. Only green juices and maybe a salad to pick at.

I see if visiting an old love will do. Bookstores. I go to theory and art critique. Design, interviews, nothing. I think of purchasing a book on African poetry, but the storekeeper is talking to a writer. She is small, shielded in a Bottega Venetta green, ribbed turtleneck with a checkered wool blazer. She holds a mini plush bag in black. She constantly looks in the corner as she speaks, as if a teleprompter is there. I look at what she’s looking at and all I see is a blur, books flush with a vagueness, academic unanswered questions flushing the world out of a solution.

I sit down, pretending to flip through a photography monograph, unsure of what I’m looking at are people or places. Nausea, the day’s chosen cologne, overcast weather, a crowded weekend, I don’t know. But it is nausea and I’m flipping and flipping through the pages until there isn’t a book in my hands, but an end.

And I am ending. Right there on the chair in a bookstore in Seoul so far from everything I know and everyone I love. Do you get it? This immense pressure on my chest because the new year has blown into me an air that I cannot breathe.

I leave what I love, only to go to another bookstore. This time it is empty. There is only me, and I’m given time to flip through many things.

These days, I lack patience. I don’t know if it’s the 빨리빨리 culture or if it’s this incessant need to consume, but I cannot stop. Content. Taking pictures. Talking to strangers. Inviting them to events and galleries of half-interest.

I mean their meetings well. They mean well. Is it over-saturation? Have the countless cafes and pop up stores enriched me with a gout? With a kind of diabetes that makes nausea less bearable. Is it treatable? Is this what New York feels like?

Self-infliction. Self-destruction. Yet the eruption hasn’t happened yet. This isn’t the calm before the storm. This is suspense.

I am suspended.

Dissatisfaction picks up my pace, my fears, and jumbled them into steps towards one of those donkatsu places you don’t think twice about. Places where you didn’t think hunger could be.

It comes out, bigger than my head, filled with cheese. A side of potato soup and a coleslaw, even a macaroni salad. I slice my knife into it and it crisps with a golden fragrance that claps out my fatigue. But as soon as I’m ready to eat, my eye twitches with a tear, and in my dismembered donkatsu, I see my mother’s face, battered and broken by years of nurture, nurturing me, nurturing herself, through thick and thin. She doesn’t have a father or a mother. No husband. And once, her own son.

Many times I’ve tried to end my life at sixteen. By hanging, by overdose. By plastic bags over my head, rubber-banded by the neck. Looking back, I can only laugh yet it’s incredible how much now I yearn to feel as I did as a teenager. Where have my feelings gone?

But in that restaurant, in seeing how far my mother has come, nearing an age where she aches when she jumps, my eye burned as if something had ripped a chipped tooth into my cornea. I took a tissue to my eye, rubbed vigorously, seeing reality out of one eye, my mother’s past in the one eye shut. She’s screaming at me about a stain in the carpet but it turns out to be sunlight. Other patrons ate alone, not looking up from their phones. At red lights, she stares blankly at empty highways. The restaurant was hot with dry air. She is laughing at a thing I said or did that she pees a little on her California King. The meal was only about $8. She is there in my eye and I was here having an emotional fit in the corner of the world.

And tears fell into my food. I let them fall because if I had kept them in there, in the eye that is my mother, I would’ve drowned her, past or present, here or there, anywhere I hurt and I hurt others.

I left the meal half-finished. Quickly paid without a word and walked into what was already night with a fang-like moon. My eye twitches again, but this time dampens my vision with clarity. My vision burns with clarity and it is the new year, finally. Maybe 10 days late, but better late than never.

I’m going to love my mother the way she wanted to try and love me. I may not understand her and she may not understand me, but I’ve stopped blaming her for the ways I struggled in the suburbs.

Two years time, I’m coming home, finally.