mucus in the pineal gland —
or how the past becomes suddenly present, and the present seems mediated by the long passage of years.
When death occurs, the internal and the external meet.
Your eyes drip with tears and your heart rips open.
Your knuckles go white and your stomach croaks.
My father died when I was sixteen.
For my mother, it was tougher than war.
She came here for the American dream.
Me, I was just born with it.
Marriage was taken away from her. All fifteen years of it. To cope, she bought a cemetery plot right beside him.
On a Sunday after church and dim sum, we came to his grave to talk to him about our days.
I usually told him little things. Things I never braved to say when he was alive.
I thought of you when a bird circled the setting sun.
I like boys.
I tried to kill myself by overdosing on melatonin gummies.
I have a stomachache.
All this pain, I put it on myself.
To my mother’s surprise, a mound of dirt sat next to his tombstone.
My mother wasn’t furious. Defeat and fatigue blushed her face.
Death seemed to follow her.
Her father had passed away in the war.
And her father-in-law had passed away not too long before my father did.
A few years later, she lost her mother.
Loss knows my mother.
Loss is her shadow.
Goddamn the California sun. Her shadow has such a strong grip on her.
Years after, she learned how to love again.
This was during the Trump era.
I was embarrassed for America. I was an embarrassed American.
Was I even seen as American?
So, I left for South Korea.
It’s more conservative here, but I’ve been able to feel less anxious about micro-aggressions.
Do you know what it’s like to breathe?
On bad days, you have to wear a mask because the fine dust is harmful.
The dust can kill you.
COVID could kill my mother, but she is more worried that the vaccine will kill her.
She escaped war. She knows what can kill her.
What do I know?
I know that I don’t know much. Days and days come bite-sized. Living in the present tense is a continuous practice. Anxiety is a concept I try to fumble with less and less.
Everything doesn’t need a reason, but everything has a history.
I’m still trying to create my own.
Does my mother know that?
Or am I creating reason? Reasons?
She calls them excuses.
She calls me on the phone to tell me that my bank account is, once again, at a low balance.
No, she texts me this.
We don’t talk much anymore.
The last time I said, I love you, was last year.
To my boyfriend.
Ex-boyfriend.
Did it mean anything anymore?
Days begin without me. They end without me knowing.
There is so much light in the days it’s hard to imagine deaths in the summer.
My dad’s dead. And I can’t remember if he died on August 31st or if that was his birthday.
He begins and he ends, even without his body.
I envy his history. Everyone said he was a good man.
But no one knows how cold he was when he tried to raise me.
Panic attacks. Beatings. Beatings during panic attacks. Locked up in a dark garage. Too dark to even think of turning the lights on, to breathe light into my childhood.
As a child, you only begin your own history.
As a child, I think the only person that loved me was myself.
On the quietest days, I would sneak under my desk and hold myself, thumb my shoulders to signal to myself that the world was small.
Thumbs on my shoulders, rotations on the roundest edges, little globes.
My knees next, until my head sunk in between them.
Until I became as small as the world.
Coworkers said my father had charisma.
Close friends said he was kind and funny.
I try to imagine those things, but only see him on the sofa with the Sunday paper, the cartoons tossed to the side.
I imagine myself scanning the cartoons, trying to find my father there somewhere.
Non-sequiturs confused me. Why is it that when I think of my father, I can only think of my eight-year-old self?
Perigee Gallery
I walk in with a friend.
Mucous membrane.
External surface, internal parts. Jung Sungyoon, an artist that works in mechanical installations and videography.
Shapes, clockwork movements, still and silent.
In the first room, there is an incomprehensible video on the floor.
Orbs, digitally created, melt and morph into other mechanical objects on screen.
I ask my friend if he likes this kind of art.
Yes, he says. You don’t have to think. Everything is presented there for you.
We talk over the video, about Jesse Kanda, about the uncanny valley.
What a privilege it is to be man made, flourished full with an Apple Pencil, and to live forever only until the screen goes dark. Death does not exist for the digital bodies on screen.
I imagine a body composed of zeroes and ones. My body.
Someone walks in, and we leave.
In another exhibition hall, two big black discs rotate on top of each other in opposite directions, but because they are black, the blackest black, it looks like they hardly move at all.
Is this how life works?
The discs move as one body. Have I ever done that with somebody?
My father and I have always moved in opposite directions. He comes to the dinner table, and I leave.
He asks me a question, and I turn it into an argument.
I am a child and he is an adult.
Now, the same thing is happening with my mother and I.
In the far corner of the hall, there are gears that continuously grind lube without ever going dry.
This is a luxury. I wish I could have what the gears have, this continuous cycle without end, without ever needing to stop for anyone.
It does not know death. Is that its greatest handicap?
In the middle of the room is a lump of chrome-plated aluminum. It doesn’t begin anywhere or end anywhere, yet remains lifeless in its fixed morphology.
All of this was man-made.
And it’s funny, for man to create these things, to extend a portion of reality beyond its end.
It’s hard to understand this when you come from war.
I’m only a byproduct of war.
My friend is too.
But we don’t talk about it, our parents.
Rather, we talk about types of men, what to wear next season, if we’d be able to bear the current season, dinner.
Summer is aggressive this season, no remorse in the evenings.
And I get angry.
With myself.
Because I am summer and my mother is spring.
Or whatever season California exists in.
I miss places like people.
I miss people like places.
As if they are something to occupy, discover, live in.
A cicada rests on my window screen. Samba music plays.
All of this only survives for summer.
I think of knocking the cicada from my window, but I let it sing.
See what it has to say. Its vibrations string along to Sergio Mendes & Brasil ’66.
I think it has confused the music for a woman because it squeezes a screech out of itself as if begging to be loved.
I blush for it.
Can summer love spring?
Yes, I’m asking if I can love my mother even after the Trump era.
When death breathes, what are the remains of the day?
A parasite in my stomach.
Sleep escapes me. I toss and turn, wondering which day will wash my aching limbs with okayness.
In the womb. Did my mother love me when I was a fetus?
Was love lined along the umbilical cord?
Then-love.
Now-love.
I grind Tums in between my teeth until my appetite numbs. Until I imagine my beat of my short breaths to a plateaued line, a thinness as that of a shedded cicada skin, clinging past death, creating a mocking shell of life, living.
How did she want to define it?
How will we define it?
Our love. Our love?
In the meantime, I continue to hold myself, mold myself into the shape of the earth, a circle, a cycle, external surface, internal parts, trying to be loved.
