mythology – an ongoing construction
beautiful world, where are you
Some time after God sent pebbles into dinosaurs, my mother decided to love a man so much to want to bear a version of him in her womb.
For three spring moons, my father held my mother like a trophy, one of those plastic ones I got from soccer games where everyone is a team player, a real winner, so nobody has to feel bad about themselves.
I was born to become a disappointment. I didn’t have his wealth or his discipline. She looked at me with shame because I was a materialization of all her bad habits.
1.
I was born from the way you stuttered my name. Below zero in Toulouse. On our first kiss, I bled on you at your apartment. I drank too little water or it was my childhood nosebleeds haunting me. I was 21 and you were reckless and in love with American Apparel, before it went bankrupt.
Syllabically, you split my name in your nervousness, pronounced the t and th too many times to count, and I recited my own name to save your embarrassment, to remind myself that I had a name.
These days, I don’t hear my name very often. No one writes it out for me in texts or voices it on calls. It becomes something like a ghost, falling back into bed when I rise in the morning.
2.
I was born in the morning, at the same time a Starbucks docked in a corporate office opens, or when my father usually wakes up. My birth somehow aligned with his standards, his first sense of awareness as his first son.
Born an Aries, born a rising sun. I wonder if I felt like fire. What I only know now is that my time of birth is my mother’s body alarm. She wakes with me.
The love I have for my mother is the same love I have for my writing, sometimes and broken up by good seasons.
The past isn’t something I carry. It follows me.
3.
I got the iPhone 12 mini as a totem of sorts to remember the moments I had with my iPhone 5S. And now, the iPad mini has returned.
The iPad carried the death of my MacBook – after exhausted years from over-burning CD’s and streaming pirated Criterion films – and the weight of my first two years of undergrad in San Francisco. Quick. Fast. At the time, it spoke dialects of both at-home use and school-use with some fluency in keeping up with my hours at cafes with a decent battery.
2021 has now become too nostalgic for my own good, a return to all things that have felt so natural in the course of my reckless adolescence.
Is there something I’m not admitting to myself here? Now? In a time where oversharing and transparency seem ubiquitous to one’s image, self-image, and image for others?
Images for others?
4.
“I think of the twentieth century as one long question, and in the end we got the answer wrong. Aren’t we unfortunate babies to be born when the world ended? After that there was no chance for the planet, and no chance for us. Or maybe it was just the need of one civilization, ours, and at some time in the future another will take its place. In that case, we are standing in the last lighted room before the darkness. Everyone is at once hysterically attached to particular identity categories and completely unwilling to articulate what those categories consist of, how they came about, and what purposes they serve.”
– Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You
5.
I used to be the kind of suicidal teen that always wished he wasn’t born. I didn’t ask for it. Which is funny for me because my name in Hebrew means gift.
Birthdays aren’t for me. How I celebrate is by turning off my phone and escaping. Usually it’s a place I escape to. Somewhere foreign, where I am unwanted. Where I am nobody. Because that is the reminder of my birth, to go back to days before, where I am not yet known.
Because I tell people I write, most people gift me notebooks or pens for my birthday. I have always hated this because it reminds me of the work I am not doing. For every blank page there is in the long line of notebooks I already own, an ounce of disappointment fills me. And I’m to the brim. I am now overflowing with guilt that doesn’t even disappoint my mother, but my entire lineage, her maiden name, my heritage.
6.
On a day hungover, I made it out to a gallery where little pillows were sown together with childhood objects to make plush seats, plastic toys, notebooks scrawled with notes from, perhaps, the artist’s childhood. Albeit uncomfortable, they looked like clumps of children wrapped in cloth, in the sun to bake. The works carry through to a little jail cell room where a bubble machine failed to fill the dimly-lit room with wonder.
Yu Hee Jeong’s “Piling Up on Things Covered” explores post-pregnancy blues and how the body restores itself.
It was then I connected the present to the past, my childhood was far from me. Or it was dead, and my senses have picked up the stench, that I’ve been carrying it around with me like a miscarriage. Futile devices like ultrasounds heeded no warnings. I was never warned that my childhood was something that could not be sought after again.
It’s hard these days to create fiction, to work the imaginary out of reality, of real people. I think it’s because things have been more real than they needed to be in this new abnormal. COVID not only took my time away from me, but also friends, energy, the splendor of creating art. See, I wish I was one of those people that were productive during the pandemic. Instead, I spent it all on Animal Crossing.
Now when babies are born, they will be born with emails. And when they do get their first email, they will learn to photo dump. Curation will no longer be a job, but au naturale. Photodumps, eventually, if not already, will contain sets of photos past and present, images that speak to each other spanning weeks, maybe, eventually, centuries on social media feeds. And this will be how we record history. New hieroglyphics for intelligences beyond us.
Why is it that middle school Greek mythology made lives so grand? Even when Sisyphus still rolls that rock uphill only to be killed by the thing he cheated twice: death.
I’m rewriting the textbooks with my own history. Because here is a myth that is not so grand. Just look at me, but not too close. The flaws aren’t worth living for.
7.
Currently, I’m remodeling my bedroom back home in California all the way from Korea. The furniture comes in slow, halts because I don’t have the budget for it, and I wonder, is it at all worth it? To repaint the walls, to throw out sheets I’ve stained with teenage love. To continually bag up and throw out histories that have made me who I am now, far-flung and far-fetched from my mother?
The books I am reading contain less children than the films and shows I fill time with. And yet, myths are still being recorded as if they matter.
8.
But when I think of myths, fiction is implied. The immensity in exaggeration exists because we cannot bear the lives of mundane normalcy. We do not want to admit that we come from the sincere suburbs. We want to parade great lives, great loves, brandished on greater phones with greater pixel densities, quadruple the lenses and lengthen the device, to forget simplicity, to wipe out pure origins.
The younger self I want to depict this to, my lost-in-translation hieroglyphics, mean less and less as I continue to fail in piecing together renderings of my truth, of my existence.
If there is a younger self I am meaning to speak to. If there is a younger self like me out there, lost in misfit bouts and burdening claims to adulthood.
9.
The breath of the sea blew this past week a breeze, pieces of peace brought together by moments of lengthy reads and short conversations about the weather and meandering questions about life, acts of survival in maintaining a perfect present.
The low afternoon tides collapsed at the shore, almost folding into kneeled prayers to glisten in front of the sun, and me, and I begin to believe I am a miracle from the eyes of my mother. See, I’m not a singular miracle. I am many miracles working happenstance to make at least one truth. Or one faith. Indecisive miracles swimming in questions.
Blind sun, broken winds, reach the harvest moon, to beg autumn to peel off the brittle reckonings of a season before.
My eyes, I’m still looking for them, from wherever they’re looking from.
