Sublimation(13)

But right now, you want to leave the apartment, so you do.



* * *



Of course you loved your grandfather’s house. Of course you loved the way the windows glowed when it was dark and sunset shined laterally through the blinds. Of course you loved how it felt to sit in your bed at night surrounded by plushies that you or one of your cousins had won from a claw machine. Of course you loved the dent in the wall where you accidentally slammed your soccer cleat because you had been so excited at winning the tournament at school. You had been happy there. But you don’t want it anymore. You loved it like something you had already lost, like something you were always meant to lose.



* * *



Soyoung’s apartment leads to a pedestrian pathway bordering a small road. You pass storefronts selling fish cake and twigim and tteokbokki, 7-Elevens with cardboard K-pop stars advertising soft drinks and soju. You pass five thousand coffee shops, none yet open. There weren’t this many coffee shops when you were a kid. You’ve passed two different Starbucks and a Coffee Bean in the last fifteen minutes.

You walk through the neighborhood and cross into another. You walk across broad roads and up staircases and down hills and you stop in at a FamilyMart to buy a packaged coffee that you pour into a cup of prepackaged ice. You drink as you walk. Around you, the vague character of the neighborhoods change, though the stores keep repeating—another Olive Young, another Caffe Bene. You eventually walk around a large local shopping center, and pause at the corner. Something about it is strange. By now Seoul’s waking up, and there are people here—a couple of old men and women setting up to sell vegetables, a few shopkeepers still pulling up metal doors that cover their shops, a few kids buying some little snack before school.

You frown. You sit on the edge of a windowsill. From this angle, the world is familiar. Then it hits you. You’ve been here before. You’ve been here dozens of times. This is the little grocery market near your grandfather’s house, which your mom had always claimed was a little overpriced. You had bought candy here as a kid. There had been an arcade machine that was always broken, outside. You and Yujin and Minsoo had played at the playground nearby. Your grandfather’s house, the one that he’s trying to give to you from beyond the grave, is a five-minute walk away.

You think about turning and leaving. Going back to Soyoung’s apartment. Going anywhere else. But it’s so close. It’s like an invitation. It’s like how once you had heard that your grandfather had wanted you back in Korea, there was no other option for you but to return. The door is open, so, you have to walk through.

You’ll just take a quick look. And then you’ll leave.



* * *



It’s not curiosity that creates instances. Not the desire to know the world outside your own boundaries. Marco Polo famously didn’t instance. You can travel the whole world and still return home and stay singular. It’s not a bad thing, to instance. But it means that you were of two minds. It shows a desire beyond wonder. It suggests a desire for escape, an understanding that either the world outside is so beautiful it must be permanently inhabited or the world inside is so terrible that it should be escaped. Instances often are annoyed when asked how they knew they were leaving. It’s like falling in love, the cliché goes. You just know.



* * *



You had expected your grandfather’s house to have changed after nearly two decades. It hasn’t. It’s a redbrick house with a wrought-iron gate, covered in vines. Yellow forsythia and blooming purple azaleas line the fences. You feel a punch of emotion in your throat. You didn’t ever think you would be back here. You feel as though if you opened the gate and stepped through the front door, you could call for your grandfather and he would look up from where he was watching the television, and say, ah, Soyoung, back from school?

You stand in the street, staring at the house. You guess you were hoping for some sort of closure. But this isn’t a movie and you hadn’t felt bad about leaving, anyway. It had just been a fact of life. You had moved to America because your mom said that you were moving. It was just something that happened to you. Though you had missed the house. It had taken a long time for your mom’s new place to feel like home.

The door opens. A face identical to your mom’s pokes out.

“Soyoung, what are you doing, standing there in the street?”

“Umma—” you say, forgetting for a moment. No—that’s not your mom, that’s Soyoung’s mom.

“Soyoung-ah—”

“It’s Rose,” you say. “From New York.”

“Oh, Rose,” she says. She says your name accented. The s turning to a j. The emotion in her face has turned from light curiosity to something deeper. She’s staring at you. She looks exactly like your mother. “Do you want to come in? I’m just here doing some cleaning. I started boxing things up.”

You are gripped by a sudden visceral desire not to go in. You don’t want to go into your childhood home and drink coffee as if you’re a stranger. You don’t want to remember this place like it’s somewhere you don’t belong. You like the warm memories of your childhood. You don’t want to overwrite them.

“Not really,” you say. You wouldn’t say that to your mom in the States. It would hurt her feelings. You shouldn’t be saying it to any version of your mom. But you really don’t want to go inside.