Sublimation(2)

“You sure you don’t want me to stick around?” Yujin says, leaning forward.

With his hair in his eyes, Yujin looks like your memory of him from high school, when you were just childhood friends who had fallen out of touch, when he was just another one of the boys in the uniform shirt and slacks and you were one of the girls with the regulation haircuts. You had only become close again after Yujin had instanced, after he had called you from the airport because you were the one person his age who had an instance. And now you vet his girlfriends and he shows you about how to download movies illegally and you have both forgiven each other for what you did when you were seventeen.

It hadn’t been anything so bad—Yujin had asked you out and you had said no.

“I’m sure.”

“Because I can stay, for moral support. I can make intimidating faces in the background. Or I can be super friendly so she-you likes you more. Whatever you need.”

You shake your head. When you had instanced, you had gone home and then gone to school and you had marveled at the way that nothing in anyone’s life had changed, how they didn’t know that anything was wrong. This is how you feel now.

“It’s family stuff,” you say, handing Yujin your empty cup so he can toss it on his way out. “And I don’t want to scare her.”

You know that’s a foregone conclusion. Of course you’re going to scare her. She’s you. And you’re scared. You’re sick to your stomach with want. You need her to love you so bad it hurts. Because then you get to be her. Then she gets to be you.



* * *



An instance is a duplicate self cleaved mitosis-like from the original—though the duplicate and the original are both referred to as “instances” in modern American vocabulary. To become an instance is to “instantiate”; in the present tense, “instancing.”

The oldest reference to instances is a line in Hammurabi’s Code translated as the foreign brother-self will receive no inheritance.

Different cultures refer to instances with a Technicolor diversity: the sibling-self, the changeling, the one-who-does-not-return. The first requirement for instancing is a settled culture, and traditionally instances appear specifically in seafaring societies. In many civilizations the ocean formed an organic division between the familiar and the foreign.

The second requirement is intent. Sailors throughout history are recorded as having sailed from their home ports without instancing for decades, until one morning they board their ship and look back to see their instance standing at the docks. Something must have shifted in their heart, some secret admittance that their leave-taking is permanent, that their families have become foreign to them.

There is a folktale that is repeated in Japan, Korea, and coastal China, of a fisherman who is coaxed into following a water spirit into an undersea court, where he drinks and dances with the beautiful merfolk. But the night grows long, so the fisherman asks the water spirit to take him back to his home. The spirit warns him that time flows differently underwater, but the fisherman repeats that he wants to go home.

The spirit nods and sadly takes the fisherman back to the shore. When the fisherman’s feet touch dry land, he ages thirty years instantly. When he walks into his house, he finds himself already inside, asleep with his wife.

A border is an artificial thing with practical consequences: the severing of the self from the self.





ROSE


You’re trying to find your instance in the basement of the Shinsegae Department Store. You hadn’t managed to sleep during the flight, which had been all roller-coaster turbulence and recycled air. But now, fresh out of the airport and cleared through customs, you’re wired from sleep deprivation and strangely delighted by all the people running around and the coordinated chaos of the food hall, so foreign to you now. They don’t make food halls like this in New York. The closest you go to regularly might be Eataly. And all your memories of Shinsegae are two feet lower, from the perspective of a child. You want to go look around. You want to buy an ice cream. You don’t want to go looking for your instance.

Once you see your instance, all of this will become real again. The good feelings will start to sit wrong in your chest and you’ll have to act like you’ve flown in for a funeral, because your grandfather is dead.

You do feel sad about it. Abstractly. It’s the hollow grief of losing something you already assumed had dissipated into the past. Your instance had dredged up a whole dead history with her phone call in the middle of the night, waking you from a deep sleep.

“Hello?” you had said, accented with slumber.

“Is this Soyoung Kang?” your own voice said, accented with Korean.

“Yes.” The only people who still call you Soyoung are family. Everyone else calls you Rose.

“Harabeoji’s dead,” your instance said. You had dropped the phone in shock.

You hadn’t heard from Harabeoji in a decade. For a while there were phone calls on your birthday. He would say happy birthday, and you would say thank you. He would ask how’s school, and you would say it’s okay. Then you would ask how is other Soyoung? because you remembered the photograph of the little girl on the other side of the immigration checkpoint, wearing your clothes and your face and your memories.

Your instance.

Your-her grandfather would say she’s fine! She and her mother are doing fine. Her mother. Your other mother. The instance of your own mother standing next to you and pretending not to listen to your conversation.