Hush

The girl is silent in a spinning world of questions and traffic and other people. As shapes, relatively formless--the girl does not lift her head, so she cannot discern otherwise— d rift by, teenagers, arm in arm with long black hair, bangs in their eyes, turn and look at the anomaly—the blank, hazy, foreign lump on the bus stop bench and the confused-looking man behind her. Giggling, several long T-shirt (or mini-dress) wearing early twenty-some-things walk by, disregarding the pain in the alien faces, the distress and the anger. As they pass, they turn blatantly to stare and exclaim with surprise to one another in Korean that the couple is attractive. The girl understands them and is annoyed that the natives of this country seem unable to consider the unfamiliar with conventional standards of social behaviour. Turning and pointing and assuming one's complete ignorance of Hangook (not to mention universal body language) is quite rude, thinks the girl. Allowing this thought to consume her otherwise impassive, vacant-feeling consciousness, the girl's desire to remain in a hushed state, as a means to suppress her ultimate wish to scream and kick and criticize nothing in particular (but everything, cumulatively), prevails. Leaning her head against the smog coloured, no-longer translucent bus-stop glass, she shuts down…..

When angered, she becomes absolutely silent, void of all emotion or sensory perception. When questioned, a robotic nod of the head, or a tinny "No" from the back of her throat is all she can conjure, so absent does she feel. She remembers how, in her youth, the slightest nudge to her temper—the most minor bump-- would send her flying into fits of rage and emotional hysteria. For many years, the anger had defined her, shaped her like a sculptor's fingers manipulating the clay, cutting parts away, making edges sharp. As a child, she would slam doors and write Crayola coloured obscenities inside the walls of her closet; she'd sit perched on the pile of fallen clothing strewn across the wardrobe's floor and coated with cat hair. They told her not to scream, you see, so her bedroom was the only place she felt able to handle the silence (or near silence)—nothing but her own strained breathing and an occasional gasp for air—as she struggled through silent tears of frustration.

Sitting beside her on the bus-stop bench, he watches her closely for any signs of life, some glimpse of recognition in the eyes that look so eerily clam and glazed over. He wonders if she's taken her pills, like she'd said, or if maybe she'd thrown them up when they went for tea earlier in the day. He wonders if her silence means she prefers to tune him out and escape into a wormhole of neurosis and loneliness, swirling around clumsily, like a dancer in the dark. He wonders if the trip had been a bad idea. He begins to regret it. He begins to think that perhaps her silence means she has tired of him, of his voice, of his mouth, of his lips. Maybe she thinks that being lost in a strange place, staring out into the streets and the multitude of dingy, local seafood restaurants is preferable.

The girl knows he is upset. He is digging, asking her questions, attempting to initiate a more satisfying response than the monosyllables she's been whispering between half closed lips. It's an odd sensation, feeling angry for no one particular reason. She realizes how awful it is that by continuing to speak, he is inadvertently making himself a target of her silent, little temper tantrum. That he is standing before her, waiting for an answer, forcing her to converse, begins to anger her... It makes her think of how, as a child, no matter how often her mother told her to "Just ignore them," choosing to disregard others was never actually an option. Choosing to sit against the heater in her bedroom, singeing the back of her jeans, as she read, rather than watch idiotic ultra violent action movies or police dramas of a similar ilk with her family, somehow managed to transform her into the catalyst for tension and discord throughout the household. When he—her ever present and rarely silent father—screamed, she wasn't allowed to walk away. He wouldn't leave her alone or release her reflection—it was small and warped and it quivered in beat with his drippy red pupils—from his dark eyes until she spoke, her voice muffled by tears or scorched with rage, "Yes, Daddy."

Silence has always come naturally to me, but in Korea, the inability to communicate effectively has made it an essential part of life. If I am upset or annoyed, no good will come of raising my voice—nothing will be accomplished. My protests, however eloquent they may be, will not be understood, but instead, laughed away with an apologetic shake of the head and, "English, no." At work, I speak constantly to my students, and by the end of the day, I am rather hoarse and wonder how many of my words were lost in translation or even listened to at all... At home, I collapse into a chair in front of my laptop and allow my voice some respite. I drink the Cheonji Dew tea I picked up with my ceramic tea set in Insa Dong. It tastes sweet and fresh and I wonder about how something so fantastic can come from a tiny, shrivelled leaf stuffed into a cardboard cylinder. Perhaps words function in the same way. Maybe it's best to say little and sacrifice yourself to the judgement of your appearance and movements. Someone famous (the name escapes me, momentarily) once said, "Many attempts to communicate are nullified by saying too much" and based on my experiences this year, trying to spark the slightest glimmer of comprehension, is easiest when you stick to one word and proceed to act like a mime, rather than try confusing synonyms, in the hope that one will register. Should dramatic eyebrow raising and hand gestures prove to be impossible, I've found that a note pad on which to draw often proves quite useful.

Maybe it's alright that most people can't understand me here anyway. I've answered the same barrage of questions countless times especially when attempting to buy something, "How old are you? Where are you from? Are you married? What do you do? Do you have a point-card?" When this happens, all you can do is try your best to hold the smile and utter the words from behind gritted teeth, even as they stay staring, sizing you up, expecting you to dive into a barrage of more interesting facts about yourself, very curious and mildly surprised to see someone so different (allegedly) in their presence or gracing their store-fronts. Perhaps they imagine that an alien's perspective is dramatically different from their own and are merely attempting to satisfy their curiosity by asking questions of apparent interest. Or, perhaps they feel complete silence is a trait of the foolish or the miserable, character flaws if ever they existed, here in Korea. As I exit stores, I mutter my "Kamsamnidas" and "Anyongi Keseyos" in what I can only describe as a perpetually embarrassed hush. As I make my escape, I hope that should I ever return, someone else will be at the till or that the curiosity about me will have run dry and that my silence can be accepted as respectful or exhausted, or Zen-- any one of these will do.

At work, we are currently in the summer semester, which means I start earlier in the day and work twice as many classes as I normally would since most students actually have the time and energy to attend. My boss and I exist in this school, 'Bicycle,' together but rarely acknowledge each other's existence. Either I work and then go on break while he works, or we teach two separate classes at once, and then trade. Needless to say, approaching him is really very difficult. I sometimes say "Hello" in the mornings or "Bye" as I'm leaving for home, but it's rare for him to concede to my presence by even looking up or saying anything more than, "Neh," the Hangook word for "yes." Lately, I've been getting utter silence from him, so I no longer feel the desire to even make an effort. I can be very non-communicative as well.

As my contract draws to an end, I think my boss is finally beginning to understand that without me, he's rather fucked. I don't think he realized that only two months remain for me, until earlier this week when I demanded he give me back my university diploma, which he had insisted on keeping because supposedly, he'd wanted to display it. He removed it from the same manila envelope I'd sent it in; my own hand writing was in the corner. Before he handed it to me, he made a fumbled attempt to smooth out the tears along the edges, a result of being crammed into an over-crowded book-case, I'm sure. I stood there, silently, waiting as he used both hands (a sign of respect in Korea) to pass it to me. I'm certain I looked highly incredulous. I had asked for my degree back several times throughout the last ten months without success. I'm almost positive that he felt holding it in his possession would be a way to keep me at his school; I know he must be aware of what a terrible boss and a terrible host he's been to me. With only two months left and my recent declaration to him that I would be going straight to the ministry of labour if another problem arose, I imagine he figures I've decided to tough it out a little while longer and won't be making a Midnight Run…

My recent workload has not afforded me ample free-time, and so this has been my first attempt to write in approximately a month. Work is very much an unpleasant experience, sometimes, not because of the teaching or the students, but because of my boss' continuous disregard for me; I've decided that he is unable to view me as anything but a worker, because unable (but more likely, unwilling) to communicate with me, he cannot sympathize with me or regard me with any sort of human compassion. Last week, I was sitting at the computer at the secretary's desk—she was staring at my screen and trying to read it, instead of doing whatever it is she does—typing up a lesson plan, when the boss came over and starting speaking with her. Within a moment, it was clear that he was talking about me, not only because I am able to understand many words in the language, but because he was deliberately pointing at me, as if I couldn't see his hand a meter from my face. Rather angry, I tolerated this behaviour for a good 5 minutes before silently getting up and returning to my desk, my lesson plan nowhere near complete.

Three weeks ago, I finally managed to take four vacation days, which was a challenge. In my absence, my students informed me that all they did was do listening tests, which means the principal popped a tape into the cassette player and left the room. It's unfortunate for them, but I really needed to get away. In the middle of the week that I took off, it was a National Holiday, which meant I had Monday through Friday and both weekends on either side to my disposal. It was the most time I've had off from any job ever. I looked forward to an escape from my current reality, which before I came here, seemed like the ultimate in escapist fantasies.

On my first Saturday, John and I decided to make the very long trip by KTX train to Daechon beach in Boryeong, as it was the first week of the Mud Festival. The festival is on the beach and is essentially a free-for-all of alcoholic hysteria and mud fights with specimens from around the world in an assortment of colors. It's supposed to be excellent for one's skin.

The train ride was interesting. Though we'd purchased tickets beforehand, we were not assured a seat until an hour and a half into our three hour journey. Like many others, we propped ourselves and our bags up against the exit area's walls near the restroom, moving each time someone needed to pass. In the cars, standing people held onto anything they could, hovering directly over the seated, squirming inward whenever the snack cart (which contained an assortment of convenience store treats—kimbab triangles, eggs hard-boiled in soy sauce and Pringles) clacked by, heaving with both the weight of the load and the sway of the train in motion. We were lucky enough to get a seat on the metal steps for awhile, though each time anyone got on or off, we had to rise and make way, inevitably losing our place. When we got our seats, mine was occupied by an older man, who I felt rather badly about showing my ticket to and asking him to leave. But, that's how it is, here. People will do as they feel until someone tells them they mustn't. He complied immediately.

Upon sitting down in the relatively comfortable seat, I fell asleep. John was sitting several rows behind me, as we weren't lucky enough to get placed together. As I slept, I recalled my only other trip by train: I was six years old and with my sister and brother and mother (my father did not attend my mother's family functions) on our way to Toronto for my uncle's wedding, a lavish ceremony to celebrate his second marriage. This trip had been much less chaotic and is actually one of my favourite memories. I remember sitting by the window counting telephone poles and playing "I Spy" with my sister. My mother had packed some fruit and sandwiches and I remember feeling excited and very important to be taking such a trip, my first time beyond Montreal. To keep us entertained on the 5 hour voyage, my mother had packed coloring books and readers and bought each of us a little present. When my mother handed me the box, I remember being captivated with the contents, as I was a very imaginative child, fond of princesses and unicorns and fairies; Inside the translucent plastic box, her limbs secured with white twist-ties strung through the back, was a beautiful blonde, blue-eyed doll in a white dress wearing a silver crown. Beside her, there was a plastic lion with wings and a blue crown. I called the princess Aurora and the lion Roarie, as clearly, I hadn't developed the keen sense of originality for which I am currently known.

Sitting on the KTX train, my head nodding, I thought of that day and how happy I'd been and how easy it had been to get me there. I find it terribly unfair that the more we age and the more freedom we have to make our own trips by train and provide our own entertainment (an iPod and Chuck Palahniuk's "Rant" in my case), the more likely it is that we'll become desensitized to adventure and play. The dreaded hush will come over us and we'll fall asleep, waiting for the ride to be over so we can move on to the next anticipated, convoluted thing (which more often than not, proves somewhat disappointing).

We arrived in Boryeong late, missing the mud (somehow they 'ran out', which considering the ingredients, seems a little odd to me). We met some friends at their hotel, and had a few drinks, catching up on the events of their day and the melodramas and arguments of the particular moment. It's very difficult to be among very drunk people when you are entirely sober and tired. Talking is a bit forced, but eventually, I reached a comfort zone. We were not in Boryeong long, considering the length of time it took to get there. We spent the night drinking and searching for people who'd run off, angered or sullen, onto the beach and into the water, which was cold and shallow. I went swimming, briefly. It was my first time in the sea. I haven't been swimming in a very long time and I was never very good, but I had fun.

Despite the festive nature of the evening, I spent a significant portion of the night by myself, wandering around the beach, searching for lost friends with a cell phone that wasn't working properly. I must have gone up and down the length of the boardwalk, three times, at least. The crowds were enormous and fireworks, a stage with a rock show (if you can call Korean singing, such) and food vendors were everywhere. Little girls in sun dresses played with sparklers, shrieking in delight, and drawing pictures in the sand with their bare toes.

Realistically, it did seem rather improbable of finding two girls who'd probably lost each other, anyway. But, the time did afford me the opportunity to reflect and to appreciate the sea and the wind and the smells. The sound of people and their voices intermingled in languages I am unable to understand; Korean, Japanese. It all seemed so loud, but so wordless at the same time. The wind, buffeting around beach balloons tied to strings and pegged to the ground, scooped up words and whole sentences, weaving them in between each other, like an orange pylon obstacle course or a piece of fine embroidery. Everything bled together and an odd sort of peace was conceived from the noise, which I found ironic. It made me think of large seashells and how when you hold one to you ear, there's an echo-y, eerie sort of calm, that is most certainly audible, but indefinable as anything but silence. It's like how sometimes; things or people come from the most unlikely sources. Like how hope can be a product of destruction or disease; two polar opposites that loop around deformedly and link at the waist; Siamese twins; BF4EVR.

I never found them, but I suppose things worked out in the end, as I've seen them both since and they are neither drowned nor injured. In the morning, when we awoke in our hotel, about a ten minute taxi-ride from the beach and directly outside the train station, we decided we had no time to appreciate the beach by the light of day and that we should get our tickets and return to Bucheon by train as soon as possible.

The train trip back had standing room only. We managed to get a drafty little area (near the air-conditioning) in which to sit, free from people trampling us each time an entrance or exit was attempted. Returning home felt longer than the initial trip there, but I suppose knowing we had a very tight schedule—we had to catch a flight to Jeju Island (our vacation destination) at about 7:30 that evening, made it seem that way. Dismounting the platform at Seoul, we went to Yongsan and picked up a bit of reading material, as I have been stricken lately with the intense desire to read literature. That's generally how it is for me, though: When I read a lot, I don't tend to write often; at these times, I'd rather escape from my own rambling thoughts and bask in admiration of truly great writers. And, conversely, when I write, I very rarely read, as I try to avoid potentially adopting a style or tone that is not mine. I live too much in words and it is very easy for me to take on a foreign voice and imagine it as my own to the point where even my dreams are confused, my subconscious somewhat pathologically amnesiac.

From Yongsan, John and I went to my apartment in Bucheon, where I quickly threw some clothing and necessities into a suitcase. John surfed the internet to find out about the exact location of our hotel, a useful thing to do considering we were staying for a full five days. We made it to the airport at Gimpo (which is primarily for domestic flights) via a taxi to Bucheon station and then made a rushed transfer to another line halfway through the trip. Though my small suitcase has wheels, lugging it up flights of metro stairs when a thousand or so people are running down, is both vertigo-inducing and not fun.

We made it to Gimpo just in time. I'm sure we were the last passengers to check our luggage. The flight was amazingly short at only about an hour. I'd expected it to be longer; but then, I was never any good at reading maps.

From the moment we disembarked, it was apparent that there would be communication problems for us on the island. Unlike Seoul, a highly metropolitan city of dazzling neon lights and chic university kids who are quite aware of popular culture and the world outside of Korea, Jeju Island appears to have very few foreigners. I know that there are at least a few language schools in this part of Korea, but whether they are taught at by native English speakers or Koreans who can pronounce the letters in the alphabet (or press "play" on the tape recorder), is unknown to me. It seems to me that there is much more of an "island mentality" here when it comes to learning English. Unlike in Bucheon, where at any hour of the day, students can be seen on the streets, in between classes, munching on skewered chicken, dried squid, or any number of other street cart delicacies, here the uniformed throng of Hagwon (English Academy) school children on bicycles and rollerblades, buffeting around umbrellas and book bags is practically non-existent, which explains why no one seems to speak a word of English here.

The people of Jeju are not only poor at English, but seem mystified when confronted with western faces. I am convinced that most Koreans' experience of North Americans has created a dual bias in their minds of two types: the overweight, loud mouthed American and the celebrity; when the assumption is disproved, and a regular person is seen as neither overweight nor unattractive, the word "Movie Star" gets tossed about quite a lot. I can not recall how many times I was gawked at and complimented, but it was a lot. It did not make me feel very comfortable, being stared at so intensely. It made me uptight, irate and somewhat afraid to make eye contact with people, as they stared deeply, picking out every little detail of my face and body, analyzing and making assumptions.

On the second or third night we went to a bar near our hotel and almost immediately, the staring started. John jokingly informed a man and his wife, their young daughter in tow, that I was really famous in Canada. That piece of information made us very popular. Some men at the bar bought us drinks and poured a few shots for John. In addition, several random people, including the family, insisted on my posing for their camera phone pictures and having me sign autograph pads. One man even invited us to come and learn how to SCUBA dive with him, an attractive offer, but one which wasn't exactly viable, as diving must be done in the morning or early afternoon, and it was rare that we left our hotel before 3 pm.

Apart from attempting to find decent, cocktail serving drinking establishments, we did manage to see a few interesting things, though the way Jeju is set up, everything of interest, apart from the beaches, of which there are many (it is an island, after all!) seems to be located in the middle of nowhere and isolated with nothing but temples or mountains around. Once, we tried to take a day trip to somewhere or other (my memory is a bit fuzzy and I should have written sooner than now) and the bus driver told us we were at our stop, which wasn't quite true. Getting out and watching the bus drive away was a bit confusing, as we clearly weren't where we had meant to go. Instead, black, ashy mountains stretched all around us. Below, we could see a squat elderly couple in rubber boots and sun-hats sitting beside their horses, which were probably being let for rent or short rides, like a kid going around the track at a village carnival. To the left of where the bus had dropped us, there was a small, somewhat vacant-looking Buddhist temple. The only people around were a taxi cab driver smoking outside his car and a girl in an information booth stacked with tourist pamphlets.

A bit annoyed and with few other options, we took the taxi and drove down to Seogwipo, a slightly (this is the operative word) more populated area. As we drove, I stared out the window and blinked my eyes at the sunlight, which was intense and warm for the whole five days. The terrain of Jeju seemed wild and lush to me, especially having come from the mainland, where there is little to no apparent vegetation. I was amazed at the palm trees. I've been on islands before, of course (Montreal is an island, technically), but none of them have ever been tropical enough to produce palm trees. The roads are narrow and all along the ditches and beneath bridges, vegetation tangles thickly; wild flowers and weeds mixed with vegetable crops.

Rice and barley are grown wherever it's convenient. Ditches seemed like a popular place, most likely because they act as water reservoirs of sorts. Driving by, my forehead against the cab window, I noticed old ladies, their backs to the highway, squatting and tending to their crops. They wore straw, cone-shaped sun-hats and 'gal clothes,' which are a very basic brownish-orange coloured outfit dyed with the juice of the persimmon fruit. This is considered to be the traditional uniform of the working (field-labourer) inhabitant of Jeju. Persimmon-dyed clothes, hats and purses are sold in nearly every tourist trap sort of store on the island. I stuck to relatively small souvenirs—some special Jeju honey, which is harvested from bees that consume pollen from the flowers on the top of the dormant volcano, Mount Halla, as well as some interesting jarred tea varieties like cactus flower and citron, which are apparently specialties of the island. I bought postcards, and tea spoons at one place, but after that, all the other tourist stores appeared to be exactly the same to me.

We spent a few hours at a beach on our second day, though I found it far too cold and windy to actually go into the ocean. I've never really spent much time near the water (minus the privately-owned lakes in the Eastern Townships), so it wasn't easy for me to get used to rough sand blowing in my eyes and sticking to my arms and legs, like a coarse second skin. The walk along the precipice was of much more interest to me and we took a lot of really good pictures. Looking over the edge, we could see people rooting around the black, slimy rocks, looking for seaweed or oysters, or other such shelled creatures, a staple of the diet here, which made finding variety in restaurants somewhat of a challenge. Before coming to the island, I'd read a bit about the 'Jeju Mermaids,' (usually middle-aged to elderly) female divers who collect large quantities of seaweed during the mornings. Apparently, they're a fascinating sight to see. I'm sorry to have missed them.

The Mujanggul caves were fairly interesting, though very cold and dank. Jeju itself, like many tropical islands, was formed when a mostly underwater volcano—Mount Halla—erupted, spitting molten lava all around it. Hitting the water, the lava cooled, forming solid land. Thus, Mount Halla is in the island's center, having spewed equal parts all around its fiery breach. Mujanggul is essentially, a place to see some preserved examples of the volcanic offspring—interesting rocks, massive stalagmites, and hardened lava trails among other geological wonders which I know very little about. Anyway, upon entering Mujanggul, we descended a staircase and immediately found ourselves in a dark, frigid, underground pathway pocked with ankle-twisting pot-holes filled with water which dripped incessantly from the ceiling (or the ground above our heads, I should say). Cold and concentrating on the relatively dry (though slippery-looking rocks), so as not to fall, we made our way along the trail, passing others on their way back, also trying to keep themselves steady. It was really quite eerie, taking a walk underground in the dark, jumping over puddles and onto rocks, like it was a visit to the heart of the island, or at the very least, its progeny.

Among other adventures in Jeju, we made a trip to the world's largest museum of Sex and Health, an informational and entertaining showcase not only of a variety of facts, but of games, art, and sculptures. Outside the museum, the yard is filled with statues of sexual expression—mostly phallic and vaginal. Touristy couples with cameras—ourselves included—found it an impossible courtyard to pass without taking a few posed photographs; there's no better way to remember your vacation than a picture of yourself standing beside a six foot tall marble penis…that's what I always say…(ha-ha).

A major goal for our vacation was to relax, as clearly, we both needed it badly. Beside our hotel, was a small spa where John received a massage and I got my first ever facial, which made my skin luminous, but felt tedious, as for an hour, a variety of different concoctions were coated over my face and eyelids, scraped off and applied again. I've decided it's a bit of an over-rated practice and I have no idea why it was necessary for me to change into a fluffy pink tube dress (which wasn't staying up very well) for the experience.

On our last day in Jeju, we did manage to catch wind of a very interesting spa experience at a very large, fancy hotel up near the mountains—our ears popped as we approached via bus. I had my reservations about attending a spa, as I'm not exactly comfortable with locker-rooms or bath-houses and the obvious requisite nudity. In Korea, bath houses are a way of life. Whole families go together and the males and females separate to their respective areas. Apparently, according to some male friends who attend on a semi-regular basis, it's not uncommon to see a teenage boy washing his middle-aged father and vice-versa.

Upon enrolling in the spa experience, we were told we had forty-five minutes to get ready and shower, before meeting up with the other members. I went left, as John disappeared into the Men's Bath at the right. Upon entering, shoes are removed immediately and stored in a special locker by an attendant who somehow remembers each person's number. I was shown to a locker, where I was expected to disrobe completely and make my way into the Women's Bath. I stood in my bathing suit for at least 10 minutes, watching the attendant gawk at me—I was the only non-Asian person in the room, of course, so I suppose I was an interesting specimen. Inside the Bath House was a sauna, some showers, and several pools of water, heated or chilled, as the case may be, to various temperatures. I showered, sat in a tepid pool of water for about minute, and then escaped to the privacy of the empty sauna, before deciding I'd had enough and that it was time I returned to my locker to put on my bathing suit.

Every member was given a robe to put over our swimsuits, and sandals to wear. Carrying my towel, I went to the meeting area, which connected the male and female changing rooms. When everyone was present—there were 4 men, including John, and about 10 women, including myself—we were escorted into the 'water-therapy' room, which is essentially a swimming pool with various jets of water that spray you really hard underwater, acting as a sort of massage. There were about 7 rows of water jets we had to pass through, squatting to let the water hit our legs, primarily. As we went through each row, the streams shot higher and higher up, targeting likewise areas; knees, thighs.

In the same room, as part of the water therapy, there was a basin (it fit about 6 people) with extremely pressurized water which fell from the ceiling above. It acted as a sort of waterfall, pummelling one's back and head. About five minutes into this experience, this violent thrashing, my hair having been beaten out of its ponytail and all over my face, the attendant informed us that it was time for a cold shower. I looked a little incredulous and she laughed.

After we'd all taken our icy showers and returned to the warm pool, we were given floating Styrofoam noodles to rest our legs on, and headgear to keep our faces afloat. The purpose of this exercise was to keep our ears in the water and relax as music was pumped up from beneath the pool. Above our heads, upon the black ceiling, a constellation show was projected. As I floated, occasionally bumping into random others, I listened to the music and watched simulated shooting stars. It did feel surprisingly serene and quiet; no words. Although the ultimate intention of this sort of exercise is to meditate and not think at all, of course, I found myself contemplating how odd it was to be in a room with 15 or so other individuals, none of whom was discharging nonsense or business into cellular phones or issuing obscenities or monotonous blather. No one uttered a single syllable; we all just spun around like space men in a hushed, zero-gravity ballet, staring up at the night stars.

When the lights came on, and we left the pool, we entered a room with long personal sofas. Wearing our robes, and covering our feet with towels, we stretched out as attendants adjusted nozzles directly between our noses and mouths. As they left the room, for five minutes, we lay in the dark, as oxygen was released from the taps. I'm not sure of the exact effects of oxygen—other than that it can make you feel light headed and weightless—but I don't believe I was affected.

When this somewhat odd activity had finished, we were led into very strange rooms where there were mangers filled with hay and white sheets. We were instructed to wrap ourselves in our white sheet, and get into this manger that was somewhat reminiscent of a coffin—it was impossible to see over the edge—and allow the attendants to cover our bodies, with the exception of our faces, with hay. For twenty minutes, we were left to bake in this extremely hot—though I must admit, pleasant smelling— environment. I think the purpose was to sweat out toxins. Very once in a while I could hear people shifting uncomfortably in their wooden boxes, and laughing to myself, in my death-white shroud, in my coffin, I wondered why they didn't just stick us in a sauna. Perhaps, the discomfort and isolation of lying in a manger was meant to channel Jesus...or fragile items in the mail surrounded by Styrofoam packing peanuts—either one, really.

Finally, we were released from our boxes and led to yet another room where we were given mud to put on our faces. We were placed in little pods, which held four people at a time, and waited for the stuff to dry. We were sitting directly opposite a young Korean couple who did not speak much to each other. After ten minutes, a bit restless and considering the oddity of the last two hours, I began to make my jokes, speculating about how maybe they planned to gas us, Auschwitz style… Eventually, the shower-jets in the ceiling began to sputter, then stopped, then sputtered some more. Suddenly, water, icy cold, hit us in the chairs where we each sat. The Korean girl opposite me let out a little shriek. We rinsed the mud off, then, like magic, with a long, drawn out guuuuussssshhhhh-ing sound, the door to our pod opened. I almost expected coloured smoke for dramatic, sci-fi effect.

Finally finished, we put our robes on and went outside to an herb garden where we sipped freshly brewed tea. John and I met up in the lobby and managed to catch a bus that went directly to the airport, where we had stored our bags several hours earlier.

We got home on a Friday night, so it was good to have a few days to ourselves, to reflect. A week is the longest time I've ever been in the constant company of anther human being. Sometimes, it was stressful and worrisome for me, and I found myself craving wordlessness and dusk, some form of obscurity to limit my senses and let me slip into a self-imposed oblivion, without a doubt, one of my greatest talents. As I went to bed that night, listening to the traffic outside my window that never stops, and wishing my air-conditioner was a bit more powerful, I contemplated taking sleeping medication to hurry the anticipated sensation (or lack thereof) along.

Sometimes, as I drift off to sleep, my heart-beat feels too slow—part of my neurotic fear of my physicality, I'm sure. When this happens, and I'm nearly there, perched on the cusp of sleep, my brain seems to screech me awake, and like a catapult, I heave my half asleep body to a sitting position, gasping, but glad to have evaded death for yet another moment…clever me. But this night, with thoughts of Jeju and John and water and stars swirling in and out of the usual paranoia, the sounds of the traffic and the air-conditioner and my own breathing overwhelmed me, as noise tends to do, and swallowed my consciousness, leaving everything silent and black.

They waited for the bus without knowing if it would make them even more lost, on the island, in the hush.

Half hour later, after being turned down by several taxi drivers who refuse to try to understand his attempt to speak Korean, frustrated and tired, the tension still unvoiced, they sit beside each other on the bus. She sits next to the window and immediately pulls a book out of her bag, her old stand-by, the taciturn alternative to speech. She'd always found staring quietly at word combinations she'd probably never use, archaic or oddly twisted phrases, seeped in imagery and meaning, quite calming; much more preferable to the sound of her own voice, which she's always considered very nasal and shaky, too young and too low. For ten minutes she tries to read, uncomfortable with her decision to do so, conscious of the fact that to the man to her left, something must be said. She tries to think of something to say, but her mind is a blank and incapable of anything but consuming the piece of literature before her. More time passes and the girl begins to entertain thoughts of commenting randomly about the scenery or the names of stores.

When she finally looks over, the man is sitting in his seat with his cap pulled over his head. He is crying. She begins to panic, but still feels rather incapable of speech. She begins to wish herself capable of chattiness, just turn it on and off like some girls; to have a flirtatious relationship with language as witty words and whole sentences, even, are rolled around and propelled forward with the most minor flick of the tongue. She closes her book, which is about a deadly lullaby, a culling song, which kills the children who hear it; noxious reverberations of the voice, she thinks. She grabs his hand and squeezes tightly. He sniffs. The anger is gone. She rests her head on his chest and whispers, "I'm sorry." And, on this particular bus, in the middle of nowhere, winding along narrow roads, where outside the windows, farmers squat, picking rice plants from ditches, a beautiful hush prevails and nothing needs to be said at all.

Submerged

The warm water overflowed. It seeped into the drain in the floor of the motel washroom as she stepped into the bath her lover had drawn for her. She felt a little unwell, but baths had always calmed her down, helped her feel weightless as her back floated above the rim of the tub, not quite making contact.

The day before, it had rained. They'd purchased an umbrella and had become lost, part of the throng of multi-coloured, spinning, dripping rain-gear, which possesses a certain beauty when it's observed from above street level. Down below, as part of the mass, clinging onto his damp arm, moist with sweat and rain, she'd felt completely submerged, swallowed, even, by the city, by the world, by her own thoughts. It made her temples hurt as she struggled to breathe, as she fought to keep her head above all this water, to keep from sinking like the stone it felt like she'd swallowed.

He knelt by the tub of water that had chilled significantly when her body, lithe and cool, had entered it. As he twirled her long, dark hair about his fingers, she told him something she'd read once about womb simulation—how if a tub of body temperature water were large enough to immerse you completely, to the point where you were just floating, it would be like being back inside your mother. You wouldn't know where your body ended and the water started. Isolated and drifting, you'd be recalling your original condition, somehow.

As she told him this, this bit of trivia, the source of which she couldn't remember, it struck her as mildly ironic that such serenity could come from being submerged, overwhelmed, led, even, by a force so much more powerful and so much more permanent and certain, than she, the self-proclaimed chaotic one.

As he leaned in to kiss her, biting her lower lip the way she liked it, she slid back slowly, holding her nose and clamping her eyes shut as she went under.

From beneath the bathwater, she opened her eyes and looked up at his rippled, wavy face and thought he'd said something, the way his mouth seemed to open, and how she caught a glimpse of his tongue, but she could hear nothing.

She imagined this as perfect numbness, like a sedative effect or an unbreakable fever, like trying to distinguish shapes through a haze. For a second, she thought it was beautiful, but as she re-emerged, coughing, the cold air hitting her neck and chest immediately, the thought disappeared in the hot-water fog. Leaning her arms against the rim of the bathtub, she sighed deeply, and looking into his eyes for just a second, suggested a hot shower instead.

The past few weeks have been difficult ones. Every day for the last nine or ten days now, I've woken up feeling as though my head were being grasped and cruelly squeezed. I haven't had headaches this terrible in nearly a decade. I've been taking (in addition to the Prozac) Motrin, Tylenol, Nyquil and whatever it is the Korean pharmacists give me when I tell them "Migraine." And, grimacing painfully, like a bad mime, I clutch my throbbing brain--to illustrate the severity--which I'm sure has split open and is slowly leaking into my sinuses. The veins in my temples pound and their movement are palpable as I sandwich my face between my hands. During the day, the pain and the pills put me close to falling asleep at my desk at work, while at night, despite my exhaustion, I wake up constantly, as it's unpleasant to sleep with a pulsating cranium.

I am making an effort to eat more protein during the week, as I thought at first the excruciating pain in my head and face might have to do with some sort of deficit in my diet. Regardless of my effort and the vitamin popping, I am still exhausted, still dizzy, Imagine a thumb tack being steadily filed down to the little colourful plastic halo that sticks out of the corkboard; that's how I feel. Soon, I may be utterly useless, which is sort of how I felt two weeks ago, when two friends commemorated a successful year in Korea with a not so happy final morning.

That night, there were a lot of tears, none of which I felt responsible for, but which I felt a need to soak up, an urgent desire to stop. I've never been comfortable around crying. I myself am subject to it very rarely, but when it happens I exert every effort, every thought, to holding it back, to steeling my eyes and poker-facing it through the turbulence until my voice is steady and I can look up again, mascara intact, cheeks un-streaked by the little rivulets that strip one's face clean, vulnerable.

We stayed up all night and into the afternoon of the next day and the tears continued to flow as I bobbed along helplessly in this whirlpool of worry and despair and frustration and alcohol, which made drowning a little more tolerable. Despite a truly terrible morning, my friends managed to make it back across the Pacific Ocean (another significant accumulation of salt-water) and are in the United States, again. I miss them very much and I hope the tears have dried.

I remember learning in science class a long time ago about the water erosion of sedimentary rocks in river beds and how when you fish one out of a stream, it will most likely be perfectly smooth and even—the slow result of water pounding and rushing steadily over it, breaking it down, making it just right. I recall being very interested in this idea and how water is so responsible for shaping the world we currently know, a world that may have been very different before islands went under, and tectonic plates creaked away from each other as the oceans smashed up archipelagos and narrow land bridges holding on, staying connected by just a relatively tiny strand in the sea—a negligible prospect for permanency. I think my fascination in all this lies in the gradual, protracted sort of attribute of such enduring, results; how it's something that you can't notice happening, but will change you forever.

When I think about it deeper, in bed at night, or alone at my desk in school, I apply it to myself and grow extremely anxious and worried. How permanent my self-inflicted erosion must be; how steadily life has rushed above my head, like water, and kept me under, breaking me down in its quest to make me a little more perfect, a little more rounded and smooth: nice to look at, nice to touch, but not quite the same as I was, not the original person I might have been in a less turbulent, drier environment. I've lost a lot of myself, I think, before I even knew where I was and where I stood.

She had run through the woods that day, her birthday, trying desperately to find them, her invited guests. They had been playing Hide and Seek, you see, and she was 'It'. Special girl. In the February cold, she struggled to walk in her tight, bunched up snowsuit, the bottoms of which had frayed the year before and were becoming increasingly grey and she dragged her feet through the murky, brown sludge, a mixture of half-melted snow, mud and dog shit.

She could hear them giggling, these girls from her class to whom the swamp was foreign, the murkiness and mess of fallen branches a one-day affair. She knew they weren't far, just in the knocked down cabin she'd gotten in trouble for painting one year when she was much smaller, or behind the rusted out water tank behind the tree she spent most of her summers dangling her legs from, maybe.

Lifting her feet one at a time, she began to walk again, through the swamp, a place her mother had warned her about—a dangerous place to get lost in. The girl knew where she was—not far at all from the house. She could see her bedroom light (she often forgot to turn it off, which would make her father yell about the cost of electricity), so she wasn't scared.

As the minutes passed, it occurred to her that the giggling had stopped a while back, that there was no longer that thick sense of anticipation in being discovered, chased and tagged. She had stopped moving for five minutes at least, resenting having to search for people she didn't particularly like, anyway. She hadn't even wanted to be 'It.' They could come find her.

Angry thoughts rattled about her mind as she waited, sitting in the swamp murk, becoming greyer and greyer, her hot pink snow pants completely submerged in the muck, her boots soaked right through.

Days get dark quickly in February, as the sky starts off in grey scale to begin with. This said, within a half hour, when no one came to find her and the moon was visible, she decided she'd been "It" long enough and began to pry herself out of the sludge, though with some difficulty.

Later when they saw her clothes and asked her if she'd gotten lost, embarrassed at her behaviour, she told them "yeah," and played up how scary and terrible it was, realizing full well that foregoing solid ground and allowing herself to go under, had been her choice. Later, she told them that she'd accidentally tripped and fallen in.

On top of my current depression, I am having problems with my boss, who isn't paying me once again. This week I had a major confrontation with him and essentially told him that he was very incompetent and insensitive. I told him how it was hard enough to be isolated on the other side of the world without knowing the language; how hard it was to be stared at not only by the locals but my few co-workers, none of whom acknowledge my existence; how hard it all was and how everything was so much worse given that I have an employer who frequently lies and neglects my needs and contract clauses. I told him that if my money isn't in my account by the end of the week, I will not come back to work, because I'll be at the Ministry of Labour issuing a formal complaint. I am so tired of this. I have three more months in this country and I refuse to feel like a slave, which working for no money makes me, essentially.

My boss makes me feel so uncomfortable. Whenever I broach a subject to him, he cuts me off or lies, then bids me to follow him into a closed classroom where he starts up about the school's current economic situation, which I really couldn't care less about. I get paid once a month and nearly a quarter of it goes to my student loan (when I can afford it), the money for which, when he doesn't pay me, I am forced to use for necessities. Speaking to him Wednesday, I was very unwavering as I clutched my books to my torso, wanting so very badly to scream, or at the very least, look away. He just stood there in silence staring coolly at me, considering. Then, seeing that I wasn't about to move—I was quite petrified, in every sense of the word--or say anything more, he stormed out, slamming the classroom door behind him, Paaaff.

I exerted every last effort to not start crying and I didn't, but I came very close. While he was still there, staring, which those who know me realize I can barely tolerate in children let alone odious sweating men who stomp around the room to make their presence felt by those about them, slamming their hands down for dramatic effect, my voice broke once and horrified, I clutched my books tighter and stood standing motionless against the whiteboard for a full ten minutes until finally, I heard him close his office door behind him.

When I went home about an hour later, the ocean smashed into the archipelago, so to speak, snapping and destroying it permanently. I was amazed at the quantity of tears streaming from my face, how very miserable I was. It was a veritable deluge that sent my head into a terrible, unsteady spin-cycle. This is rare for me and I wasn't sure how I would ever manage to stop now that I'd finally managed to feel anything but arid apathy and annoyance.

Later, as the tears continued to roll, and I sat hunched over a my table, wholly unable to stop neither the steady streams of water running down my face nor the wracking pain in my chest, I thought of Alice in Wonderland and how she grew to an immense size (from drinking something suspect after her fall down the rabbit-hole), which of course, made her start crying. Maintaining proportion with the rest of her body, the huge tears splashed down and became an ocean, which, when she shrunk again nearly drowned her. It's interesting though, how Lewis Carrol suggests the possibility of drowning in one's own tears. Perhaps he's implying that the things we despair about are all of our own creation, how maybe there's something in our personalities that makes others react to us or treat us in a particular way.

It's also interesting that Alice becomes smaller again in the wake of her great flood, like her enormous 'breakdown' resulted in an ultra-quick erosion. But then, I'm probably reading too far into it all, as is often the case.

Anyway, I'm officially on vacation as of tonight. I'm going to Jeju-do with John on Sunday night. I'll try to keep my head above water for another week at least.

Shape-shifters

On my way back to Sognae Sunday night, nodding off on the train, I felt very low--utterly sapped--like I'd been sucked dry, tetra-box style. An Arab man sitting next to me seized the first opportunity of my blinking my eyes awake to assail me with questions—"Excuse me, where are you from? Do you have a boyfriend? What do you think of the Korean people's character? Where are you going now?—which I was not in the mood to answer. Every time I closed my eyes again, hoping he'd get the message (as though my barely monosyllabic responses weren't enough), he's start up again, keeping me conscious, not only that I was cognisant, but also of my increasingly budding irritation and of feeling more exhausted and rickety than I've felt in some time. Eventually, I just pretended to be in a deep sleep, head resting uncomfortably against the metal hand-grip attached to the seat I was lucky enough to have gotten.

Lately, I've felt so overcome by so many different stimuli; people, events and feelings. My temperament has always been a little extreme, I realize, but lately, I've been seized with a sort of zealous need to be involved, often beyond all physical capacity. It's most definitely a weird sort of mania, whatever it is I've got, that has me wanting everything one moment to wanting nothing the next; from spinning madly around a packed dance club and belting out songs at a nori bang one night, to barely having enough energy to stand straight the next. It's a weird sense of detachment (for lack of a better word) that comes over me and makes my eyes blur vacant. When I feel this way, I can't be convinced of anything; I am inconsolable; I robotically revert to a sort of mental autopilot, and I am conscious of little more than that there is something wrong with me and with my surroundings, where everything about me moves so quickly as though to spite my own sense of the tiresome slow, like waiting for the sun to rise in a smoggy, cloudy sky.

The strange thing is that when I am energetic and happy, smiling an insanely toothy smile for the cameras that will inevitably be pointed at me, that I desire nothing, so content am I to be seen and heard and dare I say, admired, even if I never talk to anyone in particular (any of my random commentary to the open room will suffice). When I'm like this, I feel almost special, like nothing, not warmth or food, neither flattery nor extra attention from random strangers, can make me feel more perfect than I do at these rare, luminous moments. It is then that I need nothing and am without care; I wish the night were longer—that this infrequently felt, practically alien sensation, would last forever.

However, the opposite is true of my alternative (there is rarely a middle ground, it seems) personality, which I know intimately and have grown to both loathe and need, which I cling to almost desperately in a sort of fearful paranoia—a fucked-up relationship if ever there was one. It is when I am most overcome by this sensation that I feel the tension in my neck, the throbbing of my wrists (I close my fingers around them tightly, wishing for the terrible feeling to stop), and the seemingly massive weight of my body (which all logic and a good set of scales would deem ridiculous, I know), as I plod heavily along crowded streets, discerning the stab of eyes through me, examining, curious, judging. I look down and avoid contact, blind to all who would attract my attention. It is then that I feel utterly empty and lost and alone. It is then that I need a hand to grab, a steady body to lean against, and someone to squeeze me so hard that I feel the pressure against my ribcage, a reminder that my bones do exist, as I do, and that I'm not just a disenchanted floating blob, a lonely buoy in the ocean nodding to the beat of the waves.

It is difficult for me to write this, as I've always felt rather ashamed of my self-consciousness, like any delving into my hideousness or feelings of irrelevance would be met with a laugh and a swatting of hands through the air, a "Don't be ridiculous," and a quick change of conversation.

Last year, in my Indigenous Literature class, I did a lot of reading on shape-shifters. The most interesting character is probably the archetypal "trickster figure." The Trickster has figured not only throughout many Aboriginal stories, but throughout myth in general. Some call him Whiskey Jack (or Wasaygachuck); others call him Loki; some call him Pan. In fact he has many names, but one essential personality that seems to figure so prominently in life, literary or otherwise. The Trickster can be perceived as good or evil, depending on the effects he has on the mortals he interferes with. Either way, his function is to influence destiny, to steer you on or off your intended path, to change you for better or worse, depending on his own inclinations. As an instrument of destiny, the Trickster can assume many different forms, reproducing the faces of those closest to you, because like they say, "seeing is believing," right? And in the end, ironically, it's our reaction to the shape-shifter that changes us.

I think there must be something of the shape-shifter in all of us too. Some sort of duality that never quite evens out. It's this character, I think, that fundamentally makes us all entirely unpredictable, flexible even, able to control the outcome of our respective destinies, be it for good or ill. We are malleable creatures, I've decided, able to go from one extreme to the next, expanding, shrinking, exploding and imploding. We can change and sometimes we are hardly recognizable.

I received an email from my mother this week and in it, she expressed her regret that we aren't closer, that we don't have the mother-daughter relationship that I suspect she felt would just happen naturally, as it might for some offspring for whom reaching out and needing is not associated with shame, but with love or nature. As a teenager, sitting alone in my room, and reading as I tried to filter out the roar of the vacuum, the slamming of cupboard doors and the sound of my mothers' feet pounding heel first directly above my head, I was resentful that she never seemed to 'try' very hard with me.

That we didn't have the sort of sit-com-everyone-hugs-at-the-end-of the-show-relationship didn't worry me—I'm not that deluded. What bothered me is that she left it up to me to approach her if I had a problem or was feeling badly or needed to be paid attention. While this technique may work with less stubborn, more at ease children, for me, it generally meant nothing ever got solved. Needing anything, to me, grew to be almost shameful. Wanting—the occasional frivolous little mall purchase, that is—was fine. Needing, though, just seemed so much more intimate, personal, "of the body," something I'd been trying to deny the existence and urges of, and pulling uncomfortably at since elementary school.

When my siblings and I were very young, I remember this 'bit' my mom and brother would do; from the end of the hallway, Sacha would catch sight of her, and running towards each other in mock slow-motion, they'd hug fiercely, jokingly exclaiming how they hadn't seen one another is "so long" (at least a full two minutes). At seven or eight years old, I remember wishing I could do that, but I never said anything about it and would usually return to colouring and sipping grape juice with a spoon, slurping extra loudly until it became irritating and I was told to "cut it out." When this inevitably happened, slightly annoyed, I'd bring the cup to my lips and drink quickly, barely stopping to breathe or taste it. I'd let out a big "Aaaaaahhhh" for effect, and that would be the end of that.

My mother thinks I resent her, and I sometimes do, but I understand why she couldn't be the sort of mother I required. My mother spent my childhood going through the motions of being a parent to three very dissimilar children—she worked, she cleaned, she made frequent trips to the doctor's, dentist, the hairdresser and the shoe-store. And, I knew it was difficult. I remember how she used to keep a "budget," a blue Hilroy notebook on the dashboard of the light blue, peach-striped van that was constantly at the mechanic's or sputtering on the auto-route. It was all just numbers then, but I knew that my mother found balancing her money, not to mention her own life, to be somewhat of a challenge. She tries to explain it to me now via emails, as though I wasn't aware then. But, what I needed from her wouldn't have had to be recorded neatly on the light blue notepaper line and submitted to her accountant at the end of the fiscal year.

Years later, after I'd resigned myself to the idea of not needing and sometimes disdaining affection, it was awkward when my mother, her life vastly improved, would lean in to hug me and I'd stand there, stark-still, a little amused at the ceremonial hug 'good-bye' or 'hello,' but generally allowing her to go through what I assumed she now felt was necessary for a mother to do to her daughter. My sister, Maya, had always been warm enough, if not somewhat clingy with her, and having little else to compare me with, perhaps she was concerned upon finally reaching the realization that my desire to not be touched wasn't in fact an awkward adolescent phase, but a choice. Despite it all, I never lied about it, never pretended to be deeply affected or sentimental, and I rarely hugged back, as her embraces seemed too light (as if handling something fragile), un-practiced, like she was cautious or frightened, perhaps, of my reaction to her after everything.

When my mother reads this now, I know she will be hurt. That is not my intention. Though I do believe that most of life is cumulative and that the 'formative years' are dubbed so for a reason, I haven't lived at home for a long time at this point. That said, whatever I suffer now no longer has anything to do with her or my father or Bolton Center. In fact, all of these things have ceased to exist, not so much physically, but more in that all that truly remains of my parents and my early life, are memories. They are beings that have died and have become ghosts, warped versions of their previous forms. They're like photographs left out in the sun, grown pale with the corners curling up at the sides, hiding detail; very hard to decipher.

It's been nearly a decade since I've been to Bolton Center, the place I grew up and railed against and couldn't escape from. There, I used to climb trees and scratch bug bites until they bled, and lie in field grass grown waist high that hadn't been cut all summer, due either to my parents' lack of a functioning lawn mower, or their unwillingness to refute their previous assertion of being hermits.

I haven't seen my father since that night in Waterville four years ago up in my mother's room, as he sobbed pathetically about his poor health and how he'd been betrayed by everyone in his life. I listened to his stomach grumble painfully. Down in the basement, having locked herself in a spare room, my mother wept. I looked at my father and at his tear-filled eyes and long thinning hair and I came to the realization that the father I'd grown up under had already perished and been replaced by whatever or whoever now seemed so desperate and weak, someone I might have felt sorry for had I been able to emote at all that night.

The father of my youth was a massive, strong, terrifying man. Before bed, as a child, he'd hug me goodnight, and horrified of the contact, I'd quickly move my face away. He always used to joke how I gave him the back of my head to kiss. My father was a man whose fingers were always moving, either in rolling Drum tobacco, or in pounding them into an unsuspecting Charlie horse or rib cage for his own amusement—when he laughed, he made no noise except for a sort of uncontrollable wheeze that eventually sputtered out into a cough, as his stomach quaked aggressively. Contemplating my father that night, I felt he had disappeared and had ceased to be a source of fear for me. I rarely think about him now, except for the nights when jolting up in bed, I realize I've had a nightmare and am not in fact a child any longer. It frustrates me that I still not resilient enough to prevent my childhood monster from haunting me again.

I still see my mother when I am home and plan to continue to do so, but the mother I know from childhood has also vanished. It's strange, really, to see her, this woman I barely know, so changed is she, who still regards me with a sort of distance, like concern mixed with defeat and curiosity about her middle child, the problematic one who locks doors and pushes people away and gets headaches that make her want to disappear, not just pound by pound, but entirely and at once. This mother seems happy. In my youth, I'd tell her she looked angry and she'd snap back that that was just how her face was. This mother has had boyfriends and lives in a nice house and eats organic food. This mother laughs and wears dresses and pulls her hair back in a barrette.

For a long time after she'd become satisfied with her life, she'd tell me over the phone to 'forgive and forget,' which I feel is utterly ridiculous and something I do not feel at all prepared to do. When she would tell me to 'move on,' I'd grind my teeth; feeling the hypocrisy of her statements like a lead weight upon my heart. It seemed to be easy for her to say these things to me when she was happy, but deep down, I know she'll neither forgive nor forget my father, the undeniable source of not only so much grief, but of her own children as well. I honestly don't think forgiving anyone will do anything for me. There is no isolated incident to forgive. Forgetting is even more perilous. Forgetting is to make oneself vulnerable. I wonder which adage is more cliché?—'to forgive and forget' or 'if we don't learn from history's mistakes, we are doomed to repeat them.'

Anyway, it's interesting, this duplicity—this ability that humans have to change, warp, shape-shift. As a child, you never really expect your parents to be any different. If they were unhappy, tense people when you knew them best, changing your opinions of them is not at all a simple endeavour. However, I also realize that it is somewhat arduous for parents to behold transformations in their children, especially when they are possessed of a fundamental bias that strives to deny passage to the darkness and negativity that somehow always manages to creep in through the cracks. And, it's this darkness and negativity that can break one down, gradually, but all so effectively.

Today, I read a story with one of my classes—a traditional Korean folklore about a brother and a sister whose mother was eaten by a tiger on her way home from buying them buckwheat puddings to eat. The tiger is not only hungry, but cruel, devouring pieces of her at a time while she is still alive—first an arm, then a leg and so on—because he seems to enjoy her suffering. His hunger still not satiated, the tiger finds their house and poses as the mother he's just killed, persuading her children to come outside. When the children realize what has happened, the tiger tries to kill them too, but they run into the forest. In the end, they have to escape the tiger by climbing as high as they can up a tall tree. But, the tiger starts chopping down the tree with an axe that has unluckily been left behind, and desperate, the children pray for help. Miraculously, a ladder from Heaven is provided for their escape. Taking pity on the newly orphaned children, the God turns the boy into the sun and the girl into the moon (prior to this, these celestial entities did not exist, apparently).

Though they made their escape from the monster—the murderous tiger—the girl soon grows unhappy with her new life as the moon. She exists for many years in the dark, alone and cold, as we know the moon to be. She lives this way for so long that when the God finally consents to let the siblings switch places, the girl has difficulty adjusting to her newfound brilliance as the sun. She is modest and is unable to contend with being stared at and admired and loved by the people down below. To remedy her self-consciousness, she makes herself so bright, so intense, that people need to shield their eyes from in her presence or risk blindness. Having gone from one extreme to another, shape-shifting as she had, it is the only way she can cope.

It's a simple story, but one with many layers, I think. Basically, no matter how much one alters, some small part of one's past always gets left behind whether we can see it or not.

Patterns

It's a very ironic thing to contemplate the utter excesses of this country, especially after a night of soju and noribangs and watching the sun come up on some steps in a bar-district where people continue to stumble around well into working hours. Surrounded by garbage-filled streets and puddles of vomit, and laughing about my earlier rendition of "Oops, I did it again," while I scratched out star-shaped patterns in my denim-clad knees, I felt extremely happy, like I'd finally found people and a life I could tolerate, if not grow to enjoy.

Those in the know might mistake my tendency towards excess as a bad thing, an addiction, and in a way, it is, as my inclinations to absorb completely and yet, be broken down so entirely—erosion on fast-forward—assume so many different forms, pervade so many aspects of my life, and have the ability to thrill me or shut me down absolutely. The odd part is, the differences in what sparks feeling one way or another, are practically minute, if at all decipherable.

I've always believed in the dual nature of individuals, who contribute to a collective that is even more dual, if not outright deranged. However, despite my recent desire to be sociable and to be accepted and entertaining, I say goodnight and end most nights feeling distant, an enigmatic variable unsure of who the hell that person leaving the bar really was and why she was talking so much and so fast, like there'd never be another chance to find a friend who'll listen and laugh and enjoy her company. With people, I feel my energy being consumed by my laughter and my stories and my many opinions. But later, alone at home, when the last cigarette's been smoked and it's no longer any fun, and all I've got is dirty laundry and dishes, I feel so alone and I crawl into bed and try to dream, falling into layered stories--which will maybe never be written down—that pattern and spin themselves, spider-like, around my memories and desires so beautifully and so terrifyingly so, that they become lost forever in my catapulting, see-saw mind, an unfortunate victim of duality and the excesses of my body and my thoughts.

Being with friends is rather new for me. I'm used to feeling so abandoned, and here, on the other side of the world, I find myself growing very much attached to certain characters. I'll miss them terribly when they leave or when I do.

I made it home at 8:00 Wednesday morning, and by myself for the first time in about twenty hours, I felt extremely isolated, like I was the last flower in an empty field and entirely without protection from the elements. Swaying back and forth with the wind, or rather, my air-conditioning, this run-down little Lily fell into a very deep sleep until late in the afternoon when there was a rooftop barbeque to go to, and more drinks to be drunk in commemoration of the national holiday as well as a day's respite from sticky little monster-children who think their shrieks and interruptions will intimidate me into letting them play games or sleep through my classes.

Wednesday afternoon was not the best day to be outside. The sky was a smoggy shade of white and the wind was blowing sparks from the fire dangerously close to flowing skirts and loose hair. It worked out in the end, though for at least half an hour, we wondered whether there'd be a monsoon. Later, we moved the party to an apartment where British comedy, music and literature were discussed with great relish. I love that people here get my references, as obscure as they have a tendency to be. It became yet another all-nighter, where no sleep was had, but being surrounded by people is practically a sociological experience--and one that I am happy to have--for me.

However, I'm mildly afraid that the extreme happiness I feel when I'm out sets me up for a really depressing low; like the higher one gets, the harder and more traumatic the fall will be. It's like when I was really young and would become nearly maniacal after supper, an odd tendency of mine that either had me shrieking and laughing in hysterical, choking staccato gasps, or feeling overwhelmingly head-splittingly bad. I cannot explain this nearly violent 'reaction' to food, but considering it now, as I sometimes do, I view it as feedback (pun definitely intended), hostile as it usually was, to my lifelong opposition to being controlled, be it by good-"yes-daddy"- behaviour, or by silently being guilt-tripped into finishing my plate of food ("because there are starving children in India"), all the while secretly imagining with no small degree of bitterness how much happier I'd be if there were less of me. And, until my extreme behaviour was finally instigated into an angry frenzy by siblings, which was of course only to be reprimanded by annoyed and screaming parents, I'd be like this, though honestly, most of my evenings culminated with a general sense of injustice as I sobbed into my pillows.

Thursday morning, at home and nursing a very bad hangover, not looking at all forward to my day at work, I sat at my window and had I had the energy or fluid enough in my system, perhaps I would have shed a few tears if that sort of thing was less of a challenge to me as it is. By myself, in the light of day, without the neon lights vibrantly painting the city electric, I realized I had no distractions to rely on, that until work started, I'd be stuck with the worse companion a girl can have, an insulting, compulsive, lecturing excuse for a brain, or a mind, rather, my invisible, un-trappable, habit-former, problem-maker, that so often tempts me so close to the figurative ledge and forces me to look at the vertigo-inducing aspects of my life that come up, so to speak, and bring me so down.

Work was terrible on Thursday. Head spinning, I forced myself out into the sunlight and manoeuvred down the crowded street, avoiding sidewalk driving, motor-revving scooters and kids on bicycles, their friends perched perilously standing on the back wheels' metal carriers. When I got to my hagwon, the mail was still in the door handles and the cleaning lady was sitting on the steps to my right. No one was there, the doors were locked, and I spent half an hour hunched against the wall near the bathroom trying very hard not to breathe in the urine vapour (an inevitable aspect of life in a country that doesn't flush toilet paper [too many people and an inferior sewer system, I suppose], preferring instead to deposit it in waste-paper baskets that are uncomfortably close to one's legs, given the airplane sized dimensions of most washrooms here. By 2pm, I'd had enough and my nausea was more than palpable. I told the cleaning lady via dramatic hand gestures and eye-rolls that I was annoyed and leaving and that I would come back later.

At home once more, I put my head down near my laptop and closed my eyes, feeling myself becoming thoroughly depressed. This week has been a bad one for me in this respect. I feel entirely isolated, a pattern that has certainly resonated quite strongly and painfully in my life. My boss has hired a new teacher (the third counting myself), a man who despite teaching English, can't seem to utter a single syllable to me, let alone acknowledge my "hellos" and "goodbyes." The principal has started having weekly staff meetings where everyone, including the secretary is involved. Or perhaps "everyone" is the wrong choice of words, because when they're all at the meetings, I'm alone at my table in the teacher's office. But then, who am I to call myself "someone," given what a tricky little thing this concept of my existence poses to me so frequently.

So far, they've changed the timetable around, decided on all sorts of changes together, go out for lunch meetings to which I am not invited, apparently—God forbid they involve the teacher with the busiest workload, a barely existent supper break and a monthly struggle to even get paid on time (as of today, despite having reminded the boss, my deposit is late once again).

In any case, I sometimes thoroughly hate my life and no matter how good things are sometimes, I suspect they'll always be this way. I am so tired sometimes and feel so used up and I don't know what to do but despair and complain and I suppose, let the worry gnaw on my brain, stiffen my shoulder-blades, and press so hard and so cruelly against my temples that my head feels about ready to pop.

I feel overwhelmingly sometimes that I and everyone around me runs around in patterns, concentric of course, much like frost on frigid car windows. No matter how much I strive to purge cathartically by writing or speaking about myself, I feel that as soon as feelings of sadness, frustration and disappointment return, I am helpless and unable to be consoled, even by those I care about. That in turn, causes more disappointment and frustration in the hearts and minds of those around me who wish me well, which leads me to feel even worse that I can't be so easily convinced that my life isn't as bad as it feels sometimes.

The idea that we all just repeat our actions, inevitably, or the actions of our forebears, is not a new one: "The sins of the father…" and all that, right? I feel so cornered and so obsessive some days, like how sitting bored in the back seat of the van as a child, I would count telephone poles and then the yellow lines in the road, silently in my head, wondering if there was always the same number of broken lines; if there was a set sequence that road painters followed before returning to the double-no-passing-under-any-circumstances-unless-you're-a-dangerous-jerk-in-a hurry-stripes, or if it really all was just random, an estimate. Perhaps I was just wasting my time and making myself carsick. I wouldn't be surprised, as it all sounds a little too familiar, anyways.

I remember how in the car, on frigid winter days, when the windows were all decorated up and down with pitches and drops, like kaleidoscopic diamonds (or other such icy jewel-shapes), made counting impossible, I'd trace the patterns in the frost slowly with a warmish finger, not relenting despite the inevitable numb that froze me. And I would quietly watch for the lines in the road as the upward pitches in the frost would roll down to the bottom of the window in a speeding, drippy tear-shaped drop that destroyed the whole pattern as it all fell apart.

The Distorted Breath

Two Saturdays ago, we went to Quidam, a Cirque de Soleil show at Jamshil. We had been walking around Hong Dae with some friends, checking out vintage clothing shops and sort of lost track of time. We had to take a cab there and I thought we'd be late, but we made it just in time, to my immense relief. It would have been a shame to have missed it a second time (we'd tried going several weeks before, but my tattoo session went longer than I'd expected).

I barely know how to begin writing about this show—I sometimes think that language has far too many limitations, considering its developers were of course, 'only human'; Man-made things do tend to be slightly more flawed and disappointing in comparison to things that simply exist—and therefore, I apologize if my words are inadequate to describe such a beautiful piece of performance art.

At the start of Quidam, a girl sits with her parents (both absorbed in newspapers, blank and expressionless) in a rather sedate looking parlour. Suddenly, there can be heard the deep rumbling of a thunder and lightening storm and a stranger, headless, and carrying an umbrella, knocks and enters. He stays only a short time, this curious and completely silent visitor--just until the rain slows down—and when he leaves into the night, he conveniently 'forgets' his seemingly superfluous hat, which he'd been carrying politely up until this point. The girl, still looking very bored, decides to try the visitor's hat on, either on a whim or by some sort of mechanical inclination or divine intervention.

It is at this point that reality sort of falls apart and is consumed by a starving imaginative force. The chairs where the girl's parents sit are lifted upwards to the ceiling and hover, as the floor clears and the performance begins.

A man in a silver wheel is the first to appear and he makes his entrance suddenly, hypnotically spinning around the stage and approaching dangerously close to the floor, but never falling. He spins in his wheel like a top then drops to the ground, rocking back and forth like a tossed, overly-bouncy hula-hoop that refuses to still itself. It's really a feat of perfect balance, I think, and limbs spread-eagle, for several moments, he looks quite like Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man. It barely seems possible.

The cast of Quidam is massive, so, many people are on-stage at once doing different things, creating their own realities. One young girl twirls around the stage, arms stretched and reaching, like a child playing "airplane," for what must be a very dizzying half an hour, as she captures the wind under her black dress, parachute-style. Others perform acrobatic feats to rather haunting music; a group of tiny girls toss spinning wooden hourglass shaped toys on strings, high into the air and catch them again. This trick is quite amazing, so it is even more incredible when they start tossing and catching themselves on each other's shoulders, perfectly, like there's nothing to it.

There are clowns, masters of slapstick, better at moving than any "Kramer," completely uninhibited. They interact with the V.I.P section of the audience, pulling random people on-stage to create a story—in this case, there's one about an unrequited, tragic love with comedic effects. It was truly hilarious, watching Koreans shake their asses in pantomime, ham up overly dramatic death scenes and pretend to drink poison, Juliet-style, after pirouetting crazily around in some sort of manic interpretive dance. I was thoroughly amused.

My favourite part of the show however, was a performance that has remained in my mind these last two weeks, perhaps because it was so surreal and heart-breaking at once.

From the rafters, two long lengths of what appears to be red silk are sent out to the center of the ceiling. From her place backstage, a woman approaches, leaping soundlessly. In a way that hardly seems human, she scales these ropes, quickly, seamlessly, rather like an insect might. She propels herself this way and that, using one rope for a foothold, tangling up her toes, the other for leverage around her wrists. She does this until she is perfectly horizontal, hanging in mid air. The next moment, she drops dramatically, head first, the only thing saving her from a broken neck, the wound red silk. At one point, the fabric expands, almost magically, and suddenly, one can see her form through the sheer red material, sitting as though she were on a swing of sorts. Her foot wraps around the other piece, dangling in mid-air, and then, she is enveloped and struggling to escape, like a bird pecking its way out of its shell or a caterpillar trying to make its way out of its cocoon a little too early. Her struggle seems frantic, yet determined. The music reaches a really forlorn peak. One can see her hands pressed up against the silk, feeling, searching, almost desperately, like one whose life depends on escape, ultimately.

When she finally emerges, she performs more of her tricks up in the air, making love to the silk, though with not as much passion as before, it would seem; the music is quite serene and quiet. The silk seems somehow to be restrictive; she appears to struggle. Perhaps the butterfly woman feels that her life, resigned to these two lengths of silk, beautiful to be sure, but a prison, nonetheless, would be one too filled with restraint and limitation. Up in the air, twisting and spinning like a spider in her web, a noose is fashioned somehow, and by the time the music stops, she has as well, hanging peacefully by her beautiful neck, dead by the red silk scarves. It may just be the most incredible thing I've ever seen.

Several amazing acts follow and at the end of the show, there is seen the familiar doorway, and the headless stranger appears looking for his hat, it would seem. The girl returns it to him and sanity appears to be restored. The sacred and the profane are no longer palpable as separate entities, but have returned once more to an indecipherable, seemingly mundane whole. The stage is calm. The audience is speechless, then roars with applause at this amazing piece of captured dream, the impossible having not only been accomplished, but performed in front of a massive audience, witnesses to humanity's ever-surprising capacity.

To say the experience has left me awe-stricken is putting it mildly. Watching humans move like rubber-bands (despite seemingly skeletally sound bodies) was highly surreal and it will be something I'll remember forever. It's a truly weird thing to watch a distortion of reality which encompasses so many different aspects; love, death, sex, mania, interpretive as they always are, to regular life as we know it.

This Sunday, in Insa Dong, I was talking to a friend about imagination and distortion over a Long Island iced tea. I mentioned the Classical Greek line of thought that had been speculated on quite thoroughly by the foremost philosophers of the day. I brought up the idea that the line between what is real and what is mental fabrication is a highly static one, that it was thought that material things exist because we imagine them, because we will them there. It sounds like a silly idea, I know, but it's one of those sceptical concepts that have been around for an extremely long time.

In an Indian creation story I read some time back, the world begins with nothing and then somehow, a being wills itself into existence before making everything else. It doesn't makes sense, I know, but perhaps, "Nothing" is a poor choice of words and that in essence, the blank, the dark, the void, really is an entity unto itself, a "Something" ironically enough.

Waiting for their friend outside the convenience store, she leans into him, his arm around her neck. He squeezes her tightly and she exhales slowly. He asks her if she is real. Jokingly, she tells him that she is a mirage, a figment of his deluded brain, that she has never existed at all, and that if his sanity is ever regained, she'll disappear, like an absent imaginary friend. "Don't scare me," he smiles. When their friend re-emerges outside the glass doors, and they start walking again, he holds her hand a little tighter and listens to her breathe.

Early Sunday afternoon, tired and a bit dazed, we all went together to Arui, a tea and meditation center in Insa Dong that we've been to several times before. Drinking my White Lotus Flower tea (which is really good and is supposed to be a cure-all for unhappiness), I coloured the mini Mandala that had been provided along with the coloured pencils. We noticed that there was something written underneath each picture and someone suggested it might be some sort of "Confucius Say" fortune cookie type of thing. We asked the ultra-calm waiter who spoke relatively decent English, if he could tell us what the words said, but apologetically, he told us "No," and embarrassed, went to fetch the meditation teacher, who was nearly bilingual. Her name is Eun Jun, I think, but she told me to call her "Amy." She read the Hangeul for us and translated what were basically really profound horoscopes.

Mine was the shortest, just a line. It simply said something to the effect that I should be grateful to be alive and that I should focus on being healthy and happy to the best of my ability. I felt a little trapped by irony and circumstance and John gave me a little nudge. The meditation teacher and I got into a conversation about the practices she teaches and though she told me about a lot of different breathing styles, the one I found really very fascinating was the idea that we need to slow our breathing down; that if we only inhale and exhale two or three times a minute, our lives will be longer and ultimately better. This struck a chord, this notion that we only have a certain number of breaths to breathe per life. It's as though we are each allotted a certain number of breaths and if we waste them on words that really don't need to be said, we're ultimately shortening our lives.

I don't know how meditative a person I have the potential to be. I've got one of those minds that rarely go to sleep, though my body is exhausted. On the rare instance it does, it frightens me, as it's like a black-out instead of a gradual descent into the sort of "Alpha," half-awake state that I'm used to. I mistake this heavy, 'real' sleep for death, and I prevent myself from slipping into it by jolting awake in bed to make sure I can still move. Despite what I've tried, the only success I've had with really deep sleep are the occasional sleeping pills, a temporary suffocating fix to shut the paranoid, gnawing thing up and let me rest.

It's a bit unfortunate, I suppose, that some of my worst habits, which are obviously neither healthy for my body or mind, are really the most calming to me, as it is here when I am most outside myself. It was very intriguing to me, though, the meditation teacher's concept that we're each born with a maximum breathing capacity in life, but that, waylaying any physical intervention or intrusion, we have the ability to cheat our expiration dates and still be 'good,' like mildly-spoilt-is-it-still-okay week old milk. I honestly don't imagine meditation would work for me, but I think I'd like to try it at Arui, just for the experience.

Lately, I've still been feeling really run-down during the week and my boss is still having a lot of problems paying me. He only gave me a portion of my salary this month and I was very upset. He's promised to pay the balance this week. He's hired a new teacher named Ju-Ree Lee, who I like much more than the others before her. She's been here one week now and I've talked to her quite a bit. She's perfectly bilingual, which is quite the comfort, as at least there's now someone in the school who can speak the same language as myself. She's already told me that she doesn't think Wah Jah Nim communicates well and that he never tells her what's going on. I bid her welcome to my world.

Today was Teacher's Day in Korea. My students have been giving me candy all day. The boss gave me a rose (and a massive slab of cake that I was pressured to eat, which was highly unpleasant), all embarrassed, making it clear that there was no romantic intention. I think I rolled my eyes. I can barely stand him. Maybe if he spent his money on my salary instead of roses and cakes, we could be friends or colleagues, but alas, he remains an asshole. He did tell me that I am a very good teacher now though, which makes things slightly more tolerable. I'd be an even better teacher, I think, with a week-long vacation, but he's still undecided on this issue, it would seem.

On the weekends, on the other hand, I feel so much better than I do during the week, even energized sometimes. Maybe I'm happy, though it's kind of strange and out of character. I've never felt it before.

We went to the kitsch museum in Insa Dong on Sunday and I had a great time playing with all the old '70s and '80s memorabilia, Astroboy stuff, chintzy little dolls that I'm sure I may have owned at some point. I was looking for a ViewMaster, but unfortunately, I only found the slides. A LiteBrite game would have been nice too…or an Etch-A-Sketch.

Later, we went to India Style Café with some new friends, a mix of teachers and military people. It felt really good to be in a sort of group and just have conversations and feel like I was interesting. I've never really had that before. I was, of course, the only Canadian in a group of eight or nine Americans with the Georgian drawls and all. It was pretty interesting, I guess, but one of the two military guys was hitting on some Korean girls at the next table/bed (at this bar, you sit on elevated Moroccan, harem-style beds), which seemed a little bad, considering he didn't know a word of her language, or she of his. But, it's something you see a lot here—White guys with Korean girls. Apparently, this pisses Korean men off, but whatever…It's all a bit hypocritical, as I've heard often that Korean men really go for North American/White girls themselves, if they get an opportunity (which aren't as common as those presented to Korean women, of course).

Anyway, it's weird how things work out, really. I came to Korea on a whim. I've met everyone I know here by randomly approaching them and striking up conversations when I decided I felt sociable, or by responding to intelligent, flattering e-mails…J It's weird, it really is how a split-second decision can wind up affecting the course of your entire life. I say this because I feel different somehow; not entirely changed or better (I don't think I've ever consciously felt well), but more "okay," like I'm just going to go along with things and be my own person. While it's true that I've asserted my individuality on many prior occasions, I feel like it may last this time around. It's really ironic too; this feeling of having some control over my life, considering I attribute it somewhat to the effects that someone other than myself has had on my life, thus far, in just a few months. I feel very much myself, which is a comforting change from the tense discomfort I'm used to feeling around many people. I don't know how to explain it, this thing that I was struck with one day, not so long ago, as I am only as articulate as language permits, but it's just one of those feelings that I was sure I was dead to, that I'd never sense or experience at all.

I used to say, "I'm not going to hold my breath" waiting for something good to happen to me. And I'd sigh, voiding myself of air, deflated and limp, absolutely empty. Lately though, I am focusing on conserving my breath (which I've spent quite frivolously up until now, having never really thought much about human expiration dates), figuratively speaking at least. And truth told, prior to my previous assertions, it turns out that holding one's breath isn't so bad after all.

Static

Permanence is one of those concepts that has rarely had much meaning to me. Perhaps it is the sceptic in me who has never quite believed in "that is all," that anyone can really "live happily forever after." Some may chalk it up to paranoia or a lack of trust, to the questioning nature of the human mind that only believes what it can see with its eyes and feel with its fingers. I know that everything is temporary; life itself is seeped in transience for those of us who refuse to subscribe to blind belief in…whatever lies ahead. However, sometimes, some moments, I just want to remain frozen, stationary, a statue to prove to future generations of equally confused people, that I was here and that whatever remains of me, either in memory or material possessions, is highly subject to human bias as well as a special sort of dissolution; an entropy that time lays waste on both the mind and the body.

I've been re-reading Dante's Divine Comedy these last few days. My thoughts are highly influenced by whatever words fall beneath my eyes and so, I guess it's safe to say that it's a good thing I've been writing this year, as my thoughts are very temporary and hard to grasp, slippery as they are.

Fascinating as the book is, one of the best aspects, in my opinion, is how the story is layered, and how seamlessly everything seems to pass, as transitory as one moment is from the next. As Virgil's shade guides Alligeri through Limbo (home of the unenlightened but 'good' heathens and un-baptized infants) all the way to the city of Dis (where traitors are condemned) in the seventh circle, they come across many desolate spirits.

The chapter I find most impacting perhaps is the one dealing with the fate of suicides and those who have harmed themselves; These people lose their independence and become part of an organic whole—a tree in the forest that can still feel human pain and think human thoughts; a tree with a soul that can still recall its earthly life, yet neither move nor assert its individuality. It's ironic really, that in death, these souls become growing, 'live' plants that are even able to produce fruit. Perhaps being forced to 'live' (whether they're human or not), is the consequence of their actions as decided by a life-bestowing universe.

The fruit the suicide-trees produce is the food of harpies (foul, shrieking bird-women) who dwell in Hell. The harpies pluck the succulent fruit from off the trees' branches and devour them. This consumption causes the trees great ongoing physical agony which they can never escape, so bountiful are their boughs. The point is, because these people gave themselves up in life and took control of something that wasn't theirs to control, their punishment is to have no resistance in the afterlife, rooted in the earth as they are. This of course, is the worst imaginable sentence for those who, so to speak, seize the reins on their lives and bodies; eternal torment of the soul when the intention was to attain peace and escape.

I can't say I felt entirely well after reading this chapter, yet another series of thoughts on the consumption of life and its relentless suffering. Like most 'moral' things, it just makes me feel extremely guilty and tired.

It scares me sometimes, to think back on some of the things I've done and how I've lived my life up until now. I look at other people randomly, like on the bus or subway, and wonder about them, these people with their lives, so seemingly different from mine, and I wonder if they look at me and are curious too.

One aspect I have been contemplating a lot lately is layers, not just those in Hell (and there are many), but in everything, both physical and psychological.

Last Sunday, we had our portraits done in the park by three different university-aged artists. Sitting in different spots, they all sketched and painted their subject at the same time, illustrating with their own perspectives (which depended on angle, lighting and the artists' respective milieus) the same person. It was awkward, having not only three artists constantly looking up at my face, but a whole crowd of people with cameras, checking out the foreign girl who had to hold still and be taken in, chin up.

For the artist sitting to my left, the side view of my nose and an exaggeratedly long neck proved to be the prominent features of my face. He made my eyes green (the artists were very liberal with their color choices) with long, spidery eye-lashes under slightly bagged, weary-looking eyes.

To the artist sitting to my right, who essentially drew everyone the same way—in a naïve sort of style on black construction paper, I came out looking like a "little people" doll, those old Fisher Price toys with hollow cylindrical bodies, no limbs and round heads with rosy cheeks, semi-triangle for a nose and big, round eyes, three eye-lashes apiece.

The artist in the middle, who got a straight view of my face, as I stared at the top of his head (my focal-point to avoid eye-contact), first sketched my face in a flesh-toned pencil crayon, and then painted in water colors, creating a beautiful layered effect. My hair in this picture is blue, garnished with the purple flower that John had put in my hair, sticking out of the pig-tail bun just enough. My eyes and the shadows around them are done in yellow and green, suggesting both warmth and ice all at once. My mouth, looks like my actual mouth, really; small, with subdued pink, chapped lips. I look very young. It's a beautiful portrait, though I don't think that it's quite what I look like, irregardless of the odd choice of color.

In any case, the experience made me think of how we are viewed by others on a daily basis, and even more, how we view ourselves. Catching the odd reflection of oneself in a subway window and looking momentarily hideous doesn't necessarily mean a person will look that way all day. Equally, trying to hold a perfect expression will only make one's lips quiver and face hurt. Humans, I've come to realize, are highly dynamic in appearance. Capturing life with a camera proves this. It's amazing to me, looking at old pictures of myself, that a few years ago I might have passed for an entirely different person. I wonder if that person is gone only to me, or if somewhere (about the eyes, maybe?) others can make her out.

Do our collected experiences simply add up, layer upon layer, upon our skins? Are we like tableaux raseau (blank slates) on which the years spackle on exhaustion and bitterness and anxiety and wisdom? Are our sins and weakness perceivable to those who know how to both see and look at the same time, those who can pierce the protective-layer-plastic-wrap and get beneath the surface?

My thoughts, as they often do, return to literature, Dorian Grey's portrait, specifically, and how with each atrocity he committed in life, another layer was added to his picture, making it more monstrous to reflect his inner nature. His outer-self, his public face, that is, remained beautiful, unmarred by time or cruelty. I guess it suggests that we can never really know a person, that we can't assume that a person's character and personality are truthful rather than illusionary.

I sometimes feel a lot of weight, like a sort of pressure on my torso, a constricted sort of breathing; an incubus on my chest. At these moments, I am at my worst. I cannot socialize or speak or focus. I want for nothing but to be left alone and to let the pressure collapse my frame until I'm nothing but an imploded pile of dust on my bedroom floor. But, forced to be out in the world as I generally am, I find myself avoiding a lot of eyes, not being able to find my voice, and walking quickly, twisting my body this way and that to avoid contact, a knocked shoulder, a brushed arm. But, it is very hard to remain inconspicuous here.

Yesterday, in the grocery store, a teenage girl who I've never seen before grabbed my hand and wouldn't let go, forcing me to walk with her and her mother down the soft-drink aisle. Finally, her mother noticed my rather alarmed expression and bade her to let me go. Confused, I muttered "bye," and waved slowly to her, walking in the other direction as the girl whined to her mother, who was pulling her along by the arm, about me being "pretty."

I feel as though I am under constant observation here. People are curious; they check out my shopping basket as I shop; their children come up and stare me down, asking me all sorts of questions, waiting for their parents to congratulate them on their English talent. I've been told by many Koreans that I am very attractive, but perhaps I am made somewhat exotic here, as a foreigner in a rather uni-cultural country. In truth, I feel repulsive many days, to the point of embarrassment. I cannot raise my chin for fear it will be noticed, this albatross, if you can call it that, this weight around my neck that flaps dead and flesh-heavy on my chest, 'thump' with each step I take. Looking in the mirror, I am sometimes demoralized, not because I always feel particularly ugly, but because I come off so one-dimensionally, so flat. And all my steps are like a dull clatter on the pavement, blunt objects smacking together; concrete lips.

When people tell me otherwise, insisting that I am wrong, I am slightly amused that they see joy and light when I spend the majority of my time shuffling around like so much dark matter. Perhaps like the artists in Hongik's Free-Market Park, seen from a different angle or better lighting, I come off differently.

I do have my good moments too, of course. But the warm, headiness of Sunday afternoons is impossible to keep with me throughout the week, as I sit in an isolated teacher's room under flickering florescent lighting, listening to my boss slam doors and clump around with that brisk, aggressive walk of his that makes me angry and uptight; the walk so unlike mine, a near silent, plodding, sneaker-clad tip-toe, making every effort to pass unnoticed, weightless. His walk, which I find nearly audacious, is one that that reminds me of certain family members early in the morning, while I tried to get five more minutes of sleep huddled in my quilt, slamming around cupboard doors and not caring if the wooden steps creaked.

I cringe every time the sliding door of his office opens and 'clump, clump, clump,' he approaches to talk to me or give me negative feedback—apparently I wasn't smiling quite enough for a parent while I was typing my redundant progress reports all this week. Not that this has any reflection on my manner as a teacher in the classroom (my students like me and all seem to have lots of fun, not to mention the fact that they've improved a hell of a lot since I've taken over), but whatever…The boss (Won Jahn Nim) also asked me today whether I had any problems with the job or in my personal life (ha!). I told him that I needed a vacation, maybe in June (he said July would be better), and that I didn't see a point in sitting around bored and doing absolutely nothing for four hours (rather than go home) during the exam period when virtually all my middle school students are absent because they're stressed-out, tired, and busy studying. It shouldn't last too much longer, the exam period, that is, but regardless, I still feel very tired and like I need a bit of time to myself, away from the watching eye of Koreans who discuss me in Han-guk when I'm sitting right in the same room. I guess they assume I can't understand them at all (when in fact, I've picked up on quite a few words and have at least a base vocabulary at this point).

I realize that Koreans view me a certain way and that their opinions are probably based mostly on their expectations; what they know about the few North Americans (with that Anglo-Saxon, mostly Caucasian background) they've encountered before, as well as their biases. I don't condemn them for it or anything, but it just frustrates me that I am viewed here, at Bicycle Language Academy, I mean, and to a large extent, to most of the people in this country, through a very narrow perspective: a keyhole if a might, for which no key has ever been fashioned.

But, because I know that few things are ever really permanent, especially people, with all their frailty and psychosis and vacillation, piled layer upon layer upon their already relatively shaky frames (no foundation necessary), I do have some hope that things won't always be so hard, so sad, so consuming and mind-numbing.

Last Saturday, I got a tattoo to remind me of this. The words 'entropy and optimism' slightly below my navel have become the latest layer upon my flesh. While it's true that I am not a "navel-gazer," if things ever do go that way for me and I become meditative, at least I'll have a built-in mantra, or at the very least, some awesome body graffiti with which to occupy my mind.

Right now, it's kind of itchy and scabby, but I'm sure it will look alright. The important thing to me is that it is permanent, a self-induced scar (via the tattoo artist and 150,000 won) which will remain with me no matter how I might shape-shift, shrink or grow. And like the words I am so influenced by in books, perhaps these words too, as I contemplate my body, day after day, will be able to permeate my mind, or at least the outer-most layer. And maybe they'll resonate in a way that is neither skewed nor shadowed, but visible to everyone in exactly the same way, the variable eliminated.

And until I die and my flesh rots, stripping away layer after layer, like some sort of study shot in still life, it will be legible (a temporary sort of permanence, I guess), not only as a reminder of reality and the fate of those unfortunate enough to be a part of it, but as a chronicle of a time in my life when layers and dimensions really mattered to me, when being clear and legible not only to myself, but to those important to me, was seeped in significance.

Every day and every action and every conversation we have culminates to our current lives. With all the decisions and interacting and talking we make and do, it's inevitable that even the sturdiest of status quos is without a foundation. We are in a constant state of flux, reaching our ends and blossoming all at once.

Right now, despite some very bad days, I think life has never been so full. I cannot prevent hours from passing, words from being said, or eyes from closing shut. But, I've come to understand that I can create a sort of layered static-forever in my dreams, in my writing, and in my soul.