Here and now
This time is the longest time I’ve stayed here, albeit in an indefinite state of transit between where I was last March and where I thought I’d be by last September. A few months ago, during the latter part of winter, I was at a nearby cafe to work. I looked out the window at the main street and saw the usual fruit truck, some elderly ladies, the busy bank, and schoolchildren going to and fro. This is when I remembered that just across the road is the first home I ever lived in.
As a teenager, the books and films that really got to me were ones centered around a particular city or town. Most do, but some especially evoke someplace sensible, like what makes a night back home lived-in, what makes air familiar. This sounds a bit cliché, but I envied the way people could seem to belong somewhere and know a place, and others, so closely. Maybe I just wanted intimacy. Nonetheless, what is it about stories that make even somewhere like Ohio sound romantic? (Sorry to anyone I personally know from Ohio.)
Also around late winter, I watched Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2018). It gripped me with a beauty I hadn’t felt in a while. The main character, Luo, has this distinct, self-reflexive line: “The difference between films and memory is that films are always false…” Interestingly, the film itself attempts to capture memory. It collapses film and memory, if not equating the two. The attempt to visualize, retell, and remember memory as film, then, renders that memory itself false, because films are always false. As one review of the film eloquently summarized: “Perhaps it is only falsity, the fictional falsity of cinema, or any representative art, that gives memories their structure and substance… [Memories] are closer to subliminal flashes, things with no articulated substance until we create one for them. Memory becomes a creative act…”
I stop in front of the typical 1990s Korean apartment building. Before leaving the cafe, I’d decided to take a detour and visit my first-ever home across the street. I crane my neck up to the nineteenth floor, where the unit is. It looks small from where I stand on the ground. There is a middle-aged man near the entrance, having a smoke while talking on the phone. There used to be a playground nearby. I used to play on it. It was torn down to make room for extra parking space a while back. I look up again at the nineteenth floor. Should I be feeling something? One day, I may have no reason left to come to this neighborhood. Maybe I will miss it then. For now I look up, and remind myself that it exists.
I walk back to where I live currently. On the ground, here below, my feet trace the span of unremarkable cement separating these two homes. It is this distance, but also time, between four and now. Twenty-plus years mark these few blocks. As I walk, I zip up my coat and cross my arms to keep warm. I belong when I step.
