i love you, seoraksan

lately, i’ve been a bit obsessed with the possibility of connecting all of the people on the planet together - of finding a way to reach out and grab for hands and let roots spring from our feet, of drawing an infinite dot-to-dot that would culminate in the eternal definition of us.
sometimes, though, your hands let go and float free and you find yourself staring at your reflection in the subway window – a lonely mirage interrupted by a blinking repetition of lights and sounds and faces. you find yourself folding your hands protectively into a geometric tangle inwards, pulling and twisting until you’ve become a fortress of impenetrable knots.

at this particular moment, i am staring, but not staring, at the girl standing across from me, learning, but not learning, the oddities of her outfit, as if this will let me know, without knowing, who she is, her name, and why she is standing there, wearing
• a satin turquoise blouse drowning in ruffles and buttons
• a silk pink and gray color-blocked shift dress
• a pair of white lacy patterned tights
• and some fake gucci tapestry flats.
in this inert bubble, i can gather the fragments of sound crashing from my ipod, the screeching train tracks, the automized intercom messages, and the giggling teens down the aisle into a neat heap i can curl and hide inside my clasping fists. i can shield myself from this bombardment of invigoration bordering on collapsing exhaustion.

i wonder, sometimes, at the inimitable mannerisms of an old couple who have lived with minimal societal intrusion for years. i wonder how they manage to not care so much about how they appear, how they’ve let such odd rituals normalize so concretely – the placement of a teaspoon, the schedule of a meal. i wonder how they can continue so obliviously, or why it is that i care, or why it is that the world would even bother to string up these gestural discrepancies on a scale of hypocritical comparisons. who makes up cultural rules, anyway? what is society but a series of inexplicable mannerisms?

i did a hard thing, this last week: i let go. i quelled my inner reservations and quieted the voice repeating, like a mechanical clone, the rules i thought i’d been dispelling the entirety of my life.
i found myself climbing a mountain in one of the most beautiful places on earth along a path lined with clouds so thick i could wrap my mouth around them. i untied my knots, i unfolded my hands, and reached out, hoping to grasp onto something.

and so it was that i stood on a quiet country highway with a dear friend when a tour bus came to a screeching halt to take us where we needed to go, the guide handing us freezer-cooled sodas and water bottles with a sympathetic smile. and that along a 15 kilometer climb straight up a mountain, we ended up with a random collection of rice cakes, crackers, and freeze-dried “pork in jam”, and that after a glorious dinner in a korean bakery i was handed a card scribbled with the owner's name and number, inviting me to stay at her house the next time i came to visit seoraksan.
because you speak korean so beautifully. signed, your bakery mom.
and so it was that a half hour before our bus departed i decided to assuage the convention threatening to strangle every canvas of my reason and jumped into the ocean, fully clothed, just to feel the salt in my hair.

perhaps this is why, from time to time, we must close our eyes, touch our hearts, and remember that they are still beating – remember that we are not just synthetic puppets driven about by a world of chaos –
but that maybe in that chaos lies an extreme balance of beauty, something we only understand because we’ve always known it.
perhaps this is how we sometimes realize that the only thing keeping us from beginning the dot-to-dot is not our koreanness, or our culture-ness, or our whatever-ness, but something quite terrifyingly familiar: just ourselves.