Night drive down into the industrial flats of southern Seattle. How I find myself here when I didn't plan to be is under question. Black paint dripping from the sky onto deserted streets. Can't see, see. But I need to find a mail box with an early pick-up to keep up this little game I'm playing with Yvonne. I'm always late; working the postal system trying to get caught up on my mailing schedule. There is a fabled transfer center down here somewhere in the maze of streets and long low warehouses. Longhouses. Found the old post office, deserted also. A new one located with pick-up early as 8am. A drop in the box.

Beside the skeleton of the new stadium, cars were waiting for a train. Red lights in a horizontal row along the thin white safety arms, flashing; they provided the only color in a night of greys and blacks. I watched the Amtrak superliner cars pass through the headlight beams and saw in the silver metal siding a mirror image of us, the audience, squeezing and stretching in the imperfect surface. Like those trick mirrors at the State Fair.

I'll take it from here.

I'm happy:

March 17 - Seoul
[Packing up the household]
March 30 - Beijing
April 1 - Singapore
April 2 - Rome
April 5 - London
April 8 - Philadelphia
April 9 - Seattle

Well, I wanted to write that last week before I started to feel the sobering crunch of things to be completed. A shrinking interval of time. It doesn't matter: In a week, the class will be over - for better or for worse - and then I'll slip into rotation against the Earth.

I am still happy about it - No, more than that: I'm elated, exhilarated, out of control over it. And it is so lovely, this living. Experiencing life - my life. I can think of nothing more self-affirming than moving through a globe of strangers, touching them all with my smiling gaze, a few with my fingers. If I never get to know you, then let me feel the lack. Or something very close to that, from The Thin Red Line.

I will be leaving Korea for good. I cannot say at this hour of night what this trip "home" means in the long twisted strand of my life. A most significant end. I know I will savor every vision of the city and I've promised to document all the places that came to know me regularly, all the people who laid their smiles upon me every day. The buses: I shall remember their numbers always. I know it. Crumpled, bones dissolving inside my transparent leather skin (like a thin rice wrapper), I will be reciting those numbers to the bored faces of children.

Return is ritual. What I anticipate the most is total immersion, first in the home I've left behind and then in the world awaiting.

Lost: Please don't look for me.