I walked like this nearly every day in Korea. It was how I worked my passion out. Countless days I have spent walking or riding on buses listening to music, the entire world not my movie but an ocean of possibility. For these choreographed moments, I moved and touched everything and everyone at the undercurrent. They all looked at me, but they did not see and were unaware of our acquaintance.
Tonight I walked out into an American night, to neat houses with tidy yards. Strode down the hill to another canal obscured by poplars standing guard. American trees and cedar shakes and white faces and big dogs. I wished for a gelid Korean night in the vault of unimaginable population density and I, alone, while the inhabitants carefully filed themselves into the evening time of family life. A civilization like that rumbles through the soles but with the music inflating and lifting me out of it, its distortion ceases and the jolly green giants flying low overhead, the canal to my side, and the quivering cityscape are all orchestrated in silence.
For awhile I felt nothing but the interminable longing to which I've become accustomed. The ball of vomit lying in wait in my belly for the realization of my worst, and certainly my most prophetic, fear. I cannot untie it. So I walked out into the night as far as I could go. I found the empty streets, the ones where even the Americans have retreated into the requisite family activities; I passed by, peering in to dads sitting on couches and women collected around dining room tables. A young man like my old boyfriend played a guitar before a futon couch, like the one I bought for that same boy because I was tired of sleeping on the floor. Then a man in a white sweatshirt and pale blue jeans walked behind me. When the music quieted I heard the scuff of his shoes on the sidewalk. Together we filed past persistent gardeners and windows full of dinnertime. I turned off onto another side street and he did not follow. On another street I stopped to contemplate an old bedspring that had been placed upon a wooden fence, its coils farcical of concertina wire. Enmeshed between the springs were Barbie dolls with their limbs twisted at gruesome angles. Some were paired and tangled lasciviously; others were decapitated and their heads hung from spiraled wire by their long nylon hair. Cars without drivers passed now and then, and I got caught in the moraine of their headlights.
It has been so long. All this time I have concerned myself with the reclamation of what was abandoned when I left America.
I have been driving, but driving is not like walking, not like riding the bus: Driving is somewhere between total agency and total passivity, and not a substitute for either. Tonight, working my way back up the hill, I composed an entry for you that dissipated like wet breath. It was the same as every night in Korea, like 78-3, but especially 83-1; it was every summer bike ride. Now, like then, I try to recreate that dimension and the wisdom summoned from it, and I fail. But I have not lost the lesson: I am a creature of passion and movement. A girl with legs. When I was in Korea I walked and it told me I was alive and interconnected to all things and all people; when I was a teenager, I rode a bike and became aware of the same. All those years between I was driving the car.
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