Leaving Friends

If you've lived overseas--if you've moved at all--then you probably understand what I'm feeling right now. Any time you move far enough away to miss your friends and family, your heart splits--like the torn-off arm of a starfish. (I accidentally made a L'Engle reference. Oops.) If you're healthy--and lucky--you'll make enough new friends that your "torn off" social circle will regenerate--but that doesn't mean you'll stop missing those absent limbs.

Photo by Ed Bierman

I've made wonderful friends in the time I've been home. I had the opportunity to join an awesome writing group, and met people through book groups and old acquaintances as well. Now I'm moving away, though, and all those wonderful new friends are going to become lost arms.

Of course, I'll come home periodically. It's a long trip, but a decent ESL job generally pays enough for at least occasional visits to the homeland. We'll keep in touch on Facebook, too--Facebook is a lifeline when you're away from home. (If we were living 200 years ago, there's no way in hell I'd ever have left in the first place.) It's not the same, though. Quick meetings over coffee, or shared jokes online, can't replace all the meetings and game nights and parties I'll miss when I'm away. This is to say nothing of family--I'll miss them, of course, most of all.

But on the other hand, I get to see my "Korea friends." I don't just mean Koreans (though some of my Korean friends are as dear as sisters). I mean also the "foreigners" I met while working in Gimpo--teachers, mostly, who either stayed while I left, or wandered back again. We had a wonderful time exploring Seoul, and there's a special camaraderie among strangers in a strange land that can't really be replicated elsewhere.

One friend, in particular, is about to go back for her fifth year. We're already planning all the places we're going to go--we've been to Jeju-do and Osaka, and are hoping to make more successful trips before she finally moves back to Canada. I have a long list of places I want to go. Some are repeats (Jeju-do, Gangwha-do, Seoraksan). Others are tourist attractions (Herb Island, Namiseom). I'm looking forward to visiting amusement parks, testing out restaurants, and taking lots of pictures.

Preferably in silly hats.

I sort of grew up thinking that each person had one destined future, and that if you missed that destiny you would basically fail at life. I've been trying to get away from that. A lot of times you come to a crossroads, and there's no right path--you could take any of the three ways in front of you, or go back the way you came, and you'd be perfectly happy whichever way you chose. I was excited about Shanghai, and I tried to make it work... but even though I'm sorry it didn't, I'm excited about Seoul, too. I think this is going to be a good experience, and I'm definitely going to do my best to make it one.

Right now, though, I'm sitting in my room in my mother's house, listening to the frogs and crickets, enjoying the unseasonably cool and balmy air. I live in North Carolina, and it's far from a perfect place, but it will definitely always be home. I'm lucky enough to have another home I'm going back to--but I doubt there will ever be a time when I don't miss this one.

This was supposed to be a post about all the places I wanted to go when I got back to Korea. Sometimes things don't work out the way you plan them. (And that's okay.)

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This post brought to you by the American Society for Maudlin Late-Night Meditations.

We had a lot of surprise snow last week. We'd gotten so many false predictions that I stopped paying attention to the forecast. Then it snowed off and on for about three days. It was very pretty, but the air was too warm for much accumulation. Probably that was for the best.

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I'm really torn about what I'm going to do when I go home this summer. I've considered a number of possible jobs-- tutor, TA, copy-editing assistant-- but none of them has really caught my interest. If I'm honest with myself, the idea of settling back into a regular job and niche at home is a little depressing. I also feel like it's a little silly to leave a proven, steady source of income and step back into the uncertainty of the US job market right now.

At the same time, the part of me that sounds like my mother says that I should get started making a "real career" for myself. I'm 26 now, which is a bit too old to be acting like an indecisive college student. Maybe I should be "making connections," meeting people, building a resume that American employers would be able to relate to.

But 26 is really young, too, and I want to travel more.

I miss my family and friends, and seeing them more often is a big reason to go home. How often would I see them, though? They have their own lives. I might not even be able to get a job close to home. Then what? I'm also terrified of ending up in another stifling cycle-- barely treading water, watching my free time slip by in an exhausted daze while I struggle to put gas in my car. The year before I came to Korea was, in some ways, my most miserable ever. It was certainly the most hopeless and frustrating. I never want to return to that, and I'd do a lot to avoid it.

I've been thinking a lot about Japan in the last week or so. I'm reading Speed Tribes right now, which has renewed my interest in returning to the places I saw there this summer. Tokyo, in particular, captured my interest, and I'd love to see more of it. I'm not sure about living in Japan, though-- it's hideously expensive, and I'd just be staying afloat (if not losing money. Still, it would be an adventure, and I'm not ready to give up on those.

I do want to spend some time as a person before I go back to being an alien, though. When I went home for Christmas this year, I couldn't get over the simple miracle of being able to speak in my own language to anyone I met without coming across rude. I want to eat familiar foods, use a dryer, have a social circle of more than a handful of people. I need to spend some time reconnecting with home before I start in on a new kind of "away." I'm just having a hard time visualizing how it's going to go.

Six months? Really?

I can't believe it's been so long since I updated this. I knew it had been a long time, but did not realize how fast the time would fly. Since July, I have:

1. Won NaNoWriMo for the first time in five years of trying.
2. Gone home for a three-week visit.
3. Decided-- or realized-- that what I have always wanted to be, and all I will ever truly want to be, is a writer.

What happened to Urban Planning? It's gone the way of all concessionary dreams. I'm told it was a nice post I wrote about it, though.

Anyway. I know only one person is following this, but it means a lot to me that I'm picking it up again. I've had a post sitting in my notebook since September that seems to have been blocking the chute, as it were, so here it is in all its slightly-vintage glory:

9/7/09:

I love K-pop music.

My aerobics instructor always has the latest hits on the workout routine, so I always want to dance and sing along when I hear them on the radio out in public. Do I look silly? Yes. Do I care? Not really.








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I don't know what I'm going to do when I leave Korea. It's going to feel like tearing out a piece of my heart. When am I going to come back here? When am I going to stroll around in Gimpo on a lazy Sunday, go "eye-shopping" in Hongdae, have dinner out in Itaewon? I've come to recognize and welcome the changes in the seasons here. One of my favorite things is the fruit-- strawberries, apples, grapes, tangerines, most of them fresh from the field and sweeter than I've ever had. You can buy them by the bucket from street stands or the backs of pickup trucks.

Want to hear something truly sick? By the end of this summer, I'd come to enjoy the incessant noise of cicadas buzzing outside. (Korean word: maemi.)

My Korean language study has been going better, and I'm starting to enjoy the language more. When I first got here, it sounded mushy and dull to me-- endless strings of mumbled syllables, impossible even to separate into words. Now I can recognize a kind of music to it. It's got an underwater sound, in a way-- the words rise up like clusters of fat bubbles before dropping to a murmur again. The vowels and rhythm actually remind me of French, in a way-- so much so that when I try to speak French now, my meager Korean invades. Mais becomes hajiman. I want to keep studying and using Korean after I stop working here, and I wonder how I'm going to do that when I go home. I briefly considered going for my Master's in Korean, but realized it wasn't practical. Seems like a big loose end for me to drop, though.

The real problem is that I fall in love with any place I stay in for very long. When I see sunlight slanting off green mountains, I want to be back at Western-- doing what, I don't know. Even Cary has a big draw for me, though I spent most of my adolescence complaining about it. Granted, the draw is mostly familial, but in a big way it's still my home.

I don't think there will ever be a perfect solution for this problem. I'll always miss most of the places I've traveled. A short visit is never long enough, and a long visit just builds more ties: I've been to France and Japan twice (briefly) each, and the urge to go again is stronger than ever. Traveling is like making Horcruces, except less messy. You leave a piece of yourself buried in every place you go, and every place changes you irreversibly in one way or another.

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End vintage post. Wow, tl;dr. Anyway, I've more or less decided to go home for a while as of now, but I'm still not sure what I'm going to do there. Now that this is out of the notebook and up in the ether, I'll try to keep you posted a bit more regularly. Thanks for reading.