Stay Soft, Stay Open

I'm going to miss our backyard. I'm going to miss our living room chip parties. I'm going to miss our building. I'm going to miss our neighbors. I'm going to miss our apartment. I'm going to miss our home. I'm going to miss Silver Rice. It's important to hold rituals when we leave a place — to commemorate the time we spent in New York, and to remember all the time we passed here. I notice myself b...

I can't leave New York perfectly. I have so many people I want to write letters to. I have so many people I want to meet up with and say goodbye to. I want to be able to gather with people before I leave. I acknowledge that I can't do it all, and if all I can do is my stuff and myself out of New York, that's enough.

Your home makes you feel safe, and when your home is looking unstable, then I feel untable. I don't like having our bed in our living room. Our TV is being stored in the kitchen so Haejoon doesn't get hurt.

I want to hold space for all the ways that New York held me, for better and for worse. I am taking mind pictures of all of my favorite places. There's a grief in the fact that we can't take our favorite places with us when we leave them.

This episode is about slowing but surely moving out of New York, talking to Sonny, and the societal pressures of our 30s. My life happened out of order.

This episode is about telling 엄마 we're moving to 포항 and how positive of a reaction she had about it, which was shocking.

This episode is about driving down from New York to Virginia with our first haul of personal belongings.

This episode is about the addictive nature of technology and how these technology companies make them addictive on purpose. They're like pocket slot machines.

This episode is about all the times I put off the decision and the dream to move to Korea. There is so much isolation in the displacement of immigration. Death wakes us up to our lives.

This episode is about revisiting memories of all my trips to Korea that I've ever taken, and 할머니 and 하라보지 visiting us in America in 2000 when I was in 6th grade, and how they lived with us for several months in Virginia.

This episode is about watching 웰컴투 삼달리, Welcome to Samdal-ri, and seeing the stories of grief woven into the series, and the need to see the specificities of Korean grief outside of my own experience.

This episode is about our super and our friend, Cooper. I miss him, his presence, his smile, his music, his cooking. I miss doing life together with him.

This episode is about me processing all of my feelings about our July Korea trip, three months after our July Korea trip — the grief, the overwhelm, the massive feelings of longing and missing my family and my home.

This episode is about driving back and forth between New York and Virginia every weekend for two months because I needed to have our family together after death broke our family, and I was struggling to live apart and away from 엄마.

This episode is about my plans for 아빠's 2-Year Death Anniversary and the anticipatory grief I was feeling leading up to the anniversary.

This episode is about the difficulties of the month, and the trauma of September 2023 coming back up two years later, in September 2025. I can't unmarry the worst days of my life from September. As much as I wanted to reclaim September, I wish I had instead given myself permission to be a human being. September was a pressure cooker. I put so much pressure on myself, society puts so much pressure...

This episode is about the impossible weight of September, the massive grief I'm carrying, and all of the big mile-marker days of our lives — Haejoon's 돌잔치 (9/13), Haejoon's 돌 (9/15), Greg's and my five-year wedding anniversary (9/20), my 37th birthday (9/21), 아빠's two-year death anniversary (9/26), and 엄마's 64th birthday (9/27).

This episode is a summarization of the final days of my Korea trip. Day 19: We packed all of our things into my family's cars, we went to church, we drove out to 교동도, we rode the monorail at 화개정원, and we went to 교동도 대룡시장, and we drove back to 파주. We ate 삼겹살 together, and we stayed at a hotel. Day 20: We got rescued from the hotel by our family. We went to a 찜질방 and I hated it...

This day marks 1 year and 10 months of 아빠's death. This was a really hard day. Leaving Korea is always so hard, and the final days are especially hard. I always feel so much regret about the things I didn't get done, but the actual problem is — we never have enough time in Korea.

We went shopping at Namdaemun — clothes for Haejoon, little souvenirs for myself. We ate 만두 and 팥빙수. We ate dinner with 이모부 — 김치찌개 and 두부.

I felt the weight of visiting Pyeongtaek, and I felt the weight of the trip, as it comes to an end. We went to Seoul to get my birth records from Severance Hospital. It was my first time visiting the hospital that I was born in. The maternity hospital was attached to the cancer hospital, so the hospital reminded me of Schar and our experiences with 아빠. I talked to 이모 about what it's like to ha...

We went back to 평택, and this day was more difficult than our first 평택 day, but so full of 인연. We actually met people who knew 아빠's family. We met someone who worked as a firefighter with 큰아빠, who remembered that his younger brother went to America to work at a 세탁소. He also remembered that 할머니 lived in this neighborhood, living with and helping 권 할아버지 before he died. We met a...

This was our first 평택 day. It was so intense.

We went to church with my 숙모 and 삼촌, we got lunch with my family afterwards, we went to a temple and the 감악산 출렁다리 with 이모 and 이모부.

This was an emotional day. I want to find my family's jokbo. We didn't go to 평택, but we did engage with 평택 things. We had a farewell dinner for the closing of 삼촌's cafe, Act 2 Cafe, and we gave him flowers. So many family stories.