Inspo #14 Starting at ’86:

Once upon a time, there was a man who loved a woman. Not for any one reason. Just that he loved her. It was very simple and serene. They woke with the sun, smiled at each other, felt a tenderness of familiarity in a thumb stroke on a cheek, in the breath of safety. The man was elegant. He enjoyed his work and went to his place of business with vivre. He donned his hat day to day, and sipped coffee, always black. Or was it tea? That part I don’t know. A day came when a young woman and her friends were in his store and he noticed her. She had a perm with wavy curls and wore a light pink sweater. It was oversized on her slender frame, chic of ‘86. What was she doing? Listening to music, perusing the records. Soon, despite the man already with family under his roof, the young woman became pregnant. This young woman couldn’t stay anywhere. So she fled. She lived in a rural area away from Seoul while the skin over her abdomen grew taut and ballooned, burgeoning a life within whether anyone chose this or not. ‘A better life for my daughter’ the mother, or the young woman, repeated. She ripped from the baby kin, and told not a soul who knew her of the conception altogether. A female sold as a promise, unknown. 19, she continued as one does, finding religion in the repetitious and repetition as a reality. She later married. They had a son who was loved even more. One day the first woman awoke with a start. Her husband had gone to work, he’d donned his hat and sauntered off. She’d had a nightmare which was rare for her. She remembered its dregs as she arose to begin the day. She got up to make tea, or was it woongjin? That part I don’t know. It was just a nightmare. But someone was arriving in search of her husband. The next day she startled awake again. A ghost-like apparition was arriving, something about her husband. That was her nightmare yet again and she felt ill for many days. She waited for the spiders on her back to fade. At the same time, the young woman, the one with the pink sweater and who was now middle-aged, wasn’t having nightmares. She hummed to herself while marinating the cabbage for kimchi. She looked out the window in silence on the train. But her husband, always smiling when he wasn’t, was unsettled as he tipped his mug back. What was it that unsettled him? It was a stranger at the door. A ghost-like apparition; chills. He shivered. He donned his hat day to day and carried a briefcase which he opened and closed with a metallic click. As for their son, he was beloved, in college, and around the same age as his mother when she first became one. The son frequented a record store after school where he studied computer graphics. Alternative, old classics of Korean music, sometimes Kpop, these were addendums to his life. One day, while there, he learned that the record store owner was gone. It was said that his wife, the woman, was bereaved. She’d been having hallucinations about her husband. Someone whispered this coyly and the son overheard. Later, he went to visit his mother and father. He had no siblings. At the dinner table, he sipped soju, or was it magkeolli? That part I don’t know. He told his parents what he’d heard. They listened to him relay the news. The mother jarred an extra batch of kimchi and finished putting things away. She packed it up and set it by the door. The table was cleared and the stove was lit for evening milk. The husband went to smoke on the porch, his puffs loomed in like the ghost his nerves were nursing. The son went to his room, his music billowed into the humid still air. Later, awash in stark stale ambiance of an office room, the young woman, who was now middle-aged, leafed through a photo album. She looked at the American woman across from her who was no longer her infant kin. She showed her a photo from when she was 19. A perm with wavy curls and a light pink sweater. At the table, the bereaved woman sat with her family. She got up to make coffee, or was it tea? That part I don’t know. Later, the woman with the pink sweater sat at another table, the extra jar of kimchi by her side. Her son played vinyl from his bedroom, the chords, a soundtrack to a muted dialogue. She looked at the shadows transient on her table, at the reflection in the glass jar, a nightmare, a hallucination. 

At the market is a stall set up with vintage vinyls, stacked into crates, and fanned out on the covered surface. The American woman leaves through them. The young man who mans the stall dons a hat. She extracts one and he nods, and places it into a baggy. He hands her change back and she reaches for it. Bills and coins tumble to the ground. He bends to pick them up and she beats him to it, apologizing in a different native (language).