(2021 - Disability, 2022 - Death is Only the Beginning)
The ghosts arrived gradually, slipping through cracks in the walls, the silence of my apartment, the spaces left behind by lost friendships. Some were memories. Some were warnings. Some were just echoes of lives I could no longer reach.
Theresa, my niece, messaged me from Colorado. She was planning a trip, hoping to bring her mother—my sister—from Indiana to visit. The promise of family, of a tether to a past life, dangled in front of me like a flickering light. But even as we spoke, I could sense it unraveling. The journey would never happen. It was a script I had read too many times before. Distance would win. Time would win. The plans would dissolve into missed calls and unspoken regrets.
Deb called from Victoria, Canada, a friend from my earliest days in Korea, when everything was new and thrilling. We spoke of plans—of reunions, of rekindling the adventure that had first brought us together in 1996. But the plans stayed in the realm of words. The trip would never happen. We had both become tethered to our own ghosts, caught in the inertia of nostalgia.
Some ghosts were less metaphorical. HeeJai, one of my closest Korean friends, had died believing oriental medicine would cure his pancreatic cancer. I thought of him often, but never more so than on a visit to a pond in Damyang, where the wind whispered his name in the reeds. Was he there? Had he ever truly left? Death had only made him more present.
Then there were the ghosts I wanted to forget. The ones that refused to stay buried. Naju. A wedding. His wedding. The Canadian man who had once taken everything from me, now grinning in his tuxedo as though he had never left bruises beneath my skin. The air had thickened that night, the past curling around my throat. I had smiled. I had swallowed it down. I had let myself become a specter at the edges of someone else’s celebration.
The betrayals were not only from the dead.
I reached out to an Australian colleague for help, for something as small as acknowledgment. He ignored me. The silence was as deliberate as a locked door. An American colleague—not someone close—offered assistance, but I refused. The Australian was handling it, I said. But he wasn’t. And he never would. The realization settled into my bones like an old ache.
It was during one of those long nights—when my body refused to rest, when my mind circled itself like a vulture—that I found the book. Under the Black Umbrella. A collection of stories. Fragments of lives from another time, another Korea. A history rewritten through whispered testimonies, through the words of those who had been silenced. As I turned the pages, something stirred. What if the book could write back? What if, like The Diamond Age, it could shape its own story, retelling mine in ways I had never dared to?
My body, too, had become its own haunted manuscript.
The limp worsened, a quiet rebellion against my attempts to move forward. Weekly walks with my Korean American friend—the one my American friend had left, the one I had been asked to check in on—became acts of slow deterioration. My pant leg frayed where my gait dragged against the earth, the threads unraveling as if I were erasing myself with each step.
In the end, I did not need ghosts to haunt me.
I was already disappearing.
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