Notes After Settling In from the Move #2

Rereading novels, I felt as though pains and emotions were coming back to life. There were past days when I thought the stories of Korean literature had nothing to do with me, but thinking about it now, Korean literature was in fact deeply connected to me. The more I read, the more the feeling of having lost a hometown, and the absence of communication with people, only bring past events to mind. As a result, what I choose is to grow distant from people I'd been familiar with and to look back through messages we exchanged long ago. To recall the emotions I shared with those people back then, there's no way to revive those feelings other than reading the chats we exchanged and the letters we wrote and gave each other. I think I probably miss that. Seen that way, the thought arises that the spaces where I shared those emotions are indeed something I miss too. The me of a time when I read books enormously was surely often swept up in too many thoughts and emotions, wanting to pour out to someone the stories within me but unable to — and in truth those thoughts remain unchanged even now. Perhaps even with people who've finished reading the books, I wonder whether conveying such feelings of mine is really a good thing, and I pass the time wondering whether I'm saying too many useless things. I'll miss the Zhangjiajie restaurant I often went to near the house, and the gray-and-black café I came to know and frequent over the past year, too. I'll remember the mart I went to around here, and the time when the Starbucks first opened. The glow of the sunset falling beneath the sky, the sunrise I watched in the mornings, the high school I walked to through the pitch-dark night in my school days, the red No. 07 bus I often rode, the memories at the library where I spent so much time — all of them will be hard to forget. Is this what losing a hometown is? It's so hard.