I've been awfully sick for the last two or three days. Around 8 I finally got dressed and left the house, when Min rescued me from my homebody loneliness with medicine and Red Mango frozen yogurt. Hannah and Eunhi called earlier too, and one of the girls who lives in my house made me some special Korean tea that's supposedly good for throat aches. After crying to my mother early this morning over Skype about how much I miss my friends and family at home, I really felt like a tool. I do have good friends here, friends who will take care of me and go out of their way to make me feel better, friends who worry about me and love me and whom I love as well.
After Red Mango, Min drove us up a mountain. The streets narrowed rapidly to one lane, and we often had to slow down or pull over to squeeze past oncoming traffic. I felt light and relieved during the vertical climb, reveling in the chill of the night air as I opened my window to clear out the smell of his cigarette smoke. I had been indoors for far too many hours in a row.
We parked and walked a short way up a dark road, reenacting a scene from the terrible horror movie we saw together last week. Gasping and coughing with laughter, we stopped to gaze at the city spread out below us.
"Look out there. So many people. Some people are sleeping already, some people are eating. Some people are sick like you. Some people are having sex."
"A lot of people are having sex, probably." (I'm sure there's some other way of saying it but the way a lot of young people say 'have sex' in Korean is literally to do 'sex', as in, sex-hagoissuhyo.)
"Oh really?"
"Probably."
"And some people are dying. Other babies are being born. All of these lives, everybody moving around and living together, living separately. Everybody living, living, living and then dying. Look there is Namsan. That way, way way way over there is Gangnam. I think that building there, the pretty one, it's Yongsan. I can't see Dongdaemun."
He sighed. I sighed, too. We walked back to the car.
I'm home now, listening to Johnny Cash's "Hurt" and it's making me cry. I don't know why I've been so depressed lately, it might just be being sick. Usually I'm so good at spending time alone, but suddenly yesterday and today I feel awful and heavy, 답답해 for the Korean speakers in the house. There's never enough time, but I spend hours and hours sleeping and reading the news and staring at the Bible, unable to even open it.
Truly, this is a record of the last two days, and in no way representative of how I've been feeling. Saturday I got out early and saw the changing of the guards outside of a palace, went to an art museum, went to a huge open air market for some eye shopping, did my homework in the sun on the roof terrace of a shopping mall, went out of town and met some friends for dinner, drank some tea, slept early. It was wonderful and enlivening and indulgent and productive and fascinating and I scribbled notes in my journal and I loved the strangers and the families I saw along the way.
Terribly fickle, awfully moody.
