It’s August. I’m listening to Christmas songs again. Something about bells and piano bring me back to myself. As in, back to a person without any thoughts and feelings except for those of my own. When I get here, it makes it easier to be sincere. I do this because I want to discover more about my world before I jump back into the pits of work and pressure. Before I look for a reason to be proud of myself, I want to know why I need to be.

It’s not despair that brings much revelation or thought. Rather it’s in the quiet moments that follow. Today, I tried to notice things that I usually don’t. I found that I’m not much of a thankful person. Despite any handicaps I may adopt or boast of, there is a fact that levels them all. I have my health, and I have time. Everyday there are a few hours I’m free in which I could dedicate myself to good food, friends, and writing. Well, I live like a free man–that’s what I’m trying to say–that I am a free being in that I speak and act on my own behalf. With all the choices I get to make in this life, I’m always invited to make more each day I wake. Better ones.

Knowing all that I’ve been given, I can’t help but feel the weight of authority and expectation, of God (that Guy). How dare You make it so easy for me? What do You expect me to become, to accomplish? Behind these questions, I know my appreciation is lost and it returns to something bitter. What if I am not what You created me to be and this life You put so much magic into was just a waste of time? It’s not enough that You believe in me until I do.

Here’s a quick sketch I did in pen from Giovanni’s “Traveller’s Notebook”. I’ve been learning to fill my journal with visual notes as well.

Something came to me today, very quietly. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a singer. I loved to hold the mic. As terrible as my voice had been, a talent agency with Korea and Japan offered me a three-year-contract. In small script, the three years were lengthened for training and debut (7+ years). I thought the least of the decade worth of time, or my home in the States that I’d have to give up, but the agents said I’d have to abandon my schooling. Back then, I hadn’t discovered poetry yet. With only a week to decide, I picked my education and remained here–hoping that I will come to love writing enough for having given up another dream.

I understand now why I avoid hobbies outside of my writing. Doing so makes me think, maybe I could have done both singing and writing, or even in response I could be good at both, but would never be the best at one. I haven’t sketched in years and have recently (timidly) been trying to. On my decision, I like to think it wasn’t one between careers. The mic and pen both exercise the soul in the way I imagine. Instead, I made a choice between location. Rather than find myself on a platformed, lit stage, I am the girl in the back room amongst simpler things–an open window and a warm coffee mug.

Few years back, I’d write some stuff down, dream journal things, and I called it poetry. Somehow, I’d thought poetry was a mess of feelings on a page. Mostly, that it wasn’t creating anything new like free sketching. Poets used the same look, language. So writing a few lines given this medium seemed simple and redeemable.

I like the idea of control because it had stayed with me from my Dantist studies. Control allows one to mediate their appetite for noodles, sex, fame, whatever ring of hell one prefers. I still continue to observe what this lack of control or excess does for the soul. Boethius says it better: “The joy of human happiness is shot through with bitterness; no matter how pleasant it seems when one has it, such happiness cannot be kept when it decides to leave” (1962 Macmillian Pub). He goes on to say, we find happiness not in excess, but in controlled reasoning. Reason allows us to be content with what we have, rather than seek more. Reason is the key to mediation and human joy.

As I became more acquainted with the craft, I found a similar philosophy behind poetry. Poetry is about taking that mess of feelings (the excess) and refining them.  I seize literary device and selection to control the mess on the page. By doing so, something incredible happens. Other people can read it too. The audience gains access into the poet’s writing because it’s no longer a mess. And all the poet can hope for is that the reader doesn’t feel he has wasted his time.

It seems juvenile, but some of my edits are simple, one word. It took me a week to change the line, “she stepped” to “she ran.” Quickly, we notice the differences in tone, in agency, and sometimes these different words allow ourselves to realize how we think, or how we blame. It becomes a self-study. I frequently write about my mom, it comes naturally and it has served as a vehicle to write about myself. I find Boethius’ happiness in mediating my emotions towards her and am content in doing so. I must have the most selfish (and luckiest)  job of all, being a poet.

This must have been my first poem. Frui is one of the two defined loves in Dantist study. It is to love someone, not for themselves, but for the source of their creation. (Frui previously appeared in Qarrtsiluni and received the Bret Baldwin HM)

Frui

Mom always loved the rain. She loved the sharp edges of the stones
washed with it. Because she liked things clean.

It cleans every alley, she said.
God must like things clean. She was sure of this

more than the broken zippers
and the washed take-out boxes she saved in the pantry.

She loved to bleed.
I hope she finally sensed God’s cleaning in it.

I purchased: “The Everything Guide to Writing a Novel” by Joyce and Jim Lavene, “Self-Editing for Fiction Writers” by Renni Browne and Dave King,  and “Best-Selling Secrets from Top Agents” by Rick Frishman and Robyn Spizman.

All of which deterred me from the most important thing: writing my story. I suddenly became concerned with who my audience was and how to write query letters. It would ultimately cost me three years before I could forget everything I had read and begin writing.

My first failed attempt at a novel had been untitled. After five months of drafting and a week in Jeju Island for research, I dropped it. There was no “I” actually, the draft dropped itself. It wasn’t going anywhere eventful, it wouldn’t budge.

My second attempt was more successful. I finished the book. It took two years to draft and seven months to write. I sent it over to a few editors my mentor had recommended. They tore it up. Problem 1: I was not talking enough (my 200 pp could have easily been 400). Problem 2: the draft was over-planned.

I decided to start all over. I went back and signed up for an Intermediate Fiction Workshop, meeting twice a week. To progress more quickly, I consulted with the instructor an extra hour each week about my new draft. This one contained the same basic themes as my last attempt but I was starting without a plan or direction. One of the valuable lessons I had learned: “Don’t write something meaningful, let the scholars pull meaning from your work. Just sit down and start to write about real people.” I am now two chapters in after eight weeks.

I guess it took me more than three years to write these two chapters (24 pp). Even now, I wonder what would happen if my third attempt ended up going nowhere. How do I continue to commit myself to such long term projects? I think I persist because my characters have become as real as the world around me. I am not willing to let them go, let their lives go because I am not a good enough writer. I’ll just have to get better.

Dear ______,

There needs to be a way to shut it off—the madness, the psycho, (all the words for thinking). Sometimes, a lover, a friend can do the job. And when I’m around this person, I remember how to stop thinking. I react naturally to the things around me, like a child. Yes, I even snicker and whine at the smallest things. But what if these juvenile moments are a way to claim my cradle? Don’t dismiss it just yet. In your absence, I have tried to piece together a child in me, one that has been hesitant to surface. I wouldn’t dare say that you’ve robbed me of a sort of innocence. Just that it may have been postponed. I’d have it postponed even further if you asked me to.

But the childhood having been put off, I see frivolous pieces surface now. Almost all at once, I buy baskets only useful for picnics and then go up the stairs two by two. In my weeping, “I want to, I want to because I wanted to, I wanted to for so long.” I wonder if I have made you proud somewhat, that I might have earned a favor. Could you lift this burden from me—and say that I am not “disgracing you,” that I can rest from the madness time to time. It takes a human hand to flip a switch and I might have found such a person who knows how to (tell the latent adult to fuck off). Though you’ve always had the voice of reason…that my relationships “cannot possibly last,” I say now, without thought, maybe it doesn’t matter (as much as you think) whether we persist or not.

Initially, it might have been guilt from feeling happier here than anywhere else. Even when visiting family, I look forward to returning to this city, home. It could be called independence, but I don’t see myself this way. I rely on every room, meal, family, friend I come by. When people ask why I choose to stay here, I don’t mention that I deserve it, that I haven’t felt like this in the last two insufferable cities I’ve lived in, that I’ve just begun to reap the rewards of putting time and work into these places and people, that I don’t feel ready to rip the premature security from myself just yet, that I have someone I love here. I say, the weather is great.

I felt an extreme circumstance involving death might procure an intention in life—a mind frame that certain people have (opposed to the blank, empty faces at the office). The bridge was about putting one’s body in an environment where his priorities cannot matter, where a singular design becomes clear. Wealthy and praised almost made the cut for goals, but even these cannot reflect the value of one’s existence.

I wasn’t on a bridge (the bridges here are above traffic, not water). I imagined it, as psychologically straining as it sounds. But I had found the beginning of an answer. Behind the education and career I work for, there is a responsibility as a human being. With both arms and legs intact, strong back, and a brain that has immeasurable potential, for now I owe my life to use the materials given to me to their fullest extent. And though I don’t have any answers yet, I feel I am going towards its direction. If I had been walking in the dark, I’d found a flicker of a streetlamp in the distance.

No matter how much we age, he’d lived more than me in the most similar circumstances (environmentally, biologically). To me, his word was final not because he was exceptionally loud, but because his word conveyed the world I’d face. He walked, broke his bones before I did. So there was always something to learn and be afraid of. Though he was particularly cruel with his bullying antics in my childhood, I think I was scared for other reasons. I believed he had a right to despise me. My parents reminded, “he’s had it worse” and even he must feel—he was a child faulted for being one and had thus grown to be an adult prematurely.

The whole way, I’d felt sorry for myself watching him (things I’d have to endure but never came). Like a worn broom he cleared my footpath. By the time it was my turn, I had little to bear. Evidently, I had had a childhood at all. When my parents blanked, lost me in a wonder park, it was my brother to find me huddled by the cobblestone street. I realized it’s not him that scares me. It’s what I imagine: a boy having to find his own way back to his lost parents. And most selfishly, what I would’ve done without that boy having suffered so.

Last Saturday, I looked for Fettuccine Alfredo, not the good kind. I wanted the bland, over-sauced one from Chili’s. It had to be just that–not Olive Garden, not Maggiano’s because I’d thought about it so carefully between Ramen packets and Poptarts. I imagined sitting-in like a customer on the red stool and  polished bar. It meant I got to eat something because I’d earned it. Just a taste of a little more than what I have now meant I could see above this can-opener. Maybe if I keep that in sight, I’ll reach the weekdays I could have everything.