• Listening to old Korean songs in America: missing a place I wanted to escape, finding freedom in fictional homesickness and timeless nostalgia.
  Watching American movies in Korea: trapped in the familiarity of well-paved roads, fantasizing about the branches of wild trees scraping my hair and stinging my cheeks, forcefully oblivious to how much they can hurt.
  
  
• Pain and pleasure like no other, senses turned high, high, high to the point of near spiritual revelation. So personal, the welling in your chest lifts you from who you once were.
  “Someone has felt this too, you know. It’s the human condition.”
  Maybe this is ego, maybe it’s self-importance, but I don’t understand why we don’t talk more about how little comfort those words actually offer. To be told that who you are, how you experience the world, how untethered and alone you feel, is exactly how you are meant to feel in the grand pattern of humanity... suffocating.
  
  
• Molars of the world, ready to grind you down into your most basic particles, exposing what is smallest and most vulnerable, so the world, with its inexhaustible appetite, can swallow you, digest you, stomach you more easily.
  
  
• The absence of a strong self-identity in youth is less a flaw than an inevitable stage of becoming. Yet, it feels painful precisely because we mistake that emptiness for failure, longing for perfection long before we’re capable of defining ourselves.
  
  
• I was like a shadow — the sunny weather and the dispositions of those who thrived under such conditions made me smaller, darker, and more bitter than when I could soften and expand at night.
  
  
• “The past feels more like the present to me… and the present like the past,” I said. With a look that shifted from disappointment to pity (I don't know what's worse), you replied, “That’s because the days were warmer then, and we were young and hot-headed. But look at us now—cold and frozen over in this room.”
  
  
• One desires to be nothing but dust if their body feels like lead. Or a grenade -- one wrong movement and everything sinks or goes up in flames: the routine, the workout, the Duolingo, the books, the journals, the blog... all of it.
  
  
• I thought I missed how dramatic I used to be... but now I see that I am just dramatic in a different way.
  
  
• Fear of carving my own path after a lifetime of being the “good student” who follows the rules. I tried to silence my anxiety of not belonging by compromising my first love—my dream of becoming a writer. But when I realized my soul was suffering, I knew I couldn’t give up.
  
  
• I have so much love, but never the right words to say. I have so much love that longs to be cherished and nurtured, yet no home to hold it. But my love is sacred—of my own making— and I don’t want to disappoint it. I deserve someone to show off my love to and to be seen simply for showing up as myself.
  
  
• I have too much love for this life to live without showing the world how much it continues to change me.
  
  
• Love like sitting on the edge of my bed: between comfort and suffering, dream and wake, the end of and end and the start of a beginning.
  
  
• If thinking is learning all over again how to see, what if my sight is once more obstructed from other ways of seeing? I want to see it all, but I fear that to remain in a perpetual state of unknowing is the very essence of being human.
  
  
• Sorry about that, it's also my first time experiencing myself.
  
  
• Sweating, burning my legs to reach another lesson, only for the universe to sneer, "You don’t know shit." Just to play another game where I never know the rules.
  
  
• Helico-pter
  Splitting myself in places that was never meant to be
  What made sense no longer does
  Impatient and reckless
  Ruining everything
  
  
• It is well-documented that the human condition is to experience death in all areas of life, not just the physical. We are always forgetting—parts of our minds fading, fragments of memory dying with time. Once-burning flames of feeling now flicker dull, another quiet proof of this death. What an uncomfortable thought… that no matter how hard we try, there is no singular way to comprehend the mortality of death. After all, the same death that drives men to war, to repeat history’s wounds, to commit crimes in the absence of memory—is the same death that allows hope and love to bloom again after pain.
  
  
• I am water,
  but what I want is oil.
  If I stop moving,
  I fear we will only drift
  further apart.