Preface: The Shape Before Korea
This is a memoir. Meaning, this is a true story.
Names have been changed to protect identities, but the dates, situations, conversations, and feelings are all true and real.
My experience is mine and that's it. Please respect that.
There are things about Korea I will never romanticize.
The pressure to save face. The quiet weight of expectation. The way beauty is measured, ranked, and quietly enforced. The fetishization, the colorism, the racism that exists just beneath the surface—not unique to Korea, but present enough that it cannot be ignored.
No place is perfect. No place deserves to be.
But memory is not built on perfection. It’s built on moments.
And there are moments I still carry.
Trot music drifting through the streets at seven in the morning during election season—loud, unapologetic, almost surreal. Long bus rides that cost less than a cup of coffee, arriving exactly when they promised they would. Late nights that turned into early mornings, walking to 7-Eleven with no real destination, no real fear. Standing on hills that felt like mountains, watching the sun fall slowly out of the sky, hand in hand with someone who saw the world differently than I did—and wanted to show me.
I miss those things.
But more than that—I miss something I have never quite been able to name.
A feeling.
The kind that settles into your body so deeply that even thinking about it too long becomes overwhelming.
The awareness of being seen from more than one place at once. The warmth of presence layered over itself. The quiet, impossible reality of being held in a way that felt… complete.
It was not perfect. It was not simple. And it was never meant to last.
But it was real.
I was not alone in Korea. There were parts of my life—people, responsibilities, realities—that existed outside of what you’ll read here. This story isn’t about them.
And this story is not about a place. It is not about culture, or difference, or even love in the way we like to define it.
It is about an experience.
A moment in time where something aligned—briefly, beautifully—into a shape I have not been able to forget since.
