Forsaken

August 20, 2028

Kaesong, North Korea

I’m going to America.

I keep saying it in my head over and over again, but I can’t seem to process it.

I’m going to America.

I think I should feel...something. How could I not feel at the news that I’ll be flown halfway across the world to aid in the fight against American imperialism? To know my country will finally get the retribution it deserves? To avenge my father’s death?

But there is nothing. I feel nothing.

When I dressed in my field uniform today, my mother said I look just like him. I tried to see what she saw, but I found nothing of my father in my face. My eyes looked hollow and dull. My cheeks were puffy from tears no one else was allowed to see. Everything about the man in the mirror wearing an Army field medic’s uniform, a gun holstered to his side, looked plain wrong.

And because of that, I didn’t feel the pride I knew I should have felt when my mother said those words. The only feelings I registered in that moment were an emptiness in my chest and the sudden urge to vomit.

He didn’t want this for me, and remembering that made the glowing pride in my mother’s eyes feel like a curse instead of praise.

They were right. My father said war wasn’t for me. Hye-jeong wanted me to stay and attend university with her. I could have. I should have. I wanted to prove I was a man, prove that I wasn’t too soft to defend my people, and now I’m wearing this uniform that looks far too wrong on me and I’ll be sent away to a strange land where everyone wants to kill me.

I need to get it together. I know that while many things are wrong, this is right. We can’t survive without the resources of the south, and the Americans deserve everything they have coming to them. I made my choice. I have a duty to my people.

But I can’t lie—I’m scared. I know what war did to my grandparents, to their parents, and to our country. They destroyed everything and I know they won’t hesitate to do it again. I have been working in the hospital for three years now, and will continue to until I leave, but I know what I have seen there will be nothing compared to actual combat wounds. And even if I am technically a non-combatant, Americans aren’t known for their mercy. Who knows what they’ll do to me if we lose?

I won’t tell anyone, but I wish I had listened to Hye-jeong. I wish we could have achieved reunification peacefully. I wish I could be more like Ji-eun’s husband who definitely isn’t scared of holding a gun or fighting the imperialists.

Mostly I wish I still had my father.