Stephanie in Suwon

I’ve been trying hard to take it all in, the fact that this journey I started on 3 months ago….no…..2 years ago….is really coming to an end. I’m finding it difficult though, for some reason, to feel that, to know that. Today just feels like another day in Seoul. But it’s not. It’s my last day. My last day in Seoul. Walking home from dinner last night, I choose to put away my headphones and just listen to the sounds of the city as I made my way through the streets. Horns blaring and the whoosh and zoom of traffic, scooters zipping by with their put-put engine noises, and feeling the air around me shift and the sound barrier be broken as a Ducati flew past me, it’s wheels barely grazing the Seoul streets it honored with its presence. I listened to the sounds of drunken male voices, raised in good spirits and soaked with soju and kept my eyes on the sidewalk in front of me as I passed the business suit clad men who stared and shouted and stumbled towards me. I skirted the edges of the sid...

Rewind... How can a place that feels like a dream contain such harsh realities? How many ways can you lose yourself? How quickly can you forget who you are, how you are, what you are? How many ways can you love and loathe at the same time? How long will it be until you go, mercifully, numb? How did it come to this? And now…. Life in Technicolor. Sweat and shaky muscles. Peanut butter and banana. Joy. Laughter and longing. Iced vanilla lattes. Music and lyrics. Goodbyes…

Mr. Toombs, my fourth grade teacher, had decided that our class was going to raise butterflies as a science project. We watched our caterpillars eat, grow, wrap themselves up in their cocooned world and emerge triumphant; there was a sense of satisfaction at watching something ugly turn into something so beautiful. We had already released two of the three we had raised and were anxiously awaiting the arrival of the last one of our “pets”. We waited. And waited. There was a small crack in the cocoon and we could see movement coming from the inside if we watched closely but after 3 days, we were staring to get impatient. One of the boys in my class, Chaz, decided to help out our little friend and with the support of the rest of us he swiped an exato knife from the desk of our teacher and carefully, oh so carefully, enlarged the opening so as to assist the butterfly’s entrance to the world. The next morning we arrived in class to find our butterfly, the last butterfly, the butterfly we ha...