Mountain and Island

Dreams and bubbles and big fluffy clouds in the sky. Impeccable blue and impeccable white. The surface of the ocean like the skin of an animal. To be flying in the sky and to be among the clouds. My body in the clouds. Larger than life. 

The beach was shiny but scantly populated as on any other weekday afternoon and the sky was blue but a light late spring blue. Palm trees ruffled in the wind. The air was cold enough for a cardigan and warm enough for sandals. We reclined on the balcony of a cafe and looked towards the island off the beach. Jet skis and motorboats went back and forth between the beach and the island, white foam spewing up towards the white clouds.

That night you stopped by with your mother and while our mothers talked in the kitchen you cried with me on my bed. You had your back against the beige wallpaper, and I sat by the edge of the bed. The night was warm and a little humid. It was all over, over, and we were only eighteen.

The forest was dark. The path was narrow and bumpy, and to either side of the path were leafy darknesses. Sometimes one of us would cycle over a snake, leaving it flat in the middle. The leaves would block the sun, but it didn’t feel cold or scary. I wanted it to stay there forever so I can come back whenever I want after I leave the island.

Tiled floors. Black and white diamonds. Walls painted green, and red. Upstairs were rooms, beige wallpaper, blue carpet. Out the window was the astro turf, beyond that flats and shops. The first shop there was a Family Mart, a convenience store chain, that rebranded later as CU. We were in the kitchen when we noticed blue, green and white glowing beyond the school fence, across the two-lane road, we all ran to the window fixated on the fluorescent glow lighting up the pitch-dark street.

Everything was new. The roads were new, the pool was new, the rooms were new. Everyone was new, too. I should have been scared. I wasn’t easily scared back then; such was the extent of my ignorance. I felt safe, even though I wasn’t. I was safe, even though I didn’t feel safe. I don’t know which is true. Maybe the first sentence is truer.

What I would give to feel as safe as I did on those Sunday afternoons, the day before the first day of term, having just arrived from the airport, walking over to CU with suitcases left standing in our new rooms. The sun would be beginning to set, the school would feel empty. S lived in the compound behind the shops and the three of us would sit in the gazebo.

The gazebo was small, but no one was ever around it. If we tried, we could have looked inside the ground floor flats. The compound was on a slight incline, and the hill dropped lower and more steeply behind the compound. We would cycle over that hill towards the other schools and find our way into the forest.

The forest was everywhere. I think the village and the schools were built where the forest used to be, so where the roads ended was always dark caves of green leaves. Sometimes we would hear forest animals, the cough-like sound of deer and the chirping of the birds that I had never heard in Seoul. Deer had been spotting running across the astro turf in the small hours of the morning.

The ground floor door of the building made a loud clanking noise whenever it opened and closed. There were two sets of doors with a little hallway in between. One end of year day I stood there with my wrists full of bracelets and my butt in a pair of white denim shorts, saying goodbye to my favourite teacher.

On the path towards the canteen was a pond. In the warmer months clouds of midges swarmed in the air around the pond. We had to wave our arms forward to chase them off. By the pond was a patch of grass with camelia trees. Camelias would bloom red in the early spring, and the flowers would fall, the shape intact, onto the grass. 

The sports building was by the camelia trees. The walls were made of dark brown wood panels and had tall windows that looked into the swimming pool. The pool was always lit up a bright warm white and at night the empty pool with the water completely still through the windows looked like a different world.

Anxiety gnawing at my heart. It won’t change; it won’t go away. The tragedy has already befallen my life. I can choose to abandon or accept. 

We lived on the fourteenth floor of a fourteen-storey building on a hillside below a mountain. Icicles would appear above the balcony in the winter, and my dad would break them off for my brother and I and we would lick them and get our tongues stuck. Sometimes when I pulled my tongue off the icicle there would be little spots of pink left on the translucent ice.