fever & flashbacks

been having the strangest flashbacks all day, all of them involving seoul and alcohol and various friends/acquaintances of various nationalities. i can think of several triggers:

trigger #1
i recently clicked through the korea photos i had backed up on my hard drive, to check how well my laptop worked after my buddy partybread spiffed it up with new memory and a reformat. i felt compelled to just click through all of them one night, and i just noticed after a bit that i'd been giggling and crying and it was already light outside my window. that was 3 weeks ago.

trigger #2
been chatting a lot with a very good friend back in seoul. something he's been waiting for for a year now is finally happening and i'm really happy that there'll be one less lonely foreigner in seoul by month's end.

trigger #3
although my cable TV apparently doesn't have the arirang channel, i discovered that KBS world is on channel 75. so far, i've seen a documentary of a japanese girl talking about japan and korea's messy joint history (the girl's body language reminded me of kanako), and just this afternoon, a short and slightly xenophopic feature about a girl's coming-of-age ceremony in sri lanka. actually, i thought i was looking at a school for girls in india, but when the film crew was asked to step out of the classroom, i recognized the squiggly ensaymada-like swirls of sinhala script painted on the building's walls. and that, of course, reminded me of my friend kalinga who has to stay in korea till 2008. he's in film school, i think.

but beyond the triggers, there lies the flashback phenomenon itself. was chatting with good friend R (who is PhDing in michigan now) late one night recently, and he asked me if i missed korea at all. everyone who asked this question when i got back last september got an earful of vociferous denials from me. as recently as last month, i'd tell people i would not willingly go back and live/work there.

so anyway...i told R that i mainly miss the friends i made there. i also told him i honestly miss the fact that there was no pressure to make a living when i was there since we received a very generous stipend from the korean government. i really did enjoy that, haha. ha. no wonder the wealthy people i know here in manila are always so bloody chipper. who wouldn't be happy to blow 30 dollars on a schmancy meal and not care too much?

but i must say what i miss most was the strangeness of the whole experience. that life i had, that self i constructed is in many ways very different from what i have here. everything was different over there. in the beginning, i felt betrayed by nature because the sky was still light at 8pm and everything was too damn cold. now that i'm here in warmer weather, i can choose to remember the washed-out colors and the watery light and the blooming and the hush and the seeming perpetual aloneness. and actually miss all of it.

trigger #4
i could be coming down with something. been feeling feverish since 2 in the afternoon. not quite delirium and hallucination but still...

P.S.
hey, polymath. methinks you been working too hard. je tu manque.*




*je tu manque is french for i miss you. but i find it so appropriate that "manque" as a noun speaks of a lack, a shortage. a gap and an emptiness.