slipping through my fingers
postcard 41: on an ode to growing up as a reader, ephemeralities of childhood, and growing pains
There is a sort of beautiful sadness in growing up.
Nothing feels the same anymore, and all that is different only exists in memories. Nostalgia that I feel like I can taste on the tip of my tongue if I try hard enough. It tastes like the first snowfall, the sliced apples my mom used to bring me; feels like the sleepovers I had with my childhood friends, the matted fur of my first teddy bear; smells like the cheap rolled up posters of One Direction and Taylor Swift I stuck on my wall with Blu-Tac, frazzled yellowed paperback copies coated with shiny library plastic,
I was born in the Springtime, in the late thaw of winter. Korea’s true spring arrives in the tail end of April after an abrupt bout of frigidity earlier that month, like winter trying to leave a stubborn imprint before it disappears for the rest of the year. My grandfather, who loves nature so deeply, always tells me that the flowers had just started blooming across the city, petals spilling over onto the asphalt pavement in a symphony of pastel hues.
Not a day earlier, he adds at the end. That’s how I knew you’d be someone special. For the last sixty four years, my grandpa has recorded the first bloom every single year without fail in his tiny leather bound notebook he has had since before I was born. When he lets me flip through it (“careful, it’s old and may disintegrate in your hands”, he warns me as I hold it gingerly one might hold an expensive piece of artwork), I see the date in the yellowed pages: April 20, 2000. Out of all the dates, he has that one circled and starred, like it means something more to him, more than the flowers and green grass he cherishes.
SEVEN: I’ve just moved to a new country yet again on the eve of my seventh birthday, and I am the new kid—yet again. Everyone is fascinated with me because I’ve just moved from London and I have a strong British accent when nobody else in my class does. I’m ambushed with a slew of interrogative questions by people in my class, and then everyone loses interest in me after a day, going back to their old friend groups and regular programming. I overcorrect my accent throughout the year until it metamorphoses into a regular American one, because I hate sticking out like a sore thumb. I was familiar with the feeling of loneliness but never with being alone, and it takes me a while for me to come to peace with finding solace elsewhere; it is only in the quiet hum of the air conditioning of the school library that I do.
I have just started reading books that have less pictures in them. I’m already done with all of Horrid Henry, the Rainbow Magic Fairy series, and Junie B Jones as well. Magic Tree House and Goosebumps are regular favorites as well. I have always loved books, but it is around this time that I stop searching for my identity in places that didn’t have them. Instead, I find them in the hundreds of books I read per year and the stories I write, even until now. The piece of myself that I am still, to this day, the most proud of and selfishly want to keep for myself, is being a reader.
NINE: New school again. The loneliness I feel bleeds into my life at home, which I feel terribly guilty about, because it’s nobody’s fault. My parents try everything they can to make me feel happy, to make me realize that no matter what happens outside, that everything at home (despite our actual home) is not temporary. My mom and my dad and my one year old baby sister are not temporary placeholders waiting to have its name card switched out.
I feel bad when I complain, but sometimes I can’t keep it in anymore. “I feel so blue,” I keep telling my parents at this point, when the sadness of everything feeling temporary begins to feel overwhelming, an irrational fear looming over my ten year old head that I myself will also transform into an ephemeral existence. I try not to use real words that describe emotions because I always feel like I’m making a bigger deal out of things than they are. I worry that once I say the word ‘sad’ out loud, it’ll amplify like a curse. My parents try to lighten the mood as best as they can, making half hearted jokes about how blue was my first word and how I was born to be a writer. They’ll continue telling me this, encourage me to pursue writing until I tell them I want to go to law school in college a decade later.
In a few minutes, my parents will call me for dinner. I will sit down in front of the television screen and watch an episode of Hannah Montana that my mom recorded for me while I was at school. I have just received a hot pink iPod nano for my birthday after months of begging (and my dad’s requirement that I write him a persuasive essay for any big thing I want), a prized possession I take with me everywhere. My earphones only work if I am bending the wire at a certain angle, so I’ve taped it together. My thumb slides across the circular control, shuffling the music until I reach one that I like. There’s not much variety. There’s Taylor Swift’s Fearless album, a Glee album, the ABBA Gold album, and a few miscellaneous 80s songs that have found its way into my iPod from my mom’s.
Next to me is a copy of an unread Anne of Green Gables—a book that will change my life. It is my first real big girl book, and I have already read the abridged version of it the past winter. I have loved it so much, to literal pieces, that my mom had to use tape on the spine. After I read the full version, the world will become a bit brighter, a bit clearer. I will look around my room and feel like something had shifted. I will have finished a three hundred page book, which I can barely hold in one hand, and everything will feel better, like a miracle cure.
You enjoy a good book, but a great book changes your life.
TWELVE: New school again. I’m used to it, I think, the initial weariness and confusion that settles into my bones as an eventual indifference. I think I begin to realize that I’ve felt deeply unmoored my entire life, having to uproot my life every few years (and moving to a new school every year)—at night, as I stare at the ceiling before falling asleep, and find myself beginning to yearn for a place I can call a childhood home. By the time I leave for boarding school at fourteen, I’ll have had half a dozen renditions of a childhood room, all of them feeling too fleeting for me to be able to call it one. Through the years, I grow increasingly jealous of my friends who have grown up in the same home for their entire lives. It sometimes feels foolish and childish to place so much emphasis on the concept of a physical home that is a constant for more than a cursory moment. Even back then, I’m aware of it.
I try to rationalize with myself, the anticipatory dread of ephemerality casting a shadow above my head wherever I go.
I convince myself that I’ve come to peace with having this identity as the ‘new kid’. It must feel nice to not have the adjective, I think, but it’s not something that I can change. I make my way down the fiction section, reading books in alphabetical order by author. I have always loved books, but it was around this time that I stopped searching for my identity in places that didn’t have them, in physical places that no longer held any evidence that I had ever been there after I left, like my existence was as superficial as water spilled on a table, something that could easily be wiped away.
I have yearned—and maybe, in my heart of hearts, still yearn, over a decade later—for a place I can refer to as a childhood home, somewhere that stores all of the precious memories of my formative years. I spend hours upon hours daydreaming about what it would have looked like, imagining returning to this nonexistent room as an adult. Would it be covered with posters of my favorite artists? Would it be painted sapphire blue, my favorite color? Would it have faded pen marks of my recorded height growth through the years? Would it be scattered with meaningless certificates I got in elementary school that yellowed with age? Would it have worn in, curved bookshelves filled with my favorite childhood books?
THIRTEEN: Another school, yet again. My identity as the ‘new kid’ has become something that piques people’s interest and not one that makes me the unwitting victim of isolation. I grow into my skin, as much as a twelve year old tween girl can, and learn to love having people around me. It’s good, I tell myself, you’re meeting new people, and you’re a people person…right? My adjustment period has shrinks with each move because I am never afraid to be alone in my solitude. I stop searching for my identity in homes. I am always wary. I guard and protect myself and my feelings fiercely. I try not to let people know too much about myself, or let them sense any sort of vulnerability—a bad trick that will haunt me into my adult life. I put little pieces of me where nobody could find me, in characters I build and memories that are vague but just enough to write about. This way, I will have written records of me that only I know about.
The next year, I will go to boarding school, and everyone will be the new kid. I’ll lose that identity for the first time in my life, and I’ll feel free in a way. But it’ll still be lonely in a sense. My life always feels like a series of flash fiction pieces haphazardly collected together, and mostly manifest in the various books I read that year. I’ve spent so long putting pieces of me inside books and based my identity on being a reader, that I’ve unwittingly coalesced myself with the bookshelves in my rooms over the years. I wonder if anyone will ever understand how that feels.
A few years ago, I stumbled across a word I've been searching for my entire life. Hiraeth is an untranslatable Welsh word with the closest meaning being: a homesickness for a home to which you cannot return to a home, which maybe never was, the yearning the grief for lost places of your past.
I fly back to Seoul in March of 2020 after COVID shuts down in person classes. My parents are preparing to move to Hong Kong and they ask me to go through some of my old childhood boxes, some I forgot that I even had. I didn’t grow up in this home; my parents moved as soon as I left for boarding school. My four dorm rooms have felt more like homes than my room at my parents’ house does. It’s a weird feeling, still feeling that sense of displacement, in a way.
It feels strange looking back on all of this, old relics from my childhood. I hold each one and know exactly when the memory of having it was the most vivid. Throughout my life, I’ve become a collection of tiny memories gathered to make a new real shape. In my adulthood, I still love books, but I’ve learned to place pieces of me in the people I love, and I collect pieces of them in return by being loved. It’s an odd thing, thinking of yourself as a kaleidoscope of memories and encounters that you cherish, but maybe it’s the most normal thing ever as well. Rather than a physical house you can go home to, time and again, you go home to everyone who you have ever loved and who has loved you. You become your own home and a museum of every moment you hold precious in your life. You love that so deeply.
I open the boxes. I don’t have a lot of constants throughout my childhood, but I do find some. My first copy of The Phantom Tollbooth, taped together with yellowed pieces of scotch tape, my pink iPod Nano, an old Goosebumps library book I never returned dated back to 2006, a catalog of little stories I wrote on scratch paper through the years that I kept in a folder I forgot about. I trace the curves and lines of the letters, seeing my handwriting morph over the years. It’s a nice written record, the same way I feel about my journals I hold close to my heart.
There’s not much to be sentimental about anymore, but it’s nice when you can be, despite it all.
Because nostalgia is such an odd little thing. I talk about my old friends like we didn’t lose touch years ago. I talk about growing up with artists I loved listening to in my preteen years, like they all weren’t a carefully shaped image of them—I now know that as a grown up. I talk about how every location was so big and vast, although revisiting them a decade later proves otherwise. I talk about tiny trinkets and toys of my childhood like they didn’t slip through the cracks through one of the houses I lived in.
I put on rose colored glasses, and for a second, I am seven years old again. Nothing is fake and everything is just as I see it. It is all exciting and otherworldly and enchanting.
Nostalgia is a tiny souvenir shop I visit whenever I feel lonely.
that last line is heartbreaking and also so very comforting
i love you and i love this essay