Monday, August 31, 2009

Reflections at the Embassy in Chicago

[Actual Date: July 21, 2009]

While I was waiting to pick up my visa at the Korean embassy, surrounded by a group of restless Americans in their twenties and thirties, I considered how many of us were going to Korea and how many were simply going from the U.S. I wondered if we are all running away, really, with our broken hearts, or even if we were simply running to escape the boredom that pairs with predictability: the tedium of life lived in a cubicle and “the inexorable dolor of pencils.” I wondered whether these people felt, as I do, divided by their choice to leave the country. It's the gravity of my predictable life in the U.S. that pulls me down – and not always in a bad way. It anchors me, gives me security to be surrounded by friends and to understand my own place in the order of things. And then there is this other feeling – this wanderlust – that draws me with its glittering possibility. What might be is the one unending phrase that always tugs along at my heartstrings.

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