the legend of 한라산¹ is nothing more than a fairytale, words spun from gossamer and sugar and the silk of a spider's web. but tell me, 할머니², do you believe in Heaven? the veil between two worlds is so thin-perhaps it's simply the hydrogen and stardust that drips from my outstretched hand when i wake from a dream, or maybe it is the space between a mountain's peak and the clouds it reaches for. one so superficial, the other a thousand years of myth, intertwined by a million red strings. both have swum in the river of the Milky Way and both have returned empty-handed, for in the end, we are all too afraid to steal a star from the embrace of the sky.

    and then there is a memory that lies worn and lined in the corners of my mind, between pressed flower crowns and tarnished gold wings. it smells of the sea and the mountains and 벗꽃³ and something i can just barely remember if i close my eyes tight enough. i dig my fingernails into my skin and wish for a miracle, for a story. so you give me both, breaking apart the words so they are easier for me to swallow, like sections of 단감⁴ that slip between the calluses of your palms. trace your steps here with humility, 손녀⁵, for even the spirits hesitate to walk this path.

    but it is Here where my head brushes the swollen bellies of the clouds and i catch the rain in my mouth and speak to my ancestors through pinholes in the sky. it is Here that i pretend i was born whole, and it is Here that the waning form of 달님⁶ whispers to me that we are one and the same. it is night, and my lungs are insatiable, and 달님’s gaze is filled with shallow pity. she caresses my cheek in a way meant to be motherly, which is to say, callous. her breathless rhetoric falls on my ears like a song, reminding me of how i only find comfort in the empty and the finite. and then i wake, fragments of my heritage staining the tips of my fingers like ink but never seeping onto my tongue. grandmother. cherry blossom. persimmon. i press the pads of my fingers onto paper and pray for metamorphosis.

    you work the lines from my brow as you speak, knead out worry like wrinkles in 만두피⁷. pretend you see your mother in me, your daughter, your childhood. i will wrap my tongue around foreign sounds because blood is thicker than the ocean between who i am and who i wish i could be, and though Rushmore weighs heavy on my shoulders, i will climb 한라산 and sift through the stars. 할머니, help me find my voice i lost in the storm drains and the grocery aisles, in the halls of my old school and in the words that never were. speakto me in a flood of stories and memories and habits and home, and if the sentences rise too quickly in you, let them flow into me. and when i am filled with remnants of a past life, i will hold your hand and raise it to the sky. i will brush my fingers across the stars and i will speak loud enough for both of us.

    "노인성⁸."
    do you wish to live forever?

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