Nonfiction / Karis Ryu
:: Ne me quitte pas ::
**CW: mentions of death.
Did you know?
In elementary school, I was assigned to the same table as a boy I had a crush on and started scoring lower in class behavior because of it. When I got my report card back and saw the unfamiliar letters staring back at me, the wave of shame that hit was sudden and colossal. Before the age of ten, I learned that liking boys came at the expense of being myself. So I cut him out of my head as quickly and as sharply as he had popped into it, and through sheer force of will I drilled back into myself the words MY FUTURE IS MY OWN MY FUTURE IS MY OWN.
In middle school, the closest I came to telling a boy I had a crush on him was by proxy. He was older, and a line of girls had already liked him. I scoffed initially, so sure I would never join that line, and then a few months later I was running out of rooms the moment he entered them. On my last day, two younger girls approached me with mischievous eyes and asked if they could tell him.
“Why not?” I shrugged, feigning nonchalance. The truth was I was relieved, because I actually wanted them to tell him. I wanted him to know without having to tell him myself. I think I was afraid that if I told him myself, I would tremble and my spirit would crack into pieces and he would end up taking some of me with him, parts of me I would never get back.
I was twelve: old enough to understand that girls who felt things and said so lost their faces and never got them back.
*
Did you know?
I am twenty one and I am so young. People are so quick to press their hands to their foreheads and perform dramatic faux strokes when they hear how young I am. We are in the same place, yet I am three, four, five, six, ten years younger. I have worked so hard to get here. All I have done is work. After all, MY FUTURE IS MY OWN MY FUTURE IS MY OWN.
At first I thought he was impressed. Then he kept poking at it, poking at me, in nudges of embarrassed laughter and patronizing nods that bolstered his pride by pushing me down. Now I cannot help but wonder whether my presence emasculates those who have to breathe the same air as me. So I worried, when I realized how well we got along, that you would poke like he had. I worried our silences signaled your discomfort. I worried our silences signaled your boredom. That my presence dampened the room with how heavy it was. That my presence burdened you with how too-much it was. My worst fear confirmed, set in stone, the cold hard truth: I am a strange and overwhelming concoction of frenzy and fear and too many ideas, and you say I am brilliant, but that is only as long as I am at arm’s reach because if you look any closer, you will realize what I already know: I am unpalatable.
A boy I liked said this about me once, that I was too good for the guys at school. That’s all well and good, but where does that leave me? Sometimes compliments don’t mean shit if you’re lonely.
I am twenty one. I am sitting outside of a coffee shop and crying because I am so young, yes, but being so young at this stage in this place means that I am alone. I am alone, and it is heartbreaking. I have a bright future ahead of me, so they say, but I cannot do anything about it right now because I am so young. I might have grown up quickly and I might know how to do lots of grown-up things, but bandaging my own broken heart is not one of them. So I sit on this bench and cry because that’s what girls in love and pain do.
*
Did you know?
When I was thirteen I walked circles and circles around a lake in my neighborhood. When we lived in a city a one-hour train ride from my mother’s birthplace and a thirteen-hour flight across an ocean away from mine. Couples double-pedaled duck boats across the water. At night someone would busk on the platform, their voice echoing through the mic and through my head.
When I was thirteen I thought a lot about death. I thought a lot about whether or not I wanted to die, and how I had no answer. I thought about how my lack of an answer at the very least signaled how I felt about life: that is, my utter lack of a desire for it. Yet I could not bring myself to die.
I looked at everyone around me and remembered I was surrounded by a dialect adjacent to my mother’s, a language I kind-of-understood and just as much kind-of-didn’t, a language I was so glad not to speak and just as much longed to.
Yet I could not bring myself to die.
I thought about death so much I believed I no longer thought about boys. That wasn’t true, because there was a boy that year, there was always a boy, wasn’t there, for each new wound that the world ripped into me that I then fumbled to balm with whatever substance was closest—whatever would do for a fantasy. I thought more and more about death in the hopes that it would make me think less of the boy, of what I wanted him to be and what I knew he was not. Dying was easier. Dying felt more meaningful. It is more poetic to die than to like a boy. It kind-of-worked.
I walked the lake in a bizarre jaunt that the brightness of the sun made even more macabre. I walked the lake while thinking about dying while listening to a marimba play while Regina Spektor asked people not to leave her, feeling somewhat more livened up by it but then because of that, feeling sadder than before. Yet I could not bring myself to die.
*
Did you know?
I am praised a lot for my honesty nowadays, which is interesting because it’s when I’m being honest that I’m most worried about being dishonest. Like I’m deploying my honesty because I know that’s what works, that’s what endears me to people. At the same time, I cannot help the things that come out of my mouth and I am very much at the mercy of the person sitting across from me as I helplessly watch, eyes crossed, my guts push out from between my teeth and spill onto the table. I am terrified of being perceived as a too-earnest child and nothing more, but this is the only way I know how to be that feels the closest I can ever get to “true.”
I’m sure you would rather be with somebody else right now, someone nicer, someone more pleasant, not someone who was born with a triangular mouth and had to train herself out of a resting bitch face by staring into a mirror and pushing the corners of her lips up for years. Here are some things I have learned over those years:
I am admired; I am not approached. I am a statue; I am not a girl. I believed that too for a while, but I am tired now. I am a girl. I was a girl all along. I will always be a girl. A girl who giggles and feels and cries and loves and flutters and laughs like everyone else.
When I was nineteen, I walked all the way down a hill in the dead of the night. It was a dead night. My legs were dead and my eyes were dead but my soul refused to die. It just refused to fucking die. I could have walked forever. I could have walked until I died.
Please, I cried. Let me die.
Please, it begged. Don’t leave me, too.
I am just a girl who does not want to be alone.
*
Did you know?
I think I am thankful I did not take my life that night, or that other night, or that other other other night when I thought about doing it. It has taken me years to get to this thought. Lately I’ve been thinking it more and more. Here are just a few:
I think it when it is our second week of college and we sit next to each other in a small group where we both feel out of place. You, too? we gasp, looking at each other. We walk in the same direction after it’s over and after a while of talking outside your dorm building, you say to me: Hey, do you want to just come inside? So we talk inside your dorm for two more hours, and that night our friendship is born.
I think it when I turn seventeen and my plan was to sit in my dorm and eat a double-chocolate Insomnia cookie alone. That is when you call me, a girl you barely know, because Facebook said it is my birthday and am I doing anything to celebrate? Let’s get froyo. No, don’t bring money, you are treating me to froyo because it’s my birthday!
I think it when years pass and it is my birthday again, and another you waves a card into my hands, saying HAPPY BIRTHDAY, YOU ABSOLUTE ANIMAL, which I know is a compliment because I know you. The card is almost illegible because of your notoriously loopy penmanship but I can read it. It is detailed, lovely, and truly something only you could write to me.
I think it when it is the middle of what was looking like the best semester of college yet, but a virus hits our little life of laughter and suddenly we are three friends sitting in Meeting Street Cafe, angry and in shock but most of all scared that our first time together in this booth might be our last one too. Yet all we can do is smile for one another, trembling mouths holding up taut frames. Later we sit by the water and we cannot help it, the words that flow out of us. When peace like a river attendeth my way. When sorrows like sea billows roll. Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say. It is well, it is well with my soul. We cry and I wonder if I will ever know tenderness like this again.
I think it after I move to a new city and we have known each other for maybe a month at most when you invite me over for bagel brunch, and I assume that this is for some party or gathering because the only way I would be included in an invitation is if it was a mass one. But I show up at your house and it is just me, and I ask you if anyone else is coming and you smile and shake your head and say no, today it’s just me.
I think it when you remember me on New Year’s and send me a text because I am who you’re thankful for.
I think it when you invite me at ten o’clock at night on an impromptu excursion to the beach because you missed me, you say, and there is another one of us, another friend, look, you again, you’re there!—to love is to be one and isn’t that wonderful—in the passenger seat of the car you are driving, and there is a pack of lychee beers in the back, and anyway you’ll be in front of my apartment in three minutes so get dressed and don’t go to sleep!
I think it when two years after we cried by the water, you are graduating and at your departmental ceremony we stand there beaming at you. We hand you a bag, and inside that bag is our gift: a cookie from Meeting Street Cafe. I almost cried while I stood in line for it, did you know? So circles do end somewhere after all.
I think it during the silences between our conversations every time you walk me home. I wonder if this is special for you, too. I think about how worried I was and at times still am that no one would ever want to exist with me like this. I think about how there is no one else I would rather exist with right now than you. I hope I mean something similar to you, and while that hope is tinged with fear that I am wrong, it is beautiful precisely because it is fragile, and I would much rather cling to it than have nothing to cling to at all. Anyway, we keep going, held by the same deep indigo sky each time, in murmur and laughter and silence, cushioned in all that I do not yet know how to say but want to let you know somehow. I am scared of what will happen when I do find the words. I am scared I already have them. I am scared of what they mean. Of losing my face. My roommate told me once that to ask for a place in someone’s heart is to ask for permission to break it one day. God forbid, but it could happen. I don’t want to hurt you. Even in my own fear of my own heartbreak, my first thought is of you. That scares me most of all. But sometimes I dare to believe that your wordless thoughts might be searching for me too. I dare to trust that whatever we are figuring out together is good, very good.
(To make a declaration is to, in the back of your mind, always wonder just a little bit if you even believe what you are declaring. But to feel anything at all is to risk being wrong, and that tension is what makes life real. So lean into it. Embrace it.)
I think God is telling me there is a way. A way to confess without losing my face. A way to love that keeps the heart intact.
(Or: Love is an exercise in trust.)
I used to think that love was about what is said. What is spoken aloud. What is communicated through touch, through stare, what is projected onto a wall in blazing letters and yelled from across a long, long room. That love is something you cannot miss.
But love is trust, and silence is sound. Love is having faith in what has not been said. Believing in a glance and perhaps in the absence of a touch entirely. Maybe you are careful with how you touch me because I am someone to treat with care. Maybe we sit side by side because we hope the time we give each other says what we do not speak aloud, because the dam holding back everything we could say or do is so thin and oh, how exciting and terrifying it is, how dearly I would hold you to me if you would let me. But first I have to let you know.
Love is as shy as it is bold. It is shy because it is bold. It takes the breath out of you to expose the heart for one second. Blink and you might miss it. But if you do, that’s okay. Trust that it is there, because you are loved. You are loved and so you love, because I trust you, I trust you.
You are my friend. You say my name. “Have you ever judged someone for being honest about their feelings?”
No, I respond. I always thought they were brave.
“Exactly.” You nod your head. You say my name again. “So why are you scared?”
In May, you tell me how strange it is to think we have only known each other for less than a year, because you feel like, in the best way, a lifetime has passed between us. And I say, I can’t comprehend sometimes how I love you as fiercely as I do. And you say, you know where it says that eternity is written on our hearts or something like that, and I think, yes, and you say, in feeling like I’ve known you for a long time, eternity is the freedom to love you as if I have.
From the writer
:: Account ::
As the reader can tell, I was twenty one years old when I wrote this piece. It has been revisited and revised periodically since then, but at the beating heart of this confession of an essay was and is the earnestness of a person crafting a burgeoning definition of love as she learns to love others and to love herself.
The inspiration to write this piece first struck me one spring afternoon, while I cried on a bench outside of a coffee shop near my apartment. (This scene made it into the essay. In a way, perhaps I started there.) I was, in short, processing many firsts: my first year out of college, my first year in a new city, and the chances I had taken on experiences and people during that time. The love those risks had brought me, but also the hurts and the losses—and the heartbreak of realizing that the time had come to say goodbye again. Growing up as a military child, I had built up antisocial detachment mechanisms in order to mitigate the hurt of getting attached. Twenty one was the year I truly began to shed those walls—and had to face the beautiful consequences.
These ongoing tumults wouldn’t quite resolve for some months’ time. But writing this piece over those difficult summer months kept me company during periods of loneliness, confusion, and growing pains. I have, of course, grown since I first wrote this, and am sharing the experiences and feelings of a past me, but I continue to hold this piece dearly for its vulnerable honesty. That’s the person I want to stay true to in all that I write and do.
Karis Ryu is a writer, artist, and graduate student currently based in New Haven, Connecticut. She grew up moving frequently across North America and the Pacific as a U.S. military child of Korean descent. Her work has previously appeared in Chaotic Merge Magazine, HerStry, The B’K, and other publications. Find her in a coffee shop, a library, or at karisryu.com.