071206

A lunch turned into a seven-hour outing.

The drive to Culver City was just over an hour. After a leisurely lunch and a brief stop at my former workplace to say my goodbye to the office poodles, I took a gelato break at the corner cafe. I was still too full from lunch for dessert. But it was the hesitation that held me there, that strange sense of "home not being home any more" feeling that I never got used to despite bakers' dozen moves in three decades. I sat there wondering if telepathy really works. It didn't. At 3 o'clock, I got up to head back home.
I figured it would take me an hour and a half to an hour forty-five minutes to get home. My estimate was off--way off. The drive along the 405 freeway took 3 full hours. I regretted not accepting G's invitation to stop at the art gallery for a jewelry show with her and her friends that evening. But it worked out fine--I took advantage of the hideously long drive home to finally let myself...grieve.

Once home, I started to organize a whole plastic container full of my old school papers that have been accumulating since high school, from course syllabuses to term papers. And among them were ten notebooks in varying sizes plus a packed 1-1/2" binder, all containing the handwritten records of my thoughts, my activities, and my obsessions--my diaries since twenty years ago.

Evidently, my journal keeping was most active during my college years. In my freshman year, I wrote almost a full page of college rule paper every other day or so, filling up the whole binder. I wrote little in my second year, but I filled two medium size sketchbooks' worth during my junior and senior years. Back then, I wrote mostly in Korean, and because I wrote so frequently, my penmanship was tidy and almost pleasant to just look at. How I've changed over the years. Now my writing is predominantly in English which, if handwritten, is hardly legible even to myself.

But no matter how I have changed, one thing is for certain--that throughout it all, it was me all along.