Gwangju Writes: Prose

There and Here

Written by Boipelo Seswane.

The air was thick and sticky – the way only Korean summer air can be.

The cab came to a stop as neon lights streamed in from the beauty store on the corner onto the patched blue seat covers, casting shades of yellow and pink on the diamond patterns. Lerato handed the cab driver her bankcard and silently waited for him to hand it back. She had forgotten how alive Chungjang-ro felt in the summer and began to wonder if it had been a good idea to venture out.

Couples and families filled the tiny streets.

She thanked the cab driver and bade him farewell, slipping her bankcard into her pocket. She sighed to herself opening the door and stepped out among the milling people. Streetlights were beginning to faintly glitter against the gradual build of darkness. Lerato stood silently on the sidewalk for a moment before heading towards the restaurant.

It had been a crazy week. She had broken down in tears in the teachers’ room. Her co-teacher comforted her and eventually helped her make an appointment when her sobbing had settled.

Here she was today, having just gotten back into town from the hospital in another district. Stress. That is what they said was causing the lumps, but they would check of course just to be safe, so she needed to return in a couple of days.

“Get some rest,” that is what everyone, including the doctor, had said. There was nothing more she wanted than to be alone, but every moment by herself felt further from respite.

It felt lonely, stifling, scary.

Those were feelings she did not feel ready to process, so here she found herself – alone among all the laughing families and giggling lovers. The restaurant was fairly quiet for such a busy day. Lerato picked a window seat along a quiet section of the wall to still feel connected to the outside.

Lerato’s eyes kept wandering as she waited for her dinner to arrive and landed on an old couple at the edge of the street packing away their street-food stall.

She watched as they worked in sections rolling down the tarp sides; old fingers struggling to undo the straps holding the flaps up. The woman dusted fluff off her bright yellow work bib before running across the square to put the trash in the bin – her reddish-blonde bob bouncing off her shoulders. She ducked around the subway entrance and then disappeared into the adjacent building.

The little stall had now turned into a truck. The old man locked the back and climbed in to wait for her. His movements were slow and weighted: feet lifting and deliberately hitting the tarred earth, pendulum arms.

The waiter appeared, announcing Lerato’s meal. She thanked him and looked back outside. The old couple and their truck were gone and a new one had arrived in its place.

Cutting into her simple steak dinner, she took a moment to find some form of peace in knowing that even though she felt she was processing madness, in essence she was okay.

Her mother had instilled that in her.

She thought back to the day before she had left home to return to Korea. Members of her father’s family had contacted her out of the blue of 24-odd years to tell her that despite everything that was happening, she was not one of them. They said she was not privy to knowing “what was happening,” and hung up in the same blue from which they had called in the first place.

In the fuzz of the surprise call and the heaviness thrown at her, she was reminded of the day she had asked her mother about her father. She had been young, curious, and without much memory of the man aside from the time her mother had frantically needed him to be present for a doctor’s visit. With bright, kindergarten eyes, she remembered that it was the first and last time she had seen him in her life.

Her mother sighed, taking Lerato’s hands into her own. They felt warm – even the callouses along her mother’s Girdle of Venus were a comfort. Lerato’s eyes darted across her mother’s tired face and felt something she could not place at her young age.

Her mother smiled, making tiny crow’s feet appear around her eyes, and said, “I’m choosing to be open with you. It’ll be too much or too little – you won’t always understand, but it’ll never be a lie.” From then on, anytime Lerato curiously opened some wound her mother had carefully tended to, her mother would take the Band-Aid off with her and redress the wound.

They both had no idea, but here they were healing each other – lightening the loads and holding each other a little closer. All these years later, they both relished in the phone calls, text messages, and whatever time they had together – even across time zones. They would talk about anything and everything, carefully cleansing parts of themselves and each other and placing love where it had seemed scarce.

That is what their love was like – a kind of gentle holding and understanding. Lerato smiled to herself, making a mental note to call her mother when she arrived back at her apartment. It would be nice to have a kiki, – they would laugh, perhaps cry – but more importantly, love would flow. Her spirit felt lighter as she ate the rest of her meal; she felt part of the laughter and love outside.

THE AUTHOR

Boipelo Seswane is a Seoul-based South African artist. She is a teacher, performer/creator (actor, model, painter), and writer with experience in multiple facets of creativity, including writing, editing, theater, and film. She has always been interested in interrogating life through words and other forms of expression. Instagram @bopzybee.