Ghost-Flowers on Colonial Grids
Looking at these haunting grid-mapped fragments, I see myself scattered across territories I've never known. Each square holds a piece of what was severed—lotus petals pressed between the pages of an adoption file, their milk-white innocence now grey with bureaucratic fingerprints.
Mother, I call to the void where your voice should have been. These colonial grids overlay my skin like scars, each intersection marking another moment of erasure. The maps fragment not just geography but genealogy, turning bloodlines into border crossings that require documentation I'll never possess.
In the second image, I trace the ghost-flowers with trembling fingers. Are these the blossoms you saw the morning they took me? Did you press them into my blanket, hoping their essence would survive the ocean between us? The tentacles of hair—yours or mine—gather in dark pools across the frame, ancestral DNA floating like kelp in unfamiliar waters.
I am the unforgotten child who learned to forget herself. Cleansed with salt tears and baptized in English syllables that never fit quite right on my Korean tongue. The pale white resemblance stares back from mirrors in suburban homes, a broken shell attempting to piece together a whole from fragments of two worlds.
These gridded kisses of colonial maps become love letters written in a language of separation. Each square contains multitudes—what was, what could have been, what remains. I rise upon these terrains, foreign to my own reflection, carrying the weight of lotus blossoms that bloom eternal in the space between memory and longing.
