Self-Portrait as Leaf Pressed Between Two Countries
Today I found myself tracing the outline of leaves on this old cloth, each mark a question I cannot ask in the language that birthed me. The fabric holds these drawings the way my body holds its first country—loosely, tenderly, as if afraid too much pressure might cause everything to disappear.
엄마. The word feels like stones in my mouth, smooth from being turned over and over but never spoken aloud. I sketch another leaf, its veins mapping pathways I will never walk, leading to a grandmother whose face I construct from the negative space between what I know and what I've lost.
The adoptive mother who raised me taught me to press flowers between book pages, to preserve beauty by flattening it into something manageable. But these drawings refuse such containment. They blur at the edges, the way memory blurs when you've been taught to call forgetting "moving forward."
My hand moves across the fabric without instruction, following some genetic wisdom that survived the severing. Each botanical form becomes a letter in an alphabet I'm slowly remembering—not Korean, not English, but something more elemental. The language of roots seeking water, of seeds finding soil in the most unlikely places.
Sometimes I think about the woman who carried me for nine months, wonder if she ever pressed her palm against her belly and felt these same hands moving restlessly, already reaching for something just beyond grasp. Did she know I would spend my life trying to sketch my way back to her?
The cloth beneath my fingers is soft with age, worn thin by countless washings. Like identity itself—fragile, persistent, holding its shape even as it transforms. Tonight I will sleep beneath these drawings, let them press into my skin like temporary tattoos, marking me with the flowers of a country that exists now only in the space between my heartbeats.
