Songs Without Papers
The birds came back. Or maybe they never left. Maybe I was the one who disappeared, who learned to forget the songs my first mother hummed before the agency took me across the ocean in a bassinet labeled with someone else's name.
In that hour when night breaks its own neck to become morning, when the sky bleeds light the color of hanbok silk I've only seen in photographs—you hear them. These small-bodied priests of dawn, their throats opening like the Korean words I lost before I learned to miss them.
You left the retreat. You left the walls that held your becoming like the adoption papers that held your new life—thin, legal, insufficient. But here, in the house where you first learned English, where your white mother's voice still echoes asking if you're hungry in the only language you know how to be hungry in—here the same chorus rises.
What does this mean? That home was never the country that gave you away, never the suburb that raised you to be grateful, never even the face in the mirror that looks like no one you've ever called family.
Home is this: the muscle memory of listening. The way your ear bends toward beauty even when beauty arrives wearing the face of a sparrow—unremarkable, small enough to fit in the palm of a woman who might have been your grandmother, who might have sung to birds like these in a language your mouth has forgotten how to shape.
The video camera shakes in your hands. Everything blurs—the fence, the sky, the precise moment when what you've lost meets what you've found. This is how belonging actually looks: not the sharp before and after the social workers promised, but the soft dissolving of what you thought home meant into what you're still learning it could mean.
The birds keep singing in frequencies your body remembers.
Your Korean bones keep listening through American skin.
In this simple act—ear pressed to the world's mouth—you remember: everywhere you've ever been was practice for learning that some songs cross borders without papers, without permission. That wait beyond language.
Even now. Even here. Even you.
