Water Refusing Its Own Tea
In the morning, I unfold yesterday's tea—cold now, a persimmon bruise spreading through hanji's breath. Three days. That's all the mother my hands remember. Each fiber refuses me. I press graphite into what won't be pressed, dust settling like the ghost of her palm I never learned. This is how I practice porousness: watching color roll from the paper's edge like a body I was pulled from too soon. I crumple with the tenderness reserved for photographs never taken. In Korea, they have a word for the space between: jeong, which grows even in absence, especially in absence. My fingers search the hanji for her fingerprints, for the maker's mark that says you are from here, from this. But the paper holds only my own failed attempts at steeping— as if I could brew a mother from memory, from three days stretched across a lifetime of mornings like this one. I fold myself smaller, hoping to fit inside the space she left, to be both the question and its echo. Mother taught me nothing. So I teach myself: to fold paper is to fold time backward, to the moment before leaving became the only thing we shared.
