It begins when it ends. Just the two of us, standing on the corner of Pine and Walnut, 4:55 a.m. on the dot. The bus comes between 5:02 to 5:07 a.m. We couldn’t figure out the wheel patterns that circled from Pennsylvania to New York. A four-hour, long-distance commute. Better to be early, my mother taught me. Just in case. So you’re not left behind. 

The weekend before Valentine’s Day 2002; eight months after the Holt Motherland tour; two months of being Korean adoptee friends, talking every night on the phone until the wee hours about how post-Korea has obliterated any sense of who we thought we were. Against all logic, I have fallen in love with him as a person but am denying my feelings because he has a girlfriend. Six months of drowning in an oblivion of love. Where I’m finally the protagonist in my own love story but at the cost of giving up myself completely.

We haven’t said a word to each other during the 10-minute car ride here. 

Just silence. 

My cold puffs of air seem to chase his. Just as I have chased him, sought him, hunted him. Always the pursuer. From my high school prom date to all my angsty friend-crushes in college. I chased. Because I never trusted or believed I was beautiful enough to be wanted. To be chosen. 

Once I hooked them, reeled them in with my biting sense of humor, my bleeding heart honesty that would become my signature—I held on tight. A barnacle. Clinging. No amount of time was good enough. I never wanted a goodbye, an ending. I smothered them with my bottomless pit of need that was really my birth mother’s abandonment projected onto them.        

I can’t look him in the eyes. I know I’ll start crying if I do. I’ll beg. Don’t leave me like the rest. 

The trees are leafless. Bare. Shadows with crossed arms and judgmental roots—planted. A lone streetlight transforms him into an outlined black figure. Before this moment—we didn’t need words or convention. We spoke through our eyes and read our hearts like in Serendipity, the movie. We were that good. But that was before this moment. Before now.

Jay kisses me on my forehead. Like I’m his kid sister. Or cousin. Not his girlfriend. Soul mate. Future wife. 

“We’ll talk,” he says. 

And as I climb onto the Peter Pan bus, I whimper, hoping this won’t be the last time we see each other. 

I shove my earbuds in deep and push play on my Walkman. The crackling cassette plays Jann Arden’s “Mend.” 

I cling to the song lyrics: Why are you weeping—yes, I still love you—we fight, fall down and mend. My life raft that we aren’t over. 

I close my eyes. And rewind.

*

What if I didn’t clean up his bedroom mess, while he worked a bank teller job on Saturdays, because I was so bored. Feeling like a stay-at-home mom, minus the baby. Not realizing I was mothering him.  

What if I didn’t snoop through his stuff and find his high school yearbook, find his ex-girlfriend’s love letter to him, written in June 2001. This was before the Motherland Tour where Jay would find a bond with other KADs that would shut her white, confederate face out. The relationship that I broke up. My beginning was her ending.

What if I didn’t read her gushy, circle-y hearts cursive that would plant a bomb of doubt. Like I was inside a YA novel. 

I thought I was above all that. As an NYU college grad, I was two years into paying for my basement studio apartment. Clubbing on the weekends and getting drunk and taking the F train from Manhattan back to Forest Hills, Queens at dawn, the alcohol dulling the fear of rape or serial killers. 

A five-year age gap shouldn’t be an issue, like the K-drama Something in the Rain that I’d fall in love with in the future. But now, at this incompatible phase of life, him 19, me 24, it might as well be called self-sabotage.

What if I didn’t ask Jay, “Are you still attracted to me?” 

Because our weekly weekend sleepovers were reduced to bi-monthly and I knew something was wrong.  I needed an affirmation I never fully felt from him. That I was beautiful on the outside, according to his photographer’s eyes. 

I needed to know my repulsive, puke-yellow Korean face that was never white enough to be loved and never Korean enough amongst true Koreans. Was it my outside that he wanted?

Jay exploded, “God, you’re so insecure. I can’t take this anymore!”

Followed by him saying he needed space.

Which led to him sleeping in the living room, fully clothed because I had to catch the 5 a.m. bus back home. 

I slept awake in his twin bed that we used to share like an entwined pretzel. Frozen. Alone. Orphaned.

What if I had self-esteem, or even just a self, and confessed how much I feared this moment of rejection that was tied to the umbilical cord of mother abandonment.

What if we weren’t so young and lost thinking we’d find ourselves in each other only to realize we were just lost—alone—together. 

*

In this one you are smiling, laughing, cradling me with your lullaby eyes.

You were supposed to be the one. You were the end of the road, it doesn’t get better than this, so don’t look over your shoulder trying.

You were not fictional. You were real. Real love. Real pulsing, bleeding, messy heart.

I let you hold my heart in the palm of your hand.

That’s how much I trusted you.

Us.

You promised me you’d never leave.

You. Me. We.

We were supposed to be indestructible.

In this one, I am untethered joy, because I’m with you. Right next to you. For so long, I have been missing from the picture. But in this one, I am here. I exist. I matter. I am loved.

In this one, I am so blindingly happy. Because I didn’t see the end coming.

*

It’s March 18, 2002—my birthday. I’m selfishly being 25. Coming out of the fog—a term that defined my transracial adoption royally fucking me up. A term that would be popular twenty years into the future.

To celebrate, I collected all my non-Korean American camps together in one smokey room to BBQ raw meat. Camp 1: childhood best friends—Zara (Pakistani), Nikki (African American). Camp 2: college friends—Leo (Chinese), Kevin (Indian). Camp 3: coworkers—Ana (Colombian), Mina (Taiwanese), Seth (white—Illinois).

And then there was Cali (former college roommate, blond actress) who insisted on calling me best friend over everyone else’s alliances. 

BAD IDEA—to bring different nations together under the illusion of peace. Because they had me in common. A fake Korean who had no proof of roots. But I could flip meat. And swallow kimchi whole. Without ice water to douse the flames. Or rice to neutralize.

Unhappy birthday. What no one knows, at the bottom of the lemon soju shots that I slam down, is that Jay broke up with me through an email. 

It arrived like it was lost in the USPS mail. This after a full month (or 35 days to be exact) of ghosting me.  

There was a long preamble that included catching bacterial strep that left him voiceless. But not fingerless to email, which was attached to words like pathetic, no excuse, I apologize. Followed by needing freedom, feeling our intense relationship was holding him back from the life he was trapped in. 

But what shattered me was this line: “I confused this strong connection with Asian American issues I had with you for feelings of true love . . . but it was not . . .”

Now Jann Arden’s song, “Unloved,” becomes my new anthem.

Today I am 25.

And twenty years from this very moment, I’ll be able to see clearly. It begins when it ends.