Seoul Central Station

I do not remember.

I was staring at the timetable that looked more like a rummy game board with unexpected changes of tiles updating seamlessly by my intense gaze.

It was a Wednesday morning. I was in Seoul Central Station, waiting to go to Changwon. Job trip, with a bunch of colleagues from other media outlets.

Why don’t my memories have a predictable timetable.

I wish time were a wish fulfilling table and I could order my memories so they can feed me when I am hungry. For love, for laughter, even for sadness. For meaning. Or when so absent from my life that I need something tangible to believe I am still alive. For flesh. Bodies are looking for bodies; I used to repeat to myself in times of trouble.

The soft and instantaneous relaxation of the body that released all tension when my hand touched a silk bead sheet while two zealous Chinese men in a small room of a factory in Xian were trying to sell me a set of bed linens. I long to turn that memory into eternity. Others, I fight to bury deep.

But mostly, memories are unpredictable and tyrannical. Greedy, not satisfied by the mess they create under the sun, they sneak into dreams helped by the cunning moon.

They show up, shape my life and steal my time. My time. As if I existed in outer space.

Thieves. They appear undercover, dressed as trees, gazes, sky hues, hand waving, the plate of a car. The familiar sensation when I lick the sticky rice on the wooden spoon with the twisted carved handle and my tongue feels safe for an instant. Or, just like this morning, when I was so sure I was sensing the scent of my beloved when I breathed the badly shaved nape of the man next to me in the hotel’s elevator.

Or even as myself, when demonic.

When I summon them up, they are fake. But I crave memories. Their random nature gives me such a thrill. There is no such thing as spontaneity. Only the lucky encounter with the right memories at the right moment. Or the wrong ones, I could foolishly try to convince myself. But I don’t. There is a speck of lucidity that stubbornly pushes me to remember something that does not have the flavor of a memory or the alluring anxiety of distant dreams.

I stare at the timetable, floating among platforms and timelines. Will I remember?

A glimmer of hope run against my blurry screen. I noticed the almost invisible shaking of Don’s jaw when he handed me a bottle of water. An old man in a deep black turtleneck sweater with a tiny waist and a messy salt and pepper hair. A friendly smile, polite but always circling back to his secluded universe even in the middle of a lively conversation.

The cold plastic touched the palm of my hand, but the wave sent by the ripples of his emotion hit me first.

It was not a lake, but an ocean. A splash full of seaweed that suddenly darkened my vision. My teeth ground minute pieces of nacre and my mouth became an iridescent womb. Multicolored fish turned into a denture and I could speak. Not with Don, that became a shadow that I swallowed without regret and then spit it out from between my legs. He was not newly born. Just raw.

No sound was heard.

I am not a memory.

Now I remember.

A yoke floating in an ever-expanding space until the surroundings felt intangible and I became the timetable.

I shook and the departure and arrival times rearranged themselves according to an instinct that didn't seem to listen to any logic. Then I simultaneously entered everyone’s brain within the perimeter of the station, as well as those of the travelers in the incoming subway trains arriving at the railway station to match them with their best destination.

Memories had no more power over me. I could intentionally create them for everyone else. With every movement, a new path was created or shifted. No more fighting for a place in space.

I felt the stony look on Don’s face glued absentmindedly to my flickering body of white light. He would not know it felt like a caress. Cold, but real. Eyes reach the deepest, even when not aware.

He was waiting for his time, but he had no clue it was me who showed up. I entered every pore of his body and filled all the corners of his being. We merged and shifted together according to my whims. He did not belong to himself. He never did and that made him such a scary, lonely place to inhabit.

What memories I displaced when I came in, I wondered. Humans are collections of memories fragmenting their being.

For a while, there was nothing but me, no space for other identities. It felt good to fill someone to the brim. His heart was a cold, dark place. I stretched as much as I could, but the rigid and rusty space wasn't welcoming. I touched a scrap of gentleness and try to set it on fire. I felt him shiver. It sparkled but died soon as a current of wet fear poured down. Then I burned his heart silently.

I was his creation though. His emotion and the previous conversations since we met Monday at noon, when he waited for us at the airport brought me there, inside him, despite my will. I left an imprint that will haunt him forever. I did burn his heart, and the memory of that scar will travel to his conscious mind when thirst will be unbearable. Maybe when he will wash his face in the morning looking in the mirror, hopefully when he will swallow in a hurry the tray with Korean crispy chicken nuggets on a regular night before running to catch the bus for the suburbs where he lives with a wife that let him travel alone.

I left his body. Same murky look. But his heart will remember.

Platform number 3, he announced looking at me. I smiled.