I'll Be Right There

by Kyung-Sook Shin

You should only ask someone if they love you if you love them, regardless of what their answer might be.

“Sometimes I wish we could start off old and get younger as we go,” he said.

“I wish someone would promise me that nothing is meaningless,” he said. “I wish there were promises worth believing in. That after we’ve been hunted and lonely and anxious and living in fear, there is something else. Considering the way we are living right now, if we were young at the end of our lives instead, then maybe our dreams could come true.”

To hold someone’s hand, you must first know when to let go.

Life demands sacrifice and difficult decisions from us at every moment. Living does not mean passing through a void of nothingness but rather through a web of relationships among beings, each with their own weight and volume and texture. Insofar as everything is always changing, so our sense of hope shall never die out. Therefore, I leave you all with one final thought: Live. Until you are down to your final breath, love and fight and rage and grieve and live.

“I can’t wait for the years to pass, Jung Yoon,” he said in a hollow voice. “Can’t wait to be older, when I will understand, even if I can’t forgive. Can’t wait to become strong.”

I wish the only things that ever happened to us were ones where you could ask how and why.

I can tell I am getting old whenever young people strike me as endearing. But getting old isn’t a bad thing. Getting old means that the subtle envy I feel for those passing through youth, and the waves of loss that wash over me when I see the way they seem to glow, will abate and leave only the hope that they will make their way forward freely, unimpeded by anything.

My Christophers, thank you for being a part of my life. Do not grieve for me. All things must come to an end—youth, pain, passion, emptiness, war, violence. Do the flowers not bloom and fade? Just as I came into being, so must I pass out of existence. Look up to the sky. That’s where the stars are. They are always shining there, whether we are gazing up at them, and whether we forget, and long after we die. May each one of you become one of those shining stars.

It was then that I finally realized I was not made up only of myself. Everything I saw and everything I felt was also part Dahn. And part Miru. And partly their unfinished time that I was living.