Elisa Shua Dusapin

He sounded different, further away, a distant echo from a body left on the other side of the world.

Why was I bothering to drive him to the border? I was giving up my time for him. I wasn’t sure he deserved it.

Why was I bothering to drive him to the border? I was giving up my time for him. I wasn’t sure he deserved it.

told me he missed me but didn’t ask how I was.

‘I like it this way, unadorned.’

That was Sokcho, always waiting, for tourists, boats, men, spring.

Our beaches are still waiting for the end of a war that’s been going on for so long people have stopped believing it’s real.

They build hotels, put up neon signs, but it’s all fake, we’re on a knife-edge, it could all give way any moment. We’re living in limbo. In a winter that never ends

He had no right to abandon me, to leave me here, with my own story withering on the rocks.

I wanted to live through his ink, to bathe in it. I wanted to be the only one he saw. And all he could say was he liked the way I saw things