Winter in Sokcho

Pages of azure ink. And the man on the waves, feeling his way through the winter, slipping passively beneath the waves, an afterimage in his wake, a woman’s shoulder, belly, breast, the small of her back, the lines tapering to become a mere stroke of the pen, a thread of ink on the thigh, and on the thigh a long, fine
scar
carved with a brush
on the scales of a fish.

What matters is the light. It shapes what you see

Eventually he stopped in front of a display of leather helmets and asked me to translate a sign.

It gave a summary of the conflict between the two Koreas that began in 1950, the North supported by the Soviets and China, the South by the US and the United Nations, the signing of the armistice on 27 July 1953 and the creation of this frontier on the 38th parallel, the world’s most heavily militarised border, in the midst of a no man’s land four kilometres wide and 238 kilometres in length. In the course of those three years, two to four millions deaths, both civilian and military. No peace treaty had ever been signed.

I didn’t want to be his eyes on my world. I wanted to be seen. I wanted him to see me with his own eyes. I wanted him to draw me.

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

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

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

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.

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

‘I like it this way, unadorned.’