the first thing i did when i realized all hotel rooms in atlanta were booked out was find a plug. i looked up from an endless screen of sold out motels to a yellow vested guy sat scrolling through his phone.

‘are you from atlanta?’ he turns to look at me down the bench ‘yeah i’m from east side’ ‘do you have a plug’ he jumps up- oh you talking bout gas? yeah. ok yeah how old are you? 22. how old are you? ok yeah so your valid i’m 24. gimme a sec let me call my friend.

an older african auntie sat next to me. i like when girls stick together. i can go anywhere in the world and share a knowing glance. i know how to choose the right train car and wait near the right people, even in silence. 

i listen to him yapping to his friend. i have a play for you–this girl–shes stuck at the airport and…. how much do you want? an eighth. …i think we talking different languages is that a 3 5? yeah. ok he has 20s and 25s. i want 20s. she wants 20s. ok bet heres his number.

i read’s swerve’s contact info through my back camera. is she bad? he texts when i snap the pic. tell him yeah i call out as he walks away. he smirks, yeah i will. 

the za is good. really good. i roll up at the top of the stairs for international terminal parking. i love how smoke wanders around buildings. i blew it down from the roof so sporadic cars rushing on floating roads distort it until it dissipates. 

should i be upset i’m staying at the airport? im really not, but i wonder if i ought to throw a fit, even alone, like all those people in the airport. i let the ash fall and rise and fall to the asphalt 5 stories down and decide its better to just chill and see what happens, like all those other people in the airport. i like atlanta’s energy anyway. sass saturates every exchange, and i can serve realness loudly. because if its true why not speak on it. its all love right?

when i was sat watching rupaul’s drag race at the empty hallway facing the top floor’s smoking section. i let my eyes overlay my bodies reflection on the rain outside. you having fun huh? a passing tsa agent smiles as he’s swiping into the door next to me. mhm! he laughs and disappears.

this blue-shirted boy repping an ’04 gold chain runs out. oh your eyes are redddd look at those eyelids. me and another girl walking by start laughing. they so reddd lookk at them. your so proud of yourself huh. im just calling it how it is. 

it’s 2am now. and those security people are still yapping loud down the hall. three boys coming back from their smoke break start cleaning the windows together. i know that’s not a three person job, but they having so much fun doing it together. i don’t want to fall asleep here, its too open in front of the window.  so i pack up and wander a floor down. families are splayed out. they gave out blankets at one point. i find a hidden cove where they keep the wheelchairs. i curl up in the peninsula – walls on three sides, lock my bag, and sleep on the granite floors. 

its 330 when i wake up to the cyclic intercom: welcome to atlanta, the most efficient airport in the world… and im not high anymore but im too tired to drag me and my bag to the stairwell i hid the rest of my j at. i can sleep anywhere. and i can work anywhere. and atl has the best jazz playing out of any airport i’ve ever been to. have you ever been so exhausted you could just sat and listened to music?

i said i missed being alone before i left. i didn’t really know what it meant, but i knew it was true. i’m starting to remember what it’s like.  but it takes time to adjust. i miss calling the shots selfishly. i miss the freedom of responding to my needs above all else, and i don’t need a lot so i have a lot of free time to indulge boredom growing thoughts. i stopped journalling when i locked in with gang. i was to busy hanging out to roll the nuances of each exchange on my tongue to comb through what’s “important.” and for me, curiosity is my biggest motivator. so the bizzare tends to take importance while comfort takes the last resort. because if i’m comfortable i probably already lived it. 

it’s strange how i feel most free amongst strangers. i like 4 seasons. i love the scorching sticky heat of annandale summers. sundress wafting through swamps and forest canopies and skin bearing the 100º sun. but i can only love it because i know it will end and bring in the unbearable wind and cold of winter. i can only love my lonesome freedom because i know i have a real world – one fortified by intimacy and connection – to return to. I can only love the responsability of community because i know i can leave without life falling in shambles. when i know my life is still my own even when it isn’t. when i know my life isn’t my own even when it is.

i like delving into things with full intensity. i trust my cycles that always ebb and flow never ceasing. and i enjoy their intensity when i lengthen the wavelengths. i spent 8 months with my life in the soup of friends. and now i’m spending a year travelling alone forgetting all that clean cool mud. my cycles. and at this passing point of the cycle, there is nothing for me to do but travel on the means i was granted. so i find a chair in the corner, pull my hood down, lock my bag, and blast caprisongs until i fall asleep.

it’s 450am when i wake up again. it’s always day in the airport. i give up on sleeping and sit one bench over from the person passed out in the smoking section outside. the suns beginning to rise on my right and i think about what jack kerouac said on the road. when he was hitchhiking for so long he forgot who he was in a red sunny afternoon. i haven’t even left the country and i’m already tasting that sweet relief of not knowing who i am. 

you can get there from a drug i’m sure. acid simply opened a door that i never bothered to close. and sometimes when i’m still and sober, that relief of non-knowing permeates the corners of my consciousness and i can stare at the sky until the shadowy night clouds fade to white consumed by rising sun.

i suppose it’s time to figure out my ticket. i was originally supposed to fly from baltimore to detroit to incheon. and at baltimore my flight was cancelled so they sent me to atlanta to san fransisco to incheon. and when i got to atlanta my flight was cancelled, so they rescheduled me to dallas to incheon. but that flight disappeared from my app and i’m staring at a 4 hour delta help desk line.  i decide to do my skin care routine in the bathroom.

 it’s the third time i’m brushing my teeth in this airport. i can do anything with a clean mouth. i change my underwear and put on my sundress. i have no idea where my checked bag is (baltimore? detroit? atlanta? dallas?)  but i had enough sense to pack my carry on like my go-bag. i could live out of it for weeks, if i needed to. i’m sure i will at some point.

i strut over to the empty korean air line and calmly tell the travel agent what happened with tears rolling down my face and she starts typing on a new computer while telling me not to worry. (you just had to take the computer i was working at, a voice floats behind her before settling on the one right over. ma’am you weren’t even here.) she sets me up on the next flight out, comps a hotel room i didn’t actually stay at, and sends me on my way with my korean air boarding pass. at the very least, i churned a profit.

of course i smoke first. my last j before korea. its exactly where i left it between the fourth and fifth floors of the back stairwell. i smoke the rest quickly before dropping the butt to the asphault. it’s biodegradable. 

i strut through tsa. the person taking my body scan purrs: oh you better wALK babygirlll i see you. let’s see that strut. gra gra gra i vogue through the tunnel to his scats. i love loud gay people, and for all that attitude and sass these atlanta gays give, i’m happy it’s all love.

and then i’m sat at my gate for the 4th time since leaving home. how am i still in the east coast?

my gate is full of koreans. it makes sense, i’m flying korean air, but it’s not like being around koreans in annandale. it’s not like being around americans. red and green and blue passports are peaking out of peoples shirt and back pockets. all the announcements are in korean and i only know what they are saying from context. 

there are no loud gay people here. or if there are, they are pretending they are not like me. or maybe there is just nothing to be loud about. 

my writing about race is clunky when it’s personal. it hard to marry an idealized decolonial awareness with the lived reality of blurry ethnicities and friendships beyond them. everyone i talked with at these airports is black (except for the korean air travel agent). all the sassy airport staff and aunties and tweaking travellers and nucleqr families that i found some moments of connection with are black. i was moving through baltimore and atlanta, after all. there aren’t a lot of black people in korea, and i know how colorist east asians can be. 

i think about how many of my closest friends are black and my strongest communities are nourished by blackness and how i’m so grateful for that home but there are parts that i will never touch because i am korean and not black(obviously). maybe its time i spent more time around my own people. what does that mean “my own people.” aside from my family, i was never close with koreans, or east asians in general. i feel bad admitting it because i do want to love and be loved by korean people. but wanting is not reality, and reality gets complicated where love is involved.

i can politicize my experience and point to my entirely kyopo (korean born american) life, my north korean features and tanned skin, my  (undocumented) korean-latino neighborhood, the historically strong communities of small korean-immigrant businesses in the dmv that raised me… but this is lazy writing. this is wellesley writing. this is i need a grant and you should give it to me because my identity signals x sort of writing. it’s how i wrote my watson application. it works as far as one lets it.

it’s an odd feeling, being a foreigner to your own people. the flight attendents fix cheery voices and pursed smiles and i think about how mommy always emphasized my style, grooming, and demeanor as a responsability to those around me. i just wanted to dress and act like my naturally twinky self, but that was irresponsable to my community when i do it awkwardly or poorly. she set a high standard for my presence where my confidence grew not from praise, but a strong sense of what i am  and am not capable of. an old colleague used to boast about korea’s “collective society” all the time.  they’d talk about wonderful healthcare and clean trains that run on time and how elders are respected and cared for. they talked about how capable their society is.  i love communal living so it sounds like a dream. still, i wonder who gets left out of their collective. i wonder what it sacrifices. i think i was left out of that korean collective in america. 

but i was my grandma’s favorite. she claimed me since she read the wisdom in the stars that rose for my birth. i inherited my other grandma’s weariness towards (south) korea. the first thing she told me after i said i was going to korea for the first time: don’t let a korean man get you. they’re not for you. protect your blue passport and youth. when i told my auntie, she asked why? we left for a reason america is better.  mommy loves visiting korea, though, as a place that is not the impoverished war torn strip she left. she says everyone bows to her and treats her well, especially on korean air. she likes when she’s allowed to do whatever she wants and say whatever she wants. i get that in america, she gets that on korean air.

when i’m boarding, i’m grateful they all know to speak to me in english. i wonder what gives it away, but i feel it as obvious. my piercings, my mannerisms, my gaze. i’ve never felt american before. i think the most american things i do are drive and drugs and take up space. even in the korean communities at home, i’ve always felt jarring in them. too loud and too gay as in too happy. and too unwilling to bow. i wonder if i’ll learn to love it…