I miss you, but I don’t want to see you…
What Moved the Judges
“…a quiet piece [but] it has so much subtle power. I read it three times just for pleasure. It’s very hard to make the study of etymology not only interesting but truly beautiful. This author does so…and in THREE LANGUAGES… This work is a well-crafted literary gem that brings both a grandmother and grief to life and explores the liminal nature of language and death so perfectly.“
I forgot the day you died. I remember only that it was sometime in autumn; that time of year when something begins to shift in the air. I searched for you in all the messages about you so that I could remember. I typed harmony, our family transliteration of what we called you. 할머니. Halmeoni. Grandma.
When Koreans miss someone, they say 보고 싶어, which translates as, I want to see you.
I would love to see you, to tell you how much I missed and miss you even while sitting across from you, breathing the same air as you. But I don’t simply want to see you, to perceive you. I want you to see me, too. Is there room for this potentiality if I ask 보고 싶어? Do you miss me? Do you want to see me? What, then, if I don’t want but simply do miss, do see?
In Russian, one way to say you miss someone is мне тебя не хватает, more poetically and literally rendered as, for me, there is not enough of you.
Ever since you died, I can’t help but feel I simply, or perhaps rather complexly, did not get enough of you. Maybe that’s a wildly clichéd thing to say but maybe it’s a cliché because it is a universal truth. That there will never be enough time. There will never be enough time to sufficiently get to know a ‘you,’ let alone an ‘I.’ But maybe the absence of sufficiency, satiety, of that which is ‘enough,’ can tell us more about what was.
There is not enough of me waking up in my cousin’s pink-walled bedroom, in a sea of pink sheets, shortly followed by the soft knock at the door as you poked your head in and asked if I wanted fruit. Sometimes you immediately brandished the proposed bowl, full of fruit perfectly peeled and cut, as if I had no choice in the matter. Or maybe you simply knew that I would accept, as I always did.
There are not enough mornings of over-sugared cereal and not being excused from the table until you have ensured that I have finished every last drop of milk in the bowl.
There is not enough of the sound of you chopping vegetables to make 만두, dumplings. You would sit on the floor for hours, seemingly indifferent to the labor of love and time, every fall of the blade cutting through a love confession or family fallout in the K-drama playing on your iPad a few feet away.
In English, I miss you suggests a failure to reach someplace, someone. When I miss you, I lament the fact that there was a time – many years that now seem few – when our lives did not fail to reach each other, but converged. It is time that has rendered our further meeting impossible, casting me off in a world where nothing is enough and, simultaneously, everything is enough.
It is only in my present missing, my failure to reach you, that I realize what is not enough. But, paradoxically, what is not enough is merely an expression of what once was enough, but is only insufficient because I seemingly no longer have it. Only through losing, missing and not getting enough of you have I gained the ability to grasp what ‘enough’ is or could be.
Maybe I haven’t missed you yet, not really.
When Koreans say they miss you, the ‘you’ is more often than not omitted, and therefore implied. So, perhaps a more literal translation would be, I want to see.
But what if I don’t want to see? What if I don’t want to see the places that used to be filled by you?
What if I don’t wish to see, let alone be, in the kitchen where you used to blow the steam off spoonfuls of 미역국, seaweed soup, so that I may be fed without getting burned; where freshly cut and peeled fruit lay in wait for hungry mouths?
What if I don’t want to walk up that hill near your house we used to hike, or drive down the same roads I took to see you?
I often feel bad for the fact that I don’t remember the day you died down to the direct date and time, as if a goodbye is truly something that happens in a single moment. I often forget that it is not really in our nature, at least not in mine, to say goodbye or miss someone for a single day. I forget that it is not unheard of to miss someone for many days, years, a lifetime; to miss them even before, during and after goodbye, perhaps even before hello.
I used to find the Korean I miss you rather cute before I found it wildly insufficient. Because how can I sit here, missing you and wishing to both see you and do anything but see you? But then again, maybe they’re on to something. Because it is one thing to want to see you and another to want to see.
I want to see – the ‘you’ implied, but undefined.
Mattea Mun is a mixed-race Korean-American writer based in London. Her work interrogates the real-world ramifications of identity politics with an emphasis on fostering intersectional discourse along the lines of anti-racism, decolonization, and feminism. Extended portfolios of her work can be read on Substack (@matteamun and @xplicitcontent), though her writing has also been published by Everything is Political and Vellichor Literary (forthcoming).