Foreigners in Korea: Lovers you don't have to love.

We live our lives here within our yearly rations.  

Noraebongs (Singing Rooms).  A mark so true, which means you have truly arrived in, and are experiencing Korea.  Without such, claims might be labeled as falsely. These spinning lights of singing rooms around which our lives occasionally sound disorient or accentuate our lives. But beyond the change of environment, as we've come to thrive in a foreign land, relationships will often enough define the course of one’s life, and our existence here depends upon our year to year contracts, and so, the subsequent relationships we make thereof.  Love (made up of different cross-cultural equations), a best friend, a mentor or a student, a new family or a new community, these are according to our yearly tastes.  Whatever your wish it seems, these - your orders in life, are as temporary or permanent as you may wish them to be.   You may have to return to your respective countries as your yearly contract yields, so should you choose a differing shade, a friend by contract of time and place, an employer shallow or short-lived, even a loving relationships lacking in love.  It is not for us to judge (with knowledge so human and reckless).  We are sometimes safe from such pronunciations.  For indeed, we exist within our year, we, in a different place, in a different time-in a different culture, amid the onslaught of an evolving environment; we often become different people.  For better or worse, is it safe to judge us?  For us: a sum who have misplaced our continuity…

Growth, fun, escape, belief, indifference, permanence of self, a break, a great hunt; first we choose a path to pave an annual detour.  I have witnessed all accounts, and should a relationship expire its' yearly marker, junctions have and will occur.  Emergent selves are shapeless and sleepless mergers. And though this picture may paint itself darkly, we may ignore such occurrences, come home marked, or discover our lives so bright and beautiful that it becomes all at once lit just the same…  That our yearly rations were, in fact, only the emergence of limitations merely convulsive in throes.   The Throes of battle.

... Of life.

"I’ve been trying to do it right. I’ve been living a lonely life. I’ve been sleeping here instead. I’ve been sleeping in my bed. Sleeping in my bed. So show me family. All the blood that I would bleed. I don’t know where I belong. I don’t know where I went wrong. But I can write a song. "

-The Lumineers.