A Week Later

Time flies.

Sometimes it moves fast, almost insultingly so — whole days gone before you had a chance to inhabit them. And sometimes it becomes a slow drip from somewhere above, the kind you watch with fading patience, knowing the bucket will never fill at this rate, knowing your endurance will give out long before it does.

I have written about time before. I think about it often, feel it in my body, try to make peace with it. I never arrive at anything particularly clever or resolved. I just keep pondering, which is perhaps all any of us can do.

This Saturday I opened Facebook — something I do rarely and usually regret — and one of the first things I saw was an update from an old friend. Someone from the years when we were young and wild and unbothered, when life had not yet shown us its full weight. She is living in a hospice now. Counting her last days, or weeks — nobody knows exactly. What she wants most, what she is asking for, is time. Slow time. Presence. As many moments as possible with the people she loves, held carefully, nothing wasted.

I have been thinking about her ever since.

There is a particular kind of pain that comes from the things we cannot control — the mysterious, arbitrary cruelty of a life cut short, of a young person running out of time while the rest of us complain about having too much of the wrong kind. It doesn’t resolve into anything useful or instructive. It just sits there, aching, asking you to hold it.

Yesterday I cried. A lot, and for a long time — in the way that only happens when you have been holding something too heavy for too many days and your body finally decides, without consulting you, that enough is enough. A whole week of accumulated weight, pressing out all at once in a coffee shop I don’t even particularly like, in a city I am struggling to love, on a grey Sunday afternoon.

The rain outside was doing the same thing.

I want to tell you about last week. Not the version of it that would make a good photograph. The actual version.

I want to do this because I think it matters — because the travelling life, seen from the outside, can look like a continuous stream of beautiful mornings and interesting discoveries and freedom so complete it becomes almost abstract. And it is those things, genuinely. But it is also this. And I think the this deserves as much space as the beautiful parts, maybe more, because it is where the real texture of this life lives.

My husband has been staying in a hotel — mould in our shared house, his health requiring distance from it — while I have been managing our daily life in the communal space we share with seven other families. The logistics of this have been relentless: the scheduling and planning and running between one place and another, trying to hold everyone’s needs alongside my own, trying to maintain the routines that keep me functional — the workouts, the meals, the cooking, the small daily acts of self-care that are not luxuries but structural requirements for my wellbeing.

I tried. I followed my plan as faithfully as I could. But the social intensity of communal living, already wearing on me, became something I could barely manage. We even spoke about leaving early — packing up and going to Japan now, not waiting for Traveling Village to end. Something in me both desperately wanted that and couldn’t quite bear it, because leaving early would also mean cutting short something I don’t want to lose.

And then May arrived. Not with the spring ease I had been quietly promising myself. With lice.

One of us. Treatments, deep cleaning, the particular brand of maternal panic that lice reliably produces in me no matter how many times I tell myself it is just an inconvenience. And then, as if to make sure I had truly run out of reserves, I woke on Saturday with a clicking knee that developed, over the course of the morning, into pain sharp enough to stop me walking properly — stopping, in one swift blow, the one thing that has been keeping me sane through all of it. My training. My body. My last remaining room of my own.

That was the moment I ran out of patience.

Not dramatically. Not with any particular clarity or catharsis. I just sat in that coffee shop I don’t fancy, with a cup of coffee that held none of its usual comfort, and felt the tears that had been collecting all week begin to rise and press outward, quietly and then not quietly at all. I spent my Sunday mirroring the rain — pouring, pausing, pouring again.

I am still raw. Still fragile in the way you are after a cry that has been a long time coming — slightly emptied, slightly clarified, not yet sure what the ground feels like under your feet.

The question I keep turning over is this: how do you stay patient when the last thing that was holding you together is taken away too? How do you keep showing up — for yourself, for your children, for your partner in his hotel room across the city — when the foundations that usually hold you have been, one by one, quietly removed?

I don’t have an answer. I am living inside the question.

I thought I would love Busan.

I want to say clearly: what I hate is not Busan. Busan is a city, indifferent to my struggles, going about its business at the edge of the sea. What I hate is being here — in this particular configuration of difficulty, in this specific accumulation of challenges, in this week, in this body with its clicking knee, in this season of grief both personal and collective that arrived without asking permission.

The place is just where it is happening.

And yet — and I notice this with something between hope and exhaustion — I keep sensing that something is germinating underneath all of it. In the way that the hardest weeks sometimes precede the most significant shifts. In the way that being stripped of your usual resources and routines and comforts can, eventually, show you something about yourself that the easier weeks never could.

I don’t know yet what this time is for. I don’t know what is growing in the dark underneath the difficulty. But I have lived long enough, and been through enough hard seasons, to trust that the not-knowing is not the same as nothing happening.

My friend in the hospice is teaching me that time is precious — all of it, not just the beautiful parts. The rainy Sundays in coffee shops you don’t like. The weeks when the knee gives out and the lice arrive and the tears finally come. The mornings when you don’t know how to keep showing up and you show up anyway, imperfectly, with whatever remains.

This is that kind of week.

And I am writing it down so that one day, when everything is easier, I will remember.

That it was all time. That none of it was wasted.

That even the bucket filling one slow drop at a time — was filling.