Seoul Again, and Then the Life

Over four months ago, in the darkness of a late-night flight, we arrived in Seoul for the first time.

I remember the rain. It was pouring when we landed and it kept pouring the next day, as if the city wanted to introduce itself through its weather first — insistent, dramatic, entirely unbothered by what anyone else thought of it. We came in late, exhausted, dragging our mountain of luggage through streets that were unfamiliar in the particular way that only night-time streets in a new country are unfamiliar: the signs unreadable, the geography unmapped, the whole city existing in potential rather than knowledge.

And then morning came.

I woke early, as I always do, in the particular way of people whose bodies refuse to adjust to new time zones gracefully. Everyone else was still asleep. The hours stretched ahead of me and I made the decision that felt, in the moment, entirely ordinary and that I have been thinking about ever since: I put on my shoes and went out.

Alone. In a city I had never been in. Without Google Maps, which does not operate in South Korea, which meant that I — a person with, by my own honest admission, no reliable sense of direction — was navigating on instinct and intention and the vague memory of a map I had looked at the night before. The rain was still falling. The streets were grey and wet and beginning to wake up.

I went anyway. And something in that going — something in the simple act of stepping into the unknown with nothing but curiosity and a general sense of which direction was approximately right — felt new to me in a way I am still trying to fully articulate. Revolutionary in its simplicity. A version of freedom I had been slowly building toward, without always knowing it, through years of inner work and deliberate practice and the accumulated small braveries of this nomadic life.

I found the vegan doughnuts. A small shop near Myeongdong, the kind of discovery that could only happen by wandering — a pumpkin spice latte and something golden and perfect, entirely plant-based, which mattered enormously to those of us in our family who cannot tolerate dairy. I carried them back to the apartment feeling unreasonably pleased with myself.

I also caught my finger in the shop door and lost a nail. For the first time in my life. Which is perhaps a more honest illustration of my navigational confidence than anything else I have written.

Four months later, my nail has grown back.

And I am in Seoul again.

This time it is a short stop — a transit between Japan and Croatia, a few days in a city I now know I love rather than a city I was only beginning to discover. I walked back to the doughnut shop. Ordered the pumpkin spice latte, which tastes the same as it did in April — sweet and warm and carrying, now, the weight of everything that has happened between that first rainy morning and this humid late-summer afternoon.

And what happened between those two moments was a year.

Not a year in the conventional sense of days accumulated in one place. A year of Seoul in the rain and cherry blossoms on the Gangnam river banks and a crab seller in a night market clapping and cheering as we tried something that set our mouths on fire. A year of Busan’s complicated resistance and the coffee shop owner who unlocked his door for my daughter’s chocolate latte and Mori and its twenty-three courses and the name falling into the cup. A year of Hualien’s quiet Sundays and seventy-two pancakes and a writers’ retreat in the mountains and two chapters of a book I had been postponing for most of my adult life. A year of Kyoto’s moss and water and the knife master with eight hundred years of lineage and Bachata on a Saturday evening in a small café called Rumbita. A year of Niseko’s impossible green and the cricket song at 7:45 every morning and Poe the green pigeon and the slow, thick days of rain and planning.

All of it contained now in a pumpkin spice latte on a humid afternoon in Seoul.

Seoul, revisited, is still Seoul.

Even with the occasional sewage smell that arrives without warning and disappears just as suddenly. Even with the noise of Myeongdong and its crowds and its relentless commercial energy. Even with the hills and the steep roads that made my training runs harder and more interesting than any other city we have been in this year. Even with all of that — I just love this city. Loudly and without apology, the way I have learned to love Kyoto, the way I have learned to love certain people: not despite their complications but alongside them, having decided that the whole is worth far more than the sum of its difficult parts.

What returning showed me — as returning to Kyoto showed me, as going back to places you have loved always shows you — is that good places, like good people, keep giving. They reveal different things at different angles of light. The city I arrived in on a rainy April morning is not quite the same city

I am sitting in now, in August, in the heat, with four months of living behind me. But it is also exactly the same city. And somehow, held at the intersection of those two truths, it is even more itself than it was before.

The same places bring out the best in you on multiple different occasions. I did not know this as well as I know it now.

When people ask why we still travel — when I ask myself, in the honest hours, why I still choose this — the answer arrives simply and without drama: because it gives.

I am not running away from anything. I do not deny the beauty of a steady place called home — I feel its pull sometimes, the particular ache for permanence and the known, for walls that stay in the same position and a kitchen I understand and neighbours whose names I remember. I allow myself to feel that ache without acting on it immediately, because I have learned that feelings are information rather than instructions.

But when I sit with myself quietly, without the noise of planning or logistics or the daily management of five people’s needs, I come back to the same truth: this life is giving me more than it costs. What I find, arriving somewhere — the surprise of a city’s particular beauty, the human encounter that could not have been planned, the version of myself that only appears when she is slightly outside her comfort zone and paying close attention — that is what keeps me choosing it.

I sat on the plane from Sapporo to Seoul yesterday and went through the photographs from the last several years. Since Anton was born we have not had a permanent address. What we have had instead is this: images of children growing up in more countries than most adults visit in a lifetime, faces of people who became family in places we passed through, mornings on yoga mats in rooms that smelled of incense in cities whose names we had barely known before we arrived in them.

The photographs kept coming and I kept scrolling and what I felt, sitting in that seat at thirty thousand feet, was not nostalgia exactly.

It was more like gratitude so large it had nowhere particular to go.

I want to be clear about something, because I have always tried to be honest here and I do not want to stop now.

I am not drawing a romantic picture. I do not want to convince anyone that I am living a dream that has no cost, no difficulty, no days where I sit in a grey apartment in a city I do not like and feel bored and claustrophobic and would trade anything for a kitchen with proper knives. I have written about those days too — the mould in Busan, the clicking knee, the planning burnout in Niseko, the week I cried in a coffee shop I didn’t even like because everything had become too much.

All of that was real. All of it is part of this.

What I am saying is simpler and less glamorous than a dream: I write to remember. I write the way other people take photographs, or keep journals, or press flowers between pages — to hold the moments still long enough to really see them, to have something to return to when the details begin to blur at the edges as they always eventually do.

Yesterday on the plane I was that person returning. Scrolling through the images, finding the smiles I had forgotten, the places I had underestimated, the faces of my children at ages they will never be again.

Smiles and giggles and beautiful reminders — moments that are mine, lived and loved for everything they were and still are and, in some important sense, always will be.

Tomorrow we leave for Croatia.

For the first time in many months we will be somewhere that feels like the closest thing we have to home — language, family, the particular smell of Adriatic summer, the ground we return to when the travelling has done what it does and the self is ready to be still for a little while.

I will miss Japan. I already do, with the particular pre-emptive missing that arrives before a leaving rather than after it, which I have learned is simply the shape love takes when it knows time is short.

I will come back to Seoul. I know this the way I know the things I have felt rather than decided.

The nail grew back.

The doughnuts were still perfect.

And the city was still there, exactly as I had left it, ready to begin again.