Every Beginning Comes From Some Other Beginning's End (or, Our Beginnings Never Know Our Ends!)
Heading may be longer than entry. Okay, not really.

It's 11 on a Sunday night and I'm packed up, ready for our move tomorrow. This apartment complex is going to be destroyed to make way for new, more expensive apartments, so me, my dad, my grandmother and my great-aunt (that's what you call your grandmother's sister, right?) are moving in tomorrow to an apartment that my aunt owns.

I don't mind moving. I made my first one as an 8-month-old carried onto a transpacific flight, and moved to two other cities after that before college. I sometimes think that I must have somehow absorbed the excitement of moving in my cradle, because I remember asking my father when I was 5 and we were living in San Francisco when we were going to move. I wanted to, you see. Starting new, starting fresh. All the usual cliches and associations.

I looked at all my stuff in my room, packed up in two suitcases, a travel backpack, a large plastic bin, and a couple other assorted containers, and I thought, man, how is it that when you don't even like acquiring things, you end up with this much crap? Most of the stuff I've acquired here is probably school-related, notes and books and things like that. I'm loathe to get rid of it, but I'll probably do so when I head back to the States for good.

Do places retain any sense of their occupants? Just about a year ago, I moved into this apartment from my boarding house, a quick, single-evening, single-carload run. If this building weren't to be demolished in a few months, would it hold the imprint of my changing during this past year? I got to know my dad again in this apartment, improved my Korean, cried over John, and ... matured, I guess.

I kind of wish this place didn't have to vanish in the next year, replaced by something bigger and newer and cleaner, because then someday in the future I might be able to come back and walk past the street with all the gingko trees, hanging heavy with golden leaves, and see in my memory the uniformed high schoolers walking together in packs to school in the morning. I might be able to pass the pharmacy where I bought my first Korean contact lens solution. I might be able to start up the stairs of building 114 and remember thinking about how strange Korean apartments seemed in the fall of 2002.

I might be able pause in the stairwell and remember the nights I smoked cigarettes out the window, looking up at the sky and feeling so badly about my breakup that I wanted to disappear like the bits of ash I flicked out into the street. I might be able to peer into apartment 504 and recall the summer day when Maiko and Etsuko came over and had Japanese stew and took a nap in the afternoon sun. I might be able to look into my old room and think with compassion of the times I cried in the dark about hurting John, or think with contentment of the times I woke up and lay lazily on the warm floor staring at the ceiling for hours on Sunday morning.

I might take a peek into the tiny, low-ceilinged bathroom, with the temperamental washing machine on one side and the toilet on the other, and remember with a smile how I used to run the hot water for many minutes in the winter, so that the room would reach some modicum of warmth before I took a shower. I might look at the small steel counter, dented in the middle, and dredge up a memory of making seafood stew with my dad one day, and playing with Mr. Squid. Poor, dead Mr. Squid!

I'd like to think that places hold memories of you. But they don't, do they? The memories are in my head, and the place is special to me, not vice versa. Tomorrow, I will start holding memories of another place. But tonight, at least, this place is still home to me.