THE ISOLATION JOURNALS - DAY 23 - HOME
Today’s prompt:
Meditate on places. If you’re working on fiction, perhaps choose places from that fictional world. The easiest might be your childhood home, but it could be: a restaurant, a street, a parking lot, a ferry station, a borrowed home in the Catskills where it rained for three days or a stranger’s glass penthouse where you once did too many drugs. Write down any images, details, or words that come to mind. Don’t worry about complete sentences. Don’t worry about describing the place as much as describing what it felt like.
This isn’t research, or even a place to collect lines of dialogue or turns of story. It is simply to remember, to feel out for a tender spot, search your own memories for the surprising detail, the “punctum,” which Barthes defined as, “the accident which pricks me.”
Home
Eastern Hills Mall, Williamsville, New York (1976)
I’m hanging out with my friends Julie DelBello and Lisa Wilinsky. We’ve spent the past hour at Fashion Island checking out the jewelry (we all got our ears pierced last year) and at Spencer’s laughing at the gag toilet paper and scandalous t-shirts. We stroll the mall’s main hallway, hoping to run into some cute boys from school, when we pass the full-length mirrors at the entrance of The Gap.
It’s then that I see our reflection: two American girls and an Oriental one. Who is that girl who doesn’t blend in?
Lotte Department Store, Seoul, South Korea (2012)
I’m sightseeing with my elderly mother and middle-aged cousin. We’ve spent the past hour at Lotte, Korea’s premier department store, admiring the legendary food court, which puts Harrods’ famed food halls to shame. We walk out of the store onto the busy thoroughfare, when we see a family of American tourists, instantly recognizable by their fair skin and mass-produced clothes. They pass us by without a second look.
It’s then that I see myself through their eyes: a Korean no different from the others in this crowd. “I’m American, just like you!” I want to shout.
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, California (2020)
I’m walking in the park with my husband. We’ve spent the past week quarantined in our home. We emerge from our urban isolation, masks shielding our faces, to stretch our legs and jump-start our hearts. We reach the top of the hill and take off our masks for a breath of fresh air. Another couple in the distance takes off their masks and lights up a joint.
It’s then that I realize: no one really cares. This crazy quilt of immigrants and pioneers, misfits and rejects, innovators and rebels. We’ve all somehow found ourselves in this strange and magical place called California. “This is what it feels like to be home,” I say.