Sometimes My Life Feels Like a Cruel Joke

Sometimes my life feels like a cruel joke. This sentence has been floating in my mind for some time now.

* * *

I never thought I’d come back to this hospital so soon — but I did. Today, I packed myself up and returned. To the very hospital I had come to just a couple months ago for my father’s illness. This time, it was my sister’s.

All week, I’d been thinking about this place: the dead silence inside the ward, the chemical scent that wrinkled my nose, the unspoken weariness that was shared between patients and their families. It all came back to me. Or perhaps, it never left.

Whenever I come to this hospital, I get an acai bowl from one of the cafes here. I don’t get it anywhere else because whenever I see something labeled “Hawaii” in Korea, I feel repelled. I don’t know why. It just feels wrong to enjoy the island as a product or a brand, because for me, Hawaii was never just a place. It was my life. My people. My home. And my youth. To consume the island with money or any sort of easy pleasure feels disrespectful.

A couple months ago, during my father’s illness, I sat in a corner of this hospital eating an acai bowl, hunched over my K-drama script. Being on deadline, I wrote in a hurry, biting fruits and vegetables between lines.

Sometimes I had more sense of the environment and what I was eating. Naturally my thoughts led to Hawaii. But when I did, I immediately I shook my head no, as if to erase my thoughts.

Whenever my friends in Hawaii often told me I should come back to the island, I used to say, “Oh, one day.” And when I actually visited them on miraculous occasions, many of them asked me to move back. I smiled in return, knowing what they meant by their words: they had missed me. And therefore wanted me to stay by their side for longer.

Today, I had another acai bowl. And I thought of what my friend from Hawaii had told me when she visited me in Seoul last month. “Hawaii awaits you,” she said. I smiled — what can I say to that?

But now the cynical side of me wanted to respond like a rebellious teenager: "What Hawaii? Do you have any idea what I’m going through?”

I didn’t buy that resentment, however. I simply smiled, somberly, and stroked the hair of my imaginary self in my imagination. Because I knew — that beneath that anger was disappointment, and fear, and pain, and desperation.

Years ago, in another summer, I flew to Hawaii for grad school. At the airport, I cried because I thought I’d never see my parents again. Then, near the terminal, I found something called a “prayer room.” After checking that no one was in, I went inside, knelt, and prayed for a smooth future. But even before I could finish my prayer, a cleaning lady came in — she wanted to mop the floor. So I left the room with tears stamped on my sleeve.

That prayer was never answered: grad school was a tough mountain and I had to leave the country due to a pandemic.

Sometimes life is just like that. It looks like nothing but a cruel joke from heaven. A joke that says: “Look at you now. Look what you’ve become. What you’re left with after following all your so-called high ambition and positivity."

There’s not much I can do in those moments. I quietly close my eyes and say, “Please. Please have mercy on me. I am lost and powerless in this wilderness called life, called reality, called sadness.”

* * *

I don’t cry anymore — not even in my prayers. But maybe that’s because I know Han is sobbing inside me anyway.

Outside, the rain continues — the rain, who knows my heart.