❝Well, love comes after. Adrenaline kicks on your body, fight-or-flight response is triggered. Whether you fight or fly, you do move. So, the rush is where it all starts. It's what makes you budge, what makes you change. Love comes after. The realiz...
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South Korea, the "land of the morning calm". That's how the country I was born in has been known for thousands of years now. Indeed, the mesmerizing views of mountain ranges, beaches and parks by the coast along with giant palaces and temples from past dynasties in the heart of the cities speak for themselves as they live up to their surname.
I always make sure to take some time off from work every April, as the busy and loud streets welcome the breathtakingly beautiful blooming cherry blossoms, dragging color along the avenues and announcing the spring days' arrival. As I walk through the endless petal walkways, I feel all the grey of the concrete, of the buildings, of the polluted sky, miraculously turn to light and peaceful pink. The kids running around, filling their hands with the delicate petals on the ground and throwing them up in the air like confetti as the season's calm breeze draws the flower pieces along the streets, the tourists keeping themselves from looking straight the way and rising their eyes to admire the stunning trees, taking their minutes as if they had a whole lifetime to spend on that only one moment.
As I watch the people cheerfully enjoying a sunny day in the park, laughing and swirling around, taking notice of every single detail of everything around them, I almost allow myself to believe that I am actually walking and living on a true land of morning calm. Almost. Because since I came to Seoul years ago, all I was ever able to see were hurried people stumbling through sidewalks and bumping against each other at crosswalks, almost completely oblivious to what or who surrounded them. High-flown buildings and skyscrapers lighting up the capital, outshining even the brightest star in the night sky, and strangely, the more blinding the light poles shone against my eyes, the darker it actually felt.
In a place where everyone is so outworn that can't even notice their lives going by as each day ends, all there's left to save them from a cold downfall is the most basic human escape: pleasure. Bars and clubs are drowning in money by numbing us every night with loud music, expensive drinks and easy sex. The dance floor being our purest source of ecstasy, the dirty toilets being the church of all lost drunks, and the hotel rooms being the only left evidence of nights of sins. None of it fills up the missing pieces in our lives, nor it's meant to do so. It fills enough for us to hold on through another night, but drains quickly and begs for more, creating an inescapable cycle. The Seoul that I know rises in blind overwhelming work and falls in all desperate forms of greediness and lust. That has nothing to do with morning calm.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I was raised by the city, consequently being a great manifestation of it. I'm one of the millions starting nights at clubs and ending them in strangers' bedrooms. I don't feel a thing anymore when dozens of shoulders collide against mine in the short meter walk along the crosswalks. I don't believe in love. I believe in pleasure. I survive on it. And, just like this, I hold on through the days same as each citizen in this sin city, enjoying the happy moments and numbing out everything else.
So I shake my head, snapping myself out of my daydream while the kids are still playing with fallen petals and the tourists are still hypnotized by the beauty of the nearly bloomed flowers. I turn around and leave, because I know that the moment I step out of the park, the soft pink path will go back being concrete. A few days later, spring will be over as the wind brooms the cherry blossoms away, turning everything back to melancholic grey for another year. And like I said, I'm not complaining. I simply accepted the fact that this is the best it'll get, the highest I'll go, the most I'll ever feel. I'm contented. I don't need to be healed from this.
