“Are you a missionary?”
A twisted hand with half gnawed fingernails, sporting blood raw cuticles, clutched the stainless steel handrail next to my seat. It belonged to a woman of a hard fifty years. She was balding, missing most of the body in her hair, much like what a little girl’s doll becomes after years of abuse, and her scalp shown through. You could see it in her eyes, the way they scanned back and forth. She’d been someone’s doll, someone’s outlet for rage, and no amount of metallic eyeshadow would hide it.
I shook my head no, “I’m a teacher.”
Holding a tattered teddy bear against a stained top with the crook of her elbow, looking of paranoia, mouth agape and unblinking, she projected an intense energy from fully dilated pupils. Like a whirlpool of antagonizing tides, it simultaneously pulled me in, while pushing me away. The several layers of neon foundation, emanating from the bags underneath her eyes, were the one thing that kept me entranced. The makeup created rainbows of color, which fell like cupped flower petals, all the way down her hollowed cheeks. They hung loose like those of a corpse, but she had more life force than anyone aboard the subway.
To me, she looked more alien than human, her bright pink headphones still stuffed in her ears, and I guess we had more in common, in that sense, than anyone else I’d seen that day. Both of us were failing miserably to form to the strict Korean cultural mold, though some of us were handling it better.
I couldn’t tell who though.
She muttered, between loose lips, “the man, I hate…” The words fell out of her face, lacking in enunciation, and trailed off. Her expression returned to transfixed meditation, as I waited for the dark of her eyes to roll back.
“What was that?” I asked, barely making out what she’d said, but surprised to hear fluent English; a sign of high education and social clout. I couldn’t help the thought of who she was, of what she must have been done prior to her evident mental break.
The entire subway car smelled of her, a mix of cheap floral perfume and greasy body oil. She was in stark contrast to her surroundings. The sameness of Korean fashion can be suffocating. All that fucking beige, those tacky oversized name brands, but she was on fire. In this country, self expression, let alone paranoid schizophrenia, is unheard of. It’s all swept under the rug, wiped from existence, as if it never existed, all for unquestioned social cohesion.
There is no other, there is only us; the greater good. That’s how Korean hierarchy is structured and it’s crushing.
Unresponsive, she just looked at me and shoved a wrinkled hand into her tote bag. Pulling out a Doraemon sucker, a puffy blue cat-like character from a Japanese manga, she stuffed it into my hand without tact. It was the most anyone had interacted with me the whole day. I usually go noticed, but ignored, so I didn’t know how to handle the attention. I froze up and fixed my gaze to a point above her face, giving the illusion I was still looking at her.
“Suckers are good, they are sweet. Are you from England?” The woman, whose name I never did get, although I asked, exuded that uninhibited kindness only seen in a child. Waiting for my reply, the rhinestone dolphin punched into her bag, caught the shine of the train’s fluorescent lighting each time we crossed a pair of freshly connected tracks.
Clack, clack. Clack, clack.
The sound of screeching metal wheels was the only thing to cut the silence. No one talks on the subways here.
“Ah, no. No I’m not. I’m American.” I replied.
All I’ve wanted, for weeks at this point, was for this to happen. I fantasized, quite often, about someone coming up to me, saying hello, and treating me like something other than an oddity. Now that it was happening, it was all too much and I immediately sensed the deep judgement radiating from my gut. I couldn’t help it, I was choking up and at a loss for words.
I like a lot of things in theory, but not in practice.
Grabbing for something to say, I asked what the name of her bear was. Without smiling, she told me that it was her husband. Nearly letting out an uncomfortable laugh, my stomach dropped. I thought I was kinder, but it’s relative, so I tried not to fixate on it.
As badly as I wanted to look away, I didn’t. Instead, I continued engaging, I was steadfast, as I tried to mentally map out where my stop was. “Suyeong, Suyeong. The next station is Suyeong, the doors will be opening on your left.” An automated announcement, which has become something of white noise to me, came across the sound system inside the car.
A sense of relief washed over me and I told her that it’d been very lovely chatting, but I had to be going, as this was my stop.
“Me too, my stop too, I live here.” her actions mirrored mine.
“Fuck” I thought, barely containing my social anxiety, which was now at a rolling boil. All I could think about was getting away from this woman. I didn’t want to be rude, but I absolutely couldn’t handle the intimacy of the situation. I’d done so much to shut this sort of thing out. My mind was clamping down, my vision becoming blurred, and I pushed my way through the subway doors to get to the escalator.
Stepping onto those sharp, stacking metal stairs, I heard her call out, over my right shoulder “I love you.”
It was like the universe calling out, or God, knowing what I’d been needing to hear.
The tension that’d built in my neck was released, my head slumped over. It really hit me, I wasn’t running from her, I was running from kindness. I was running from connection, from love. The packaging that the message came through was unexpected, but that’s never what really matters. Riding the stairs up, I felt the weight of everyone I’d ever pushed away; subtly and overtly.
It’s never them, it’s always you. All that lady on the train really was, was a mirror reflecting back some of my deepest struggles with accepting kindness openly, of thinking myself worthy. But, like I said, I appreciate many things in theory.
One day though, I do hope to live as honestly as her.