I lived around 104 Fridays in Busan. The first third were spent drinking, trying to connect with people. The last third were low-key: small dinners. The middle third were spent with Julia.

I met Julia after I bombed on stage. Following a couple good readings, Kay, the founder of the Liquid Arts Network, was nice enough to give me a feature spot on the open-mic night. Instead of reading something safe, I picked a half-baked 12-page essay on “Pink Hair Rollers”. Instead of practicing before the show, my nervous hands poured beer down my throat. Instead of taking Kay’s advice to shorten my essay, I read all of the pages. I sat on stage and droned into a mic. Like a rookie reader, all my focus was dedicated to saying words correctly. Drunk, I was completely unaware of everything beside the words on my phone. At one point, I felt something tap my leg.

I looked down. Kay was there, shaking his head. “C’mon, man. Let’s wrap it up. You’ve been reading for over half an hour,” he said.

“Oh, shit, damn, I’m sorry,” I slurred. “Ok. It’s almost done. Don’t worry. I’m sorry everybody. It’s almost done.”

I finished reading the last page, but I’d already lost the crowd. In fact, some girls at the back were heckling me. And I understood why. The first 11 pages were an attempt to explain why Korean women wear hair curlers in public. I made a bunch of wild guesses: rebellion against grandmothers, insecurity, smartphones changing our conception of time. On the last page, I got real “meta”: I’m sitting on the bus and a girl with a pink hair curler gets on, but I am more interested in reading and editing my piece than looking at her, the actual topic of my essay. This last page was an admission of my own subjectivity, an acknowledgment that I was a flawed observer, but, at that point, nobody was listening. After all, this wasn’t a TED talk auditorium. It was a bar, and people came for poetry and music—not lectures. On top of this, my performance was at the height of #metoo, when the male gaze was super suspect. The reading couldn’t have gone worse. It sucked. Kay was disappointed. The next performer dissed me.

Out of respect, I stuck around until the end of the show. The second last performer was a girl in a green WWF (not wrestling) hat. She said she was new in town. She read some poems about sex and teaching and childhood. After the show, I told her I enjoyed her work. She said my piece was too long, but she could tell I could write. We added each other on Instagram then made plans to grab dinner next Friday.

We met up at Haeundae and went to a small Makgeoli bar. The benches, tables, and floors were dark wood. The walls were filled with marker scribbles: mostly Korean, but there were some hearts and peace signs and English letters. Like its owner, the place wasn’t dressed in anything fancy—it simply kept its chin up, confident in its identity. We sat down in a small booth. I deployed the little hangul I knew to get us a bowl of Dong Dong Ju, an unfiltered rice wine served in a big bowl with bits of rice floating on the top, and a seafood pajeon, a Korean pancake with onions, kimchi, clams, oysters, and squid. As we picked at our Asian flapjack and refilled our bowls, we hit the usual conversational topics, like “Why did you move to Korea?” I answered in a normal volume. Julia, who hadn’t adopted the culture’s hypersensitivity to conduct in public spaces, was loud as hell. In Korea, loud equals rude, and the right to crank up your voice is reserved for old men—not young foreigners. I told her to quiet down, but she forgot. Diners turned their heads to her noisy sentences. Her booming laugh got a scowl from an old lady transporting a tray of side dishes. Due to embarrassment, I didn’t enjoy the first part of our dinner.

Then she brought out a poem. I had no idea how to edit poetry. Poems usually made me feel like a tasteless idiot. Her poem was about teaching in Baltimore. There were a couple great lines, but I had to read it 7 times to feel its spark. For feedback, I honed in on lines that broke momentum. I threw out alternate ideas. She explained what she was trying to do. We obsessed over a line about rows of students as seeds. How could we continue the plant-growth metaphor in a subtle way? As we racked our brains for vegetation vocabulary, my world got smaller. I no longer cared about her loud voice. I wasn’t tired from work anymore. I wasn’t worried about what I would do on the weekend. Good things were here. Friendship. Conversation. Food. Drinks. Writing. This was it. We moved away from our pieces and started  talking about Life. The talk was so good that my positivity swelled until I could no longer be in a room. I needed to be outside. I wanted strangers. I wanted to drown in loud music, lights, flailing arms, and tequila shots.

A British girl who I met in Osaka was visiting Busan. I messaged her to meet us at Billie Jeans, a club with the cover of Michael Jackson’s Bad painted on the wall. I found her and her friend amidst the smokers at the front. We caught up then went inside. I got Julia a beer and said, “Welcome to Busan.” As we shoved past awkward dance moves and well-dressed scarecrows, I realized I messed up. The club was restrictive not expansive. I loved to dance, but nothing about laser battle EDM moved my feet, hands, or soul. Plus, there was an awkward dynamic in our group. The girl from Osaka thought Julia was my girlfriend. Upon hearing we weren’t dating, she hinted to Julia that she was interested in me. However, at the beginning of the night, her friend had mentioned that she had a boyfriend in Japan. We all stood next to each other close to the DJ booth, shuffling feet, playing eye tag. In the Makegeoli bar, I felt I was plugged into the world’s rhythm. In the club, I felt confused.

Julia and I met the next Friday. We didn’t go out. We spent the night editing. We did the same the next Friday and the next until my Friday night routine became leaving from work, grabbing food, doing a quick clean up, and then waiting for Julia. She would walk in with an eclectic outfit: half business casual, half jogger. I’d stab at my meal while she nibbled on a cheese string and crackers. We’d talk about our week. Then I’d open my laptop. She’d open her laptop. And we would get lost in the work. Around 1 A.M., I’d walk her home—partially for gentleman reasons, partially because my head felt hot, mostly because I was buzzing and needed exercise so I could sleep.

I hadn’t seen Julia for five months. During that time, I’d visited home, started and ended a relationship, and an hour earlier, finished my last day at work. A lot had changed, yet, as I sat on my couch, wiping my thumb across my phone, I felt like nothing had changed at all. And, when she knocked, entered my front door, and sat on my couch, it all felt the same. Maybe we’d become different people in other environments, but we were still the same with each other: two kids who were down to babble about banal ideas until we found ways to make them beautiful.

She wanted to see the beach, so we walked down. At one point, she stopped, interested by something on the sand that wasn’t there five months ago. Her phone was dead, so she took pictures with mine. Forced to wait, I looked at the scene. There was a massive bridge, cold waves dragging at the shore, and an inseparably dark sea and sky, swallowing up the distance. In the middle of it all was a small seat swing. The swing had room for two and moved to the wind. Hanging over the seat was one small light, stretching as far as it could, revealing all it could. We stood there for a bit, giving the scene silence. Then we continued.