night

It was the longest day of the year and therefore the shortest night of the year, but according to E, North Carolina still fell short of the 10PM sunsets she had enjoyed on the northern coastline of France, doubtless the same ones enjoyed by the master French impressionists centuries before her. Not much had changed about that shoreline. The proud arch and needle of Etretat stood clear to see for tourists and grazing cows alike.

Everything was greener there, bluer there. The flowers were larger, brighter. The leaves somehow lusher. She was smiling but she seemed tired, as she should've been. E was one of those people who I had a hard time believing was real, the kind of person who made modern-day renaissance men seem terrifyingly plausible. She described herself as a theoretical chemist by day, landscape painter by night without an ounce of sheepishness nor arrogance, and she was right to do so.

I'd never given too much thought to landscapes-as-paintings, instead opting to people-watch. Whenever I drew or painted without a plan, my hand invariably created a human face part-real and part-fiction. In public places I'd unconsciously note down the shape of someone's nose, how an overhead light made an eyebrow look like burning steel wool, the pinkish gleam of wire-frame glasses, crow's feet, sunspotty decolletage, some skinny young man's sigmoid posture, disheveled bangs slicked against a sweaty temple, a skirt with one pleat gone out of place.

The best places to do this are probably at your local grocery store or when you're abroad in a country with plenty of walkable cityspace. At my university at least, you quickly get sick of seeing glowing twenty-somethings clad in Carhartt on one side and Lululemon on the other.

If the outdoors is not an option, then movies, preferably older ones, are an alternative. By older I guess I mean anything before the mid-aughts. Faces that immediately come to mind include Fujitani Ayako's from Ritual (dir. Anno Hideaki). What strikes me the most about her appearance in the movie is her barely-there eyebrows, downturned eyes, and her dyed hair of indeterminate color. I think her mouth and eyes reminds me a lot of S, or the other way around. They both remind me of sables, weasels, and otters: if I could hold them in one hand, they'd surely droop over my palm and slither to the floor.

There's complete strangers I still remember from these observances, one being a woman, maybe in her late-thirties, in a poppy-red dress on the subway (I remember the shape of her calves under the hem of the dress, like bean pods) and another being a younger woman on the Seoul metro whose shoes made her feet look like deer hooves. The messy but worn make of those shoes still lingers in my mind, as I could easily imagine her having been plucked from a time when shoemaking was still a handicraft, and left to fend for herself in the air-conditioned innards of Seoul Subway Line 1. That these both involve the lower half of female bodies is not out of fetishism, but I won't try and convince you otherwise.

Really, I was reminded of this habit watching clips of professional poker with S. Somehow it makes sense that everyone at the table would have such a notable appearance or if not appearance, then demeanour. As the pot balloons into the millions, their banter quickly freezes over into an emotionless concentration rivaling that of chess grandmasters. The best of them can make indoor sunglasses and tournament-logoed caps look rakish. I think it's also because of the quiet dynamism of the game; it's not just how they look in repose, but how they react to the trivial knock-knock of a check, how one might heckle the card sharp, or cradle their head in their hands after a raise, going as far as to stand up and leave the table after shoving all in, praying to God or perhaps even to Saint Cajetan, the patron saint of gamers and gamblers.

Anyways, all of these things would resurface, someway or another, in the margins of my class notes. I never could summon enough courage to ask strangers if I could draw them, so their features are probably perturbed in all sorts of ways. I probably have people from all walks of life drifting in and out, homeopathically, on these ruled, recycled-paper pages.

I once had a teacher who wore black rectangular glasses that looked like they were made of lacquerware, snakeskin flats, and wooden earrings of Platonic solids. It's the kind of accordance that wrings out my heart to look at. Early this spring I would sometimes see a girl with an DIY haircut and Dance Tonight! Revolution Tomorrow! Orchid shirt walking her rusty bike, and this threatened to break my heart too.

Why these things inspire such sadness in me is a mystery, easily and shallowly explained by the fact that I am often a sad person, what a blunt and pugilistic internet (or maybe real-life) troll would paradoxically describe as being really fucking gay.

For similar reasons, the what's in my bag trend was capable of bringing tears to my eyes. The image of a makeup pouch, ID card holder, portable phone charger, headphones, laptop, Altoid tin, writing pad, all knolled and annotated by their conscientious owner, could linger with me for days.

S would tell me that he used to be obsessed with my handwriting because it was so small and orderly. He would attempt to write even smaller and neater, resulting in complaints from some teachers without the patience and strength of vision to decipher the ever-shrinking font. Nowadays my handwriting has completely changed and I write often in an expansive cursive-print hybrid, with loops around my l's, q's impaled on their own tail, and z's girded by a horizontal bar through their bent spine. You write like a math major, S once said.

The looped l's and harakiri'd q's I stole from two professors' chalkboard scrawls. The fountain pen changes how you write, on account of the heavier body and nib, and the watery ink. I guess handwriting, too, is an extension of yourself, and also the little misspellings I can't help but notice may reveal a part of who you are. At an art gallery I saw illicit where the person clearly meant elicit; it gave me the same feeling I get when I see a particularly beautiful bird.

Hey, are you still reading? I just finished Murakami Haruki's Hear the Wind Sing and I'm typing this in the gardens, on my usual stone bench. My mom says her favorite Murakami character is the Rat, I wonder what this says about her? In the shade, you can hardly tell that today's high is meant to be 100 degrees.

Happy summer solstice. Happy 하지. Happy longest day of the year.