"Bye — see you tomorrow!"

A goodbye passed from someone to someone else.
I knew it wasn't meant for me.

At school, I am invisible. No one speaks to me.

Then, one night, I begin to dream — and three boys are waiting for me on the abandoned mountain behind my house. They know my name. They have always known my name.

* * *

Line 2 of the Seoul Metro, running from Sinlim to Gangnam, is a great conveyor belt. I push myself on like an undersized part loaded by mistake. My mother named me Jinju — Pearl — while scaling fish at the Mokpo seafood market. When the acceptance letter from Seoul National University arrived, I thought I had become one.

Then, one morning, the phone buzzed. Your mother collapsed at the market. I ran out of the building. It was only when my colleagues asked why I was crying that I knew I was crying. The taxi to Seoul Station. Through the window, the Gangnam towers I had clung to so desperately scattered like dust — offering nothing, protecting nothing.

When she said she was sorry for not being rich — why hadn't I said I love you?

* * *

"Here, no one knows whose son I am."

My father said this once, and I have never been able to forget it. The weight of a life lived as only someone's son, only someone's father.

* * *

Following Polaris is a collection of three Korean autofiction works — a 28-chapter novella and two short stories — each one a small, late recognition of the love that was always beside you.

Always, beside you.

Content notes: childhood loneliness and suicidal ideation in a child; parental absence; the late-life recognition of an adoptive mother's love (handled with quiet literary restraint); chronic illness in a family.