Soul of Seoul

So I flew halfway across the planet to escape my toxic family and that sorry excuse of a boyfriend I stuck around with for months.

So what, so what?

I've been stuck on this plane for close to fifteen hours, and I'm getting real sick of sitting in my seat. I've walked up and down the aisle so many times that I think the flight attendants want to deck me for blocking the aisles.

I can't help it. I'm excited and nervous all rolled into a ball of nausea at the base of my stomach.

I'll be landing in Seoul in less than one hour.

In one hour, my entire life is about to change - for the better, I hope.

I've slept fitfully on the plane, tossing and turning, and trying to practice by low-intermediate Korean by reading some magazines and light novels on my phone, looking up the words I don't know.

It entertained me for about an hour before I let myself daydream of the what if scenarios that'll happen if life tends to go according to my script.

I'd get off the plane at Incheon International Airport and head to the subway once I've figured out the machines that'll give me a metro card. I'd take the subway all the way into the heart of Seoul, and to the district where I was able to rent a place for a year, according to my working holiday visa, out in Seongdo.

And then life would go on from there and I'd live that glamorous life where my (private) social media posts can be enjoyed by the people who follow me and I can show off how happy I am.

Not.

I know I'm running away from my problems, I know that. And taking a plane halfway across the planet seemed as good of an idea as any, needing all that space between me and my family as far as it can be.

I half-expect though that my mom's hired a SWAT team or whatever to come and kidnap my ass and bring me all the way back to Montreal, where life is boring, and awful, and I don't want anything to do with it anymore.

It started when I got engaged.

I never wanted to be one of those girls who got married young, especially not with the boyfriend I'd been dating since high school. I knew I wanted to break up with Billy for a long time, months, even but I was a coward, and couldn't bring myself to do it.

So I was relieved that while I had his engagement ring on my finger and the families came together in an old-school traditional meeting like they would do back in the villages in Greece where my family's from, I found Billy cheating on me.

Yup, he was buck naked and humping into one of my younger cousins, calling her sweet names and saying all the shit he said to me, time and time again.

I wanted to grab him in a choke hold, honestly, but I'd been thinking about moving to Seoul for a while, to get away from everyone and everything, from the version of myself that I've been trying to outrun since 1997.

I like my privacy, and I love my alone time. I don't talk unless I have something to say - I'm not angry at people when I'm in a group, and I hate small talk. I have a resting bitch face that makes people think I want to set them on fire, when really I just want to go home and slip on my jammies as my internal reserves get depleted from socializing too long.

I'm introverted. It's not a character flaw, it's just the way I am.

But it hurt me, still, what Billy did.

And I sure as shit wasn't expecting my parents, my own family to be as angry with me as they were when I called off the wedding.

Like, what did they want me to do - go ahead with it? Get married to a cheating bastard?

Absolutely not.

So I quietly looked into the working holiday visa that the Government of Canada provides people within my age group, and decided to try my hand at living in Seoul for a year.

And now I'm here, a whole forty-five minutes away from restarting my life from scratch.

No one's going to know me in Seoul.

They won't know about my past, about all my personality flaws that I've been trying to work on. They won't care about my not-so-great GPA in school, and they won't care that I failed an organic chemistry 3 class.

People here won't know the shame of carrying around how my family treated me, or the shame of being cheated on when I thought I merited that much respect from my ex-boyfriend that he should have talked to me first before doing what he did.

It could have been a clean break up, and all the fallout could have been avoided.

Then again, if that had happened, I wouldn't have dragged my ass to a plane and taken this adventure in a way that I thought would fix me.

We don't need to be fixed, we just need to level up.

My greatest fear is that I'm going to fully move to Seoul, and find out that nothing has changed, that changing my scenery won't change me as a person.

And that's terrifying, more than I can say.

***

I survive the subway ride, and haul my luggage up to the fifth floor, keying in the pass code I was given and then finally stepping inside to my new apartment for the next twelve months.

I'm renting an officetel, an apartment that is already furnished with appliances so I don't have to go out an buy anything for myself other than utensils and the like, but I have a whole list of what I need, so I'm not too worried.

I kick off my shoes and walk inside my apartment, noting the warm flooring that's common here, warming up my frozen toes. I roll my luggage inside to the bedroom up the stairs, and flop down onto the bed, grinning up at the ceiling so hard that I think my face is going to get suck like that.

I let myself get accustomed to the sounds of the building around me, the padding of feet upstairs, and the calls of someone yelling down the hall.

This place is going to be home for the next twelve months.

Twelve whole months, all by myself, for the first time in my life.

I don't know when it sours, this feeling of freedom by panic now that I'm safe and sound and I survived trying to figure out Seoul's public transit system.

I glance around, and stare through the windows that practically take up the entire wall, showing me a skyline that is completely alien to me.

Couldn't we have moved down to Vermont or something for the year? Did it have to be so very far away, especially when we haven't mastered the language yet?

It burns, in my throat, the panic and regret I have for coming here without any real kind of plan.

Every single YouTube video I watched on people coming over here to teach English looked awesome and amazing. I already know that I like Korean cuisine, and honestly, the spicier the food, the better.

But it hits me hard now, that I'm alone here - that no one in this entire city, on this entire peninsula would care what happened to me if something bad happened.

That's a lot to take in.

At least back home, in Montreal, my family wanted to know that I was miserable, shoving my failed relationship with Billy in my face every chance they got.

Isn't that better compared to all of this emptiness?

I blink fast, sitting up properly and mashing my lips together so my chin doesn't wobble.

Who gets to the city of their dreams, and what K-pop dreams are made of, and starts bawling her eyes out? Who?

Apparently me. I'm that person.

Shit.