Letter to my Dear Friend Sun Hee

My Dear Friend Sun Hee,

I am so sorry that I haven't commented on your writing piece yet...I did leave a comment and plan to revisit it before the end of the month. Danny is out with friends tonight so it has given me some time to read your writings. You are an exquisite writer. What makes you so amazing is that you are poetic without trying. It's like, there's a certain space that is lost in translation but wouldn't be poetry without it.

It makes me sad to think of our distance...you know, we are moving to Boston in a few months. I am sorry that it's been so long since we've seen each other or been in touch. No matter what, I will make sure to make a trip up to see you. You're closer to me in my heart like a sister than a friend, it is hard to describe but I know you understand. What is amazing is that we both love words, both love to write, but never really knew. It was like an undiscovered secret we each hid. In a way, I think it's almost more stunning - to grow a friendship through writing in a way that literally living next to each other could never do. You were and are a cherished friend of mine, but it's really through your writing that I love you even more.

I really understand you, your depth and your dreams, your pain and all the things in between that can't be explained in paper dimensions. You are a lovely, lovely mother. I can tell that this is a part of your constant, unmoving center that both lifts you and breaks you. I feel the exact same way so many times. Part of it, a big part of it, is because we look at ourselves everyday and we think about our own mothers, our lives, our mistakes, our pain, our triumphs - and then we look at our daughters, our children, and don't know what script their life will follow. We want to write it for them; only they own the pen of their own souls. We can only urge them to write truth and love. Out of our own fear - fears buried in our past and fears buried in their future - we try to write upon them our own story, erasing those painful, shameful parts of ourselves and then scrambling to replace them with better words of a better life.

What I, and I think, we, have such a hard time realizing, remembering, and embracing is that it is only because of our story that they can write their own. We cannot be more than who we are, we can only live up to who we are; we are miles of paper space still unwritten; every word a beginning, but words do not erase words. We simply are who we are and nothing more. It will be from our beautifully painful self-acceptance that our children will learn to do the same, tears and pain and love and joy - these inevitably are paragraphs of their life, of their own unwritten story. Theirs are words of a future that we can teach but can never write or live for them. Just as we write our own souls, so must they.

You inspire me and I am so happy to be your long-lost adopted Korean sister.

I love you,

Stacey