on heartbreak.

in a recent up-until-4am conversation (one of those when you talk about anything at all because your workday filter has completely run awry and you’re just saying whatever reminiscence is running across your mind, as your lips, with a will of their own, proceed to describe the nonfiction movie in your head to whomever you’re talking to) my flatmate sokky and i got to swapping stories about family history.  the stories went from proper hilarity to downright unimaginable.  given that he’s a funny guy anyway, the stories are always pretty entertaining.  yet there was one that no matter how you were to tell it, would still have the same impact in my memory.  

during the war between north and south korea, a woman, in the midst of the conflict, became separated from her husband.  he was captured in seoul by the communists while she was safe with their son, later to be sokky’s father.  it was a turbulent time, brother pitted against brother, families physically and in all other ways torn apart, haunted with the realization that the image of the last time they saw their father, mother, brother, sister, child, will be the closest they will ever get to seeing them again.  this was the world that separated the man and the woman in korea: a whole universe of chaos where no hope is guaranteed.

i’m not completely certain what phantoms are awakened whenever love is threatened, but i assure you, such phantoms wake.  they inspire, they strengthen, they mobilize.  and so the woman refused to resign herself to loss.  she journeyed through the country, from one prisoner-of-war camp to another looking for her husband, in case there was a mistake and he ended up with the POWs instead of at the hands of the communists.  she would walk through each camp calling out his name, hoping he would answer at her voice.  just imagine how her heart would beat when a man of the same name would reply and how her heart would stop whenever she saw that he was not the man she sought.  imagine this woman, in this universe of chaos where no hope is guaranteed, calling, calling, calling for his name.  

she never found him.

as sokky told this story, i noticed that his focus was not on the grief of his grandmother’s experience, but at the courage that carried her through it.  it led me to reflect on my own recent brush with love had and lost. now, i don’t dare compare my limited exposure to life to that of this astonishing woman’s history, but it provoked the question of whether or not it is fair to strive for love that wakens phantoms and endures turbulence, even out of context.  what i mean is, i’m fortunate enough to live away from the suffering that comes with war.  that said, is it fair to ask for love that could weather that kind of storm without the storm itself?  not in a hundred years will i ever feel as this woman felt or know the courage she knew, but i would like to live the love she lived.  to have love exist without hope guaranteed because heartbreak, after all, is still part of love.