Your Future Self Is a Stranger
by Kat Lewis
Lynne Harlow, Second Harmony, acrylic on paper, 30 x 40 inches, 2021. Courtesy of the artist.
YOUR FUTURE SELF
IS A STRANGER
KAT LEWIS / MARCH 2021 / ISSUE 6
When I was twenty-three, I promised my best friend I would carry her child. The year after we graduated from college, doctors needed to do a hysterectomy to save her life—a surgery she was considering forgoing. “If I can’t be a mother, I should just die,” Bora had told me in the black of our San Francisco apartment as we watched Where the Wild Things Are. We sat on our secondhand sofa, sharing my childhood blanket, and I tried to imagine life without her. Something cold licked my soul. On the screen, as Max woke to sunlight on Carol’s back, I took her hand in mine, told her I would bear her children when she was ready.
That was six years ago. We haven’t talked about it since.
*
Bora asked me to be her maid of honor over bingsu in Apgujeong. She had just stepped off her flight from San Francisco to visit her grandmother in Gangnam, and I made one of my rare trips across the river to see her for the first time in a year.
Bora sat across from me in a dessert cafe with two bowls of pat and subak bingsu sweating between us. She was wearing the earrings I had bought her for a birthday in college, earrings I knew she actually disliked and only wore for my benefit. Every so often, she flipped a curtain of black hair over her shoulder to let the Instagrammable cafe light glitter along the gilded moon and stars that dropped from her ears in intricate chains. Hair flipping wasn’t a typical habit of hers; she wanted to make sure I saw the earrings.
“So, what do you say?” she asked, drizzling more condensed milk onto the patbingsu.
“That’s a big ask,” I said. Marriage. Such a capital A adult thing. I couldn’t imagine committing to anyone or anything like that. “When’s the wedding? I don’t know if I’ll be able to get off work.”
“November.” She reached across the table with a napkin and wiped something from the corner of my mouth. “C’mon, Mia. It’s been three years. Aren’t you tired of that?” She nodded to a group of girls in middle school uniforms who were openly gawking at me.
“It’s a Black person!” they said loudly, probably assuming I didn’t understand Korean. One of them took out her phone to take a picture of me.
I waved to them and said, “Annyeonghaseyo?”
They all gasped, hid their faces, and turned their backs to us.
“Exactly,” I said. “It’s been three years. I’m used to it.” Three years ago, I started teaching English at a hagwon in Mapo, and it was true. I was used to being stared at, to going weeks at a time without seeing another Black person. My American friends and I even played punch-buggy-no-punch-back every time we saw another foreigner. But my contract was up soon, and I had been thinking about going back to the US, going back to school to study literature or translation or something else that would make me spectacularly unemployable in the eyes of my MD PhD parents.
Bora held my gaze, and I tried my best not to look away—eye contact always felt like staring into the sun.
“Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I’m ready to move back. And I’ll be your maid of honor.”
Bora gave me a gummy smile that made her meticulously contoured face charmingly dorky.
*
Back in San Francisco, I spent every second of my free time helping Bora plan her wedding and bachelorette party. The first week of November, we drove through redwood and palm tree lined roads up to Sonoma to stay at a ranch for her vineyard wedding.
Our first day in Sonoma, Bora and I filed into a party bus with our college friends for her bachelorette party—a wine tour of Sonoma’s less pretentious vineyards. The second stop on the list had a farm theme with picnic tables surrounding the farmhouse tasting room. We opened bottles at one of the tables. Bora spilled splatters of rosé on the splintered wood with sloppy pours into all our glasses. She tapped her own glass with a cheese knife and said, “I am so happy to be here with you all. Oh my god, I love you guys so much. Like jjinja saranghae.” She was glowing as she spoke; attention was her sustenance. Her narcissism had always fascinated me. It was as if observing her fondness for herself could instill in me a fondness for my own self. Bora looked at me in a disturbingly meaningful way and said, “I want to give a shout out to someone special.”
My face went hot. I busied myself with dabbing up the spilt wine. A heartfelt, maid-of-honor thank you was coming, but I always got embarrassed when someone expressed gratitude to me.
My parents and I didn’t even express gratitude to each other.
Bora raised her glass to me. “None of this would be possible without you. To Mia.”
“To Mia,” they all said.
I took a pull from my glass to get this unbearable kindness over with, but Bora added, “To the mother of my child.”
I choked on the wine. The dry acid of rosé burned up my nose.
All our friends clapped and beamed at me as if this information were common knowledge. It never occurred to me that Bora would tell anyone about that day because I had never told anyone.
I excused myself to the bathroom and walked up the porch steps into the farmhouse, wine still searing its way through my nose. In the rustic restroom, I splashed water on my face, like that could stop my mind from going back to the only memory it could: us watching Max sail his little boat through a storm as we talked about what was to become of her body, her future. I had meant what I said, but back then at twenty-three, I felt so removed from the promise it was like I was promising to ask someone else for a favor. Who was your future self if not a stranger?
I looked into the mirror and saw past the round, tortoiseshell glasses that gave me more personality than I had, past the dark circles stamped under my eyes, past the lace front wig that years of internalized racism told me to put my self-worth into. Yes, in this vineyard mirror, I saw myself for what I was: a high-functioning alcoholic, a low-functioning academic, a moron with no future plans for herself.
The whole move to Korea was a means to avoid any mature decision making about my life. Now, Bora was demanding that I make the most serious decision—a nine-month commitment with consequences I would see for the rest of my life. I was applying to grad school now, another expensive, convoluted way to push off a meaningful start to this life—whatever my life was supposed to be.
But what would doing a PhD program while pregnant even look like? The realization of my truth came to me: I wanted to go back to school because academia created the perfect environment for me to stay in bed past eleven, to open wine bottles at odd hours, and to be mentally engaged enough for my drinking to not become a serious, less charming habit. So me? A mother? The thought of a hand no bigger than a strawberry reaching out to me made my skin crawl. But I wouldn’t be the mother, would I? No, it would be Bora. I would just be a vessel, a necessary, tedious comma in the sentence of Bora’s life. All those years ago, I made that promise to keep her alive. Why did I want to go back on it now?
I patted my face dry and went out the back door of the farmhouse towards the goat petting zoo and scenic view of sprawling vines. I leaned against the wooden fence before the rows and rows of grapevines and took in the deep smell of manure, of sun-hot goat fur, of crisp, changing leaves. No, I couldn’t be pregnant. Pregnancy would make me face my fears, and I was very much in love with my own fright, my own failure to thrive as Ma liked to put it.
Uneven footsteps crunched on the dirt path. Bora, in her puffy vest and Prada riding boots, walked towards me with a sway to her gait. She stopped ten feet away and tapped something on her phone. Drums rolled out from the tinny speaker, and Bora pantomimed the Where the Wild Things Are scene that was layered over the music. “You are now the king,” she mouthed at me with reverence. “And you will be a truly great king.”
I rolled my eyes and said, “Bora, stop.” But she went through the motions of the scene.
“Seriously. Hajima.”
As the actors in the background of the music chanted king, king, king, she pointed at me and said,
“Hey, King, what’s your first order of business?”
The drums came to an abrupt stop, and I found myself yelling back to her, “Let the wild rumpus start!”
Her foot pawed at the ground like a bull’s.
“No, don’t you dare.”
She charged at me and chased me along the rolling hill of vines through the canopied wild garden to the edge of the fountained pond where she tackled me to the ground. Wet dirt knocked the wind out of me. I pushed her off of me and fell back, letting my turtleneck sop up grass stains and muck. “You’re an annoying drunk, you know that?” A sting heated up my elbow. I rolled my sleeve back to see I had scraped the skin.
She looked at the cut. “Ottokae. You’re hurt,” she said. “Don’t worry. I have something for this.” She reached into her vest pocket and dug around before whipping out a finger heart with her forefingers pressed together. “There. All better, right?”
I pushed her again, and she flopped back onto the ground, her green circle contact eyes staring up at the autumn burnt willow leaves hanging heavy above us.
“I’m sorry I sprung that on you. I know we haven’t talked about it since.” She looked at me from the side, her eyes glazed with alcohol and desperation. “Is it scary for you?”
I nodded, watching the branches sway in the breeze, their orange leaves falling towards us like a burst of fireworks. “Why’d you bring it up now?”
“It’s been six years since I froze my eggs. We have to use them soon. And if you don’t want to, we need time to find someone else.” She focused hard on the wind rippling through the leaves above. I did the same. Today was inevitable, but the way she had brought it up was her insurance, a public guarantee to make me think long and hard about my answer. But I understood. She was just as trapped by her circumstances as I was. Desperation made everyone gnaw away at what mattered most.
The thicket of leaves shuddered above. We stayed like this for some time, damp fabric making my back and ass cold enough to chatter my teeth. My heart tutted somewhere in my chest, urging me to tell her I couldn’t be what she wanted me to be, what she needed me to be. Just when I steeled myself to say it, a single leaf, the color of a Bartlett pear, separated from its stringy branch. It spun through the air, sinking lower and lower until it floated to a stop, a perfect perch, on the tip of Bora’s nose. I couldn’t tell if it was the kismet of its timing, its landing, or the way Bora’s cheeks puffed up when she tried—and failed—to blow it off her face, but this moment, here at this vineyard, at her bachelorette party, at the precipice of the rest of our lives unraveled me. How unfair it was that the universe took from her the one thing she wanted and left me with it, with something I never wanted, never considered for myself because to consider for yourself, for your future, required a kind of self-love, a kind of self-kindness I always thought impossible.
Maybe if I could give her the gift of happiness, I could find it for myself one day.
Bora huffed air up towards her nose, her breath only tickling the edge of the leaf. I leaned over, elbow sinking into mud and whisked the leaf off her face with a single, gentle puff.
Kat Lewis graduated from Johns Hopkins University, where she held the Saul Zaentz Innovation Fund Fellowship. In 2018, she received a Fulbright Creative Arts grant in South Korea. Her work has appeared in The Cincinnati Review, PANK Magazine, and The Rumpus. She is currently an MFA student at the University of South Florida.
Lynne Harlow is a reductive artist who has exhibited her work internationally for the past 20 years. Gallery exhibitions include shows at MINUS SPACE, Brooklyn, NY and Liliana Bloch Gallery, Dallas, TX. Museum exhibitions include the 2013 deCordova Biennial at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, MA, as well as shows at MoMA PS1 (NY, NY); Brattleboro Museum (Brattleboro, VT); and Instituto de Artes Gráficas de Oaxaca (Oaxaca, Mexico). Her work has been reviewed by Artforum and The New York Times, among others. She is a 2020 grantee of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2011 she was awarded the McColl Johnson Fellowship of the Rhode Island Foundation, and in 2002 she was a visiting artist in residence at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, TX. Harlow’s work is included in public collections, such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA, and The RISD Museum of Art.