There are very few writers in my life. My mother and father read, but do not write. I have no siblings who enjoy it. In my kaleidoscopic family scattered across continents, we do not share even the one thing in common.

But I do have someone. He is from the past, from before I was born. My great-grandfather was a poet. He passed away when he was 35 from tuberculosis.

Many of his poems were about life and death, and I recall my grandfather saying of his works, he would surely die sooner after reading them. “He only talks about birds. He only talks about dying, and looking up at the sky and the birds and wondering when he’s going to join them.”

It is beautiful, though, to read of beauty, whether of death or life. And it is nice to read something old and foreign, amidst the ever-variant worlds of today.

His originals: https://drive.google.com/file/d/11mo7n8I6LYgr-GHwCK3AkKm_VxehjdZ5/view?usp=share_link

My translations: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hbOzXgX6TX7xydxn4Ozt9aLQJU-H5agI/view?usp=sharing

Who I am

I’m Sarah, I’m fifteen, and I live in Manila, Philippines. I’m Korean, but was born in the States. Living there for the first seven years of my life, I only ever learned to speak English. And I used to like this feeling of being only. The same way I was an only child and only an American and only drank skim milk and only watched one movie, I spoke only English. But many of these onlys, the last one most of all, have become more disappointing and more inconvenient the more people I’ve met and the more places I’ve been. 

I still love English, though; I love its language, and music, and films. Most of all, I love its stories. It has stories about wars won and love lost, dead men and living gods, great evils and smaller goods; ones about the deepest parts of the world and the places far beyond it. It was impossible not to love from the beginning.

Why I’m starting a blog

This blog is about exploring further below the deep end and farther beyond the edge and every wonderful and equally terrible thing in between. This is me not wanting to forget little things. This is my way of counting myself lucky for finding whatever it is that makes itself meaningful.

Things (wonderful, terrible, perfectly fine, any, all) deserve to be remembered, and perhaps better than being remembered by only myself, they are meant to be shared. Any risk of thought exists in waves that fly across and between us and withers when it stills. We send thoughts into the world to take their own shape and make their own names. I share to be selfless. Not towards the people I hope to reach, but the ideas I seek to free. I have started this blog to put my eye up to the window of the world, and write what I see.