Dear Mi-sook,
This morning the city forgot itself.
For a few minutes, it was nothing but light —
a pink that dissolved everything: bridges, laws, regrets.
I stood on the roof with my old lens fogging over,
watching the Taedong mirror the sky until
I couldn’t tell which side was real.
You would have loved it — that hush before the city remembers
its orders and uniforms, before the loudspeakers wake.
There’s a kind of freedom in those minutes,
a borderless beauty that asks for no permission.
And yet it hurts to look at it —
because beauty, here, always feels like something stolen.
I tried to photograph it, of course.
But what stayed with me wasn’t the picture.
It was the silence after the shutter —
the way the light lingered, like a secret unsure whether to leave.
Sometimes I think the only true rebellion left
is to keep seeing.
To look, even when you shouldn’t.
To find color in a place that insists on grey.
If you were here,
we’d share tea on this rooftop until the sun burned the fog away.
Until the city, reluctantly, became itself again.
With quiet light,
Ji-eun
Ji-eun
Mi-sook
