I remember the person who arranged lives—
yes, the matchmaker with her careful phrases,
her practiced kindness, her small, shining lies—
and I remember how I stood there, listening,
knowing the life he offered was not the one breathing in me.

And I tell you—
there was a woman there too,
full with child, heavy with something unnamed—

I do not turn away from her now,
I do not say she was another—

She was myself.

I was carrying—O yes—
carrying something I could not yet speak,
a life stirring in darkness,
a word not yet ready for the mouth,
a self not yet willing to be born.

Do you know this weight?
Do you know the trembling of what asks to live through you?

Between his smile and my silence,
between the given life and the hidden one,
something broke—
not loudly, not for others to hear,
but inwardly,
like the first crack in a shell.

And after that I was set apart—
not by chains, no—
but by a strange distance:

as if I were placed behind glass,
a living body turned specimen,
a breathing thing without touch.

The world lost its scent for me,
lost its color,
lost its warm nearness—

and I wandered in it
as one already half-absent.

Yet I say to you—
even in that distance,
even in that thinning of the self,
something remained,
something watched,
something waited.

And the cliff came—
not in some far wilderness,
but in the bright, restless streets,
in the trembling lights and human tide,
where faces pass like waves
and no one is still long enough to be known.

There I saw myself—
and was startled.

I reached out—
yes, I reached out with both hands,
not knowing whether I sought the world
or begged it to hold me—

and I found only air.

And then—
I did not leap—
no, I yielded.

I gave myself to the falling.

O the falling!
slow, wide, inevitable—
not terror, but release,
not ending, but loosening—

as if all that I had held together
had finally agreed to let go.

And hear me—
it was there, in the descent,
that I first felt the edge of freedom.

Not the freedom of certainty,
not the freedom of having arrived—

but the raw, breathing freedom
of being no longer bound to what was never mine.

And the woman—
the one I feared, the one I carried—
she did not vanish.

She opened.

She became the doorway.

For I see now—
what we bear in darkness
waits not for safety,
but for surrender.

And I, who thought the fall was loss,
begin to know it otherwise:

a passage,
a breaking open,
a birth through descent—

Yes, I say it—
I fall, and in falling, I become.

— TaeHun Yoon, 3/24/1996 & now