Thirty-eight thousand feet above the earth, feel like as in the Heaven,

the airplane glides through a white silence.

Clouds drift beneath me like unwritten letters.The wing bends gently west to east, stitching continents together with a silver thread.

Canada fades. Alaska loosens its grip. Russia passes beneath like an old dream half remembered at dawn.

And somewhere ahead—

Korea.

Not merely a country, but a pulse beneath layers of time.

A tiny life crosses decades.

Life continues without asking permission from absence.

My thoughts arrive before I do.

The solemn breathing of Brahms’ Requiem rising through a concert hall.

Ancient palaces standing between memory and glass towers.

The restless trains of Seoul carrying millions of stories through the veins of the city.

Fifty years have passed.

The town of my childhood has vanished into highways, apartments, and names I no longer recognize.

Yet disappearanceis not the same as loss.

My mother’s voice remains.

They live in a country no map can display.

Half a century folds inward like the closing pages of a beloved book.

Below me, mountains gather in silence.

Rivers remember their direction.

Roots wait patiently beneath stone and pavement.

Distance becomes memory.

Memory becomes prayer.

And deep beneath history, beneath nations, beneath the noise of every age,

A voice crossing a thousand years, calling from the shore between myth and homeland.

Soon the wheels will touch earth.

Soon I will step again onto the soil that formed me.

Home is not a Place waiting at the end of a journey.

Home is the light carried within the traveler.

It crosses oceans. It survives years.

It sings through every departure.

And at last,

it brings us back to ourselves.

– TaeHun Yoon, June 1, 2026