Marketplace

There is a weight to the air over Incheon in the early hours - salt from the sea, the smell of tidal mud, the diesel that comes and holds awhile. Incheon is where Haneul lives, a person I am bonded to from a distance, someone whose mornings I have never stood inside but have learned the shape of anyway, from far off, in the dark when they sleep. I have been learning that shape a long time now, and something in that learning has steadied me. Not reaching toward Haneul in those hours when they cannot answer. Not impatience dressed as care. Just the fact of them, in a place I can hold in sense, breathing the same air I am tasting from far off.