spring fog drifts slowly—
what was a mountain yesterday,
today is just mist
In the spring of 2002, I was renting a small second-floor apartment above an internet café that stayed open 24 hours.
You could hear the soft hum of computers and the occasional thud of someone losing at Counter-Strike.
Downstairs smelled like instant ramen, sweat, and pixelated ambition.
My place was nothing special—a futon on the floor, a chipped desk I found on the street, a cheap lamp that flickered when the fridge turned on.
But it was mine, and back then, that seemed like enough.
At the time, I believed I understood life.
I had routines: instant coffee in the morning, scrambled eggs if I remembered to buy them, radio turned low while I checked my email on a chunky silver laptop that wheezed like an old man.
I worked part-time at a CD rental shop—back when people still rented music.
You could browse for hours, picking albums based on cover art alone.
I liked that.
There was something democratic about it.
Everyone was just guessing.
One day, I stepped onto the balcony with damp laundry clinging to my arms, and I froze.
It wasn’t dramatic.
No thunderclap.
Just this flat, persistent realization sliding into my head like a pop-up ad I couldn’t close:
I don’t actually know anything.
In high school, I once had a philosophy teacher who wore the same beige windbreaker every day.
He told us on the first day of class that the only useful thing he could teach us was to doubt what we think we know.
Most of us ignored him—too busy memorizing Nietzsche quotes to sound profound at parties.
But one day, he drew a triangle on the blackboard and said, “You can call this a triangle. That’s a label. But what if, in your next life, this exact shape means something else—like hunger or love or god?”
We laughed at him.
But I’ve never forgotten it.
And that morning on the balcony, two decades later, the triangle came back.
Everything we think we know rests on labels.
And labels shift.
They evolve.
Sometimes overnight.
I had called myself independent.
But maybe I was just afraid of needing anyone.
I called my quiet “peace,”
but maybe it was just loneliness I’d dressed in better words.
I thought I was disciplined,
but I was just afraid of what would happen if I stopped moving.
At night, I’d take long walks with no destination.
Just the sound of vending machines whirring beside me,
the flicker of CRT monitors in dark windows,
and the distant bass of a club that only played R&B from five years ago.
Everything felt like it was in-between—
like the city itself hadn’t decided what it was yet.
And I liked it that way.
Once, I passed a girl sitting alone at a bus stop at 1 a.m.,
holding a Walkman and nodding along to a song no one else could hear.
She looked up, saw me watching her, and smiled.
Not the kind of smile that invites conversation.
The kind that says, I know you don’t know me, but we’re both real right now.
Years have passed.
The CD shop is gone.
The internet café is now a vape store.
That silver laptop gave up sometime during the Obama administration.
But every so often—folding laundry, burning rice, staring at the wall while the kettle hums—I remember how little I know.
And how freeing that actually is.
Because once you stop pretending everything means something fixed,
you get to ask better questions.
Not what is this supposed to be?
but what is this, right now?
And that’s enough.
Maybe more than enough.
life 
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