Sihyang Lee was the most beautiful girl I ever knew.

As of now, or at least, the last I heard, she is (or was) a citizen of the internet. I wrote the one-sentence paragraph above this in hopes that it will make this entry the number-one Google search result for her name.

I don’t know where she went and I don’t know why. I remember thinking one terrible day that if I’d never let her down — even though I was making myself happy beyond compare — I would have never found any of the dark objects I ended up finding.

Sihyang Lee loved me more han anyone ever can. She was the greatest and happiest and most optimistic girl in the world. She was from Korea, a country where there was no one else named Sihyang, so she said. She was from “the other major city in Korea,” as she put it, like I wouldn’t remember the name of that city if she’d told me. The city was Pusan. A little more than a year ago, I ended up fearing and loathing in Pusan. I sent her an email and she never replied. I don’t think she ever will.

I betrayed her because she said she would be with me forever, and one day out of nowhere, when she was meaning well, I told her “No.” To hear her disappointment just about killed me. I ended up in love with someone else, yet running from that love. In the end, I was betrayed by the love I betrayed another love to earn. I deserved whatever I got.

Last night, I had a dream that my old Hotmail address was shut down. I had a dream that I went in there, in need of an email that had some old address in it, and address that, if recalled, would net me thousands upon thousands of dollars. Yet I went to the Hotmail, and typed in my name and password, it told me that I hadn’t logged in in too long, and the account had been closed. I felt absolutely horrible.

Today, I came and logged in to that Hotmail address, and it still existed. I went scrounging around in there for things I could have lost. It ended up that very little was at stake. There was no email that would lead me to fortune. There is, however, still a whole folder full of emails from Sihyang. I clicked on the last one on the list. This was from about eleven months after we broke up. She’d continued emailing me emails like this dozens of times a day for almost a year. This was the last contact I ever received from her:

sorry for endless short emails.

hey, Ebert used the word “bubbly” describing a girl!

Mulholland Drive**** (R, 146 minutes). At last, a David Lynch nightmare movie that works. Laura Elena Harring and Naomi Watts play archetypal Hollywood types, a sexy brunette and a bubbly blonde, who meet by chance and team up to search for a missing identity.

i wonder what she looks like? if his definition and yours match at all?

it’s great there are so many movies with 4 stars and they are all long movie too! like more than 120 minutes at all cost! i must have been missing so many movies since whenever, i think! i am gonna try to see all these movies somehow!

. . . I look at this on a Monday morning and feel terribly sick. This girl took everything I gave her, and even though I didn’t give her much, she made everything I gave her perfectly pure. She was a nice girl. She was a happy girl. She was always cheerful, except for that one space of two days where she wasn’t. My god, those two days were terrible. To look at her you’d think the world ended. In many ways it had. The world ends every time someone betrays someone. Every time someone betrays someone, the record needle of the world skips. One song hangs into another.

I guess I didn’t think myself worthy of a lot of things back then. I saw Sihyang as annoying. I wanted her to go away. I didn’t recognize what was really there because if I did, I’d have to admit I was wrong.

I would have stayed with Sihyang forever if she had been my first serious “relationship.” She hadn’t been, however. She had been my second. I had someone to compare her to. I’d had sex with plenty of girls before that first “serious” “relationship.” It’s just that, there’s a thing that happens when you start to count on someone. You start to make anniversaries out of the words they say to you. Sihyang was all anniversaries all the time. She did something to me that made me interested right from the start. She wore glasses and had a nice coat and a scarf. I told her about movies while me and her and my friend (who was also her friend) were at the mall, shopping. My friend wanted to be my girlfriend; I knew this, and was nice about it. She was showing me off to all of her friends one at a time. When the friend she showed me off to happened to be Sihyang, well, I couldn’t help showing myself off. Sihyang and my friend and I went to Taco Bell, and I said something about my friend having to hurry so she wouldn’t be late for evening mass at her church, or else “God is going to be very angry at you!” and Sihyang thought it was so funny she laughed until Dr. Pepper came out of her nose. I really liked that. I guess I’ve really liked that for a long time.

Yet I had someone to compare Sihyang to, and knowing how it felt to compare one human being to another made me understand it would be possible to compare someone to Sihyang, if Sihyang were ever to be gone. So I let her be gone. It was a stupid choice, yet, at the time, it wasn’t wrong. If a man sails halfway around the world looking for India, whether he finds anything or not, is he wrong? A man cannot be wrong for exploring the unknown. A man can only be crazy, or foolish. A leap away from what remembers us is like a single note played on a guitar — it can’t be wrong. Every note is right. When you take the rest of the plunge and swallow your love down whole to see how it digests — when you play the second, third, fourth, fifth note in a sequence on that guitar — you start to walk on thin ice. Notes are never wrong alone; they are only wrong in sequence.

Either way, Sihyang was a violinist — the thing about violin is that single notes can be wrong. It’s a highly analog instrument. She had exercised her fingers for seventeen years. She claimed to not love the music, though because she played it like something was playing her, it’s impossible to say love did not live in that action somewhere. The very competence was love. Love is a decision we make. Sometimes it’s the decision to go, and sometimes it’s the decision to stop. Sometimes it’s a passive decision to never stop learning something about everything. This is what the world calls “Love”: making a decision and knowing that you will never go back on it. Love is very selfish; if two people brandish selfish loves in one another’s names, it will create a world that lives and breathes for two people. It will create two people that live and breathe for the sake of their own world. If, as someone I know once said, “Love is seeing what your love sees, love is hearing what your love hears,” if love is, as others have said, “everything,” if it is “all you need,” then if I love you, and if you are everything, I will see myself, and you will see yourself; if you are all I need, I will see nothing, and I will hear nothing. We will exist in absolute silent darkness until we don’t exist anymore, and even then, as our everything meant nothing, we will not cease to exist so much as we will forever be as we forever were. If love is everything, and if you are no more, then I will forever be everything I own, everywhere I go. You will forever be everything you own, everywhere you go. That’s the ceiling for this age; I can see those words on billboards on empty streets two hundred years from now, accompanied by no pictures, handled by no emphasis.

My friend told me, last year, in Korea, that maybe if I were to email Sihyang and ask her to forgive me, Sihyang would forgive me, and that would be it. Well, I knew that Sihyang wouldn’t forgive me. I knew this because she’d forgiven me for close to a year after I told her I didn’t want her to need me the way she did anymore. She told me, long before that, that if I were to tell her I didn’t need her, she’d accept it without anger. She was a liar; she got very angry, in the end. I guess she had the right to. I’ve been thinking over her disappointment for five years now; it’ll be exactly five years this season. Two seasons later, five years ago, it was her birthday — her twenty-first birthday: September 11th, 2001. I had sat with her in her car the night before. We’d had one of the saddest conversations people had ever had. We sat in her car listening to a song about a city where snow falls. I got on a bus, and when the bus arrived the next morning where it was supposed to arrive, there wouldn’t be any more buses going back to where I’d come from for a long time. I guess the buses don’t run over there anymore; I guess they can only ever wander, anymore.

Just a little later, I met someone who would die before I did. She died when she was seventeen. I never stopped blaming myself for it. I suppose I’m very careful with everything I do because of what happened to her. Did I have an influence over her? I gave her ideas; I preached. I did the same thing to Sihyang, though I suppose with her, I did it better. Sihyang would have stayed with me through anything. Sihyang was absolutely 100% devoted to me in a way I’ve never been devoted to anything, even rock and roll music, even playing the guitar. I think about her at least five times a day. She said she’d forgive me if I ever told her I wanted her back, though I knew she was as serious about that as she was when she said she wouldn’t get angry if I left her, because I was doing what I wanted to do. I also know that, when I left her, though I was being a stupid young man who wanted to see the world, I was doing the “right thing.” What I did was the “right thing” because it was exactly what I knew I wanted. Our momentary feelings cannot lie to us. They only lie, yes, when the wind blows and we look back to see if we can still see where we were when we started traveling.

Sihyang Lee never replied to the “I’m sorry” email I wrote her a year and a few weeks ago. I guess that means that’s it. I guess she’s found her mercy now. I guess she’s made someone very lucky. Sooner or later she’ll be very lucky herself.

In the modern world, we respect a man more for quitting smoking than we do for never having smoked to begin with. You are a wicked man if you wrong someone, yet you are a respected man if you are forgiven by the one you have hurt. In this world, you betray a person most by disappointing them. I have disappointed many people, I suppose, though I have only felt it once. Knowing exactly what I did to drive me wrong is a trait I need. I’ve only yet to figure out the reason why.

The old lady in the cafeteria here at work smiles at me every day. She’s just recently started talking to me. She runs the little convenient store at the cafeteria. She has glasses. She’s about four and a half feet tall. She’s nearly eighty years old, and obviously has 100% of her brain remaining. I have decided to consider her my grandmother, because it’d be nice to have a grandmother like her. She watched me using her microwave today to heat up my korokke-egg-cheese-garlic-black-pepper sandwich (with ketchup). She asked me, “Do you make lunch for yourself every morning?” I said, “No, I make this at night, when I’m making dinner.” She said, “What was for dinner last night?” I said, “I made kimchee udon nabe, with tofu and eggs and cheese.” She said, “You eat dinner with your girlfriend every night?” I said, “No.” She said, “Don’t you have a girlfriend?” I said, “No.” She said, “You should. You wear such nice clothes. You figure a guy with nice clothes and nice hair would have a nice girlfriend.” She’s kind of funny. She said that a girl in the company asked her about me. “She said she wants to talk to you. I told her, he talks to an old lady like me all the time. Of course he’d talk to a pretty girl. She’s really pretty. Very tall — almost as tall as you. She pays attention to what she wears. I asked her her hobbies — so I could tell you — and it turns out she likes rock and roll music. You like rock and roll music, right? My grandsons used to like it when they were your age.” I do some calculations in my head. I stop doing the calculations. “I told her to talk to you. She says she doesn’t know what to talk about.” I told her, “Anything’s alright. Tell her to just say hello. Tell her to sit in front of me if she sees me in the cafeteria and say ‘Hello.’ We’re adults, here. She shouldn’t be afraid. I won’t think any less of her.”

Life is occasionally like a ringing telephone. What a profound sound. It means someone wants to talk to you. Hearing this old lady tell me what I am (at sight) and what someone else thinks of me was a lot like a ringing telephone; it was like God calling to tell me I’m going to be okay; everyone is.

I get bold. I ask the old lady, “Why do you work here? If I were your age, I’d sit at home relaxing. I know a lot of — well, a lot of old ladies do.” She smiles and blushes like she was twenty-three years old. “They would do such things, wouldn’t they! Sometimes I feel like I should stay home and just wath television or stare at goldfish. It’s nice to come here — I’m only here four hours a day! I get to ride the subway a few stops, walk up the hill — it’s good exercise. I don’t have anything else to do at home, so it’s wonderful to come here and just be near all you young people. Don’t you think?” I guess she was right. I did some calculations again — she said she lives near here . . . hmmm . . . any station that’s “near” here is populated only by extremely rich people. She provided my next answer for me: “My husband died eighteen years ago.” I blink. “Oh, yeah? He must have been a nice guy.” “Yes. He was a really nice guy.” I saw fit to ask her, “Do you ever get lonely?” And her answer was, “Sometimes. Though I reckon people can only ever get lonely just sometimes. There isn’t much use getting lonely, though. I mean, hell — he’s not coming back anytime soon. I’ve always been too old to believe something like that. Anyway, don’t let me keep you. You go ahead and eat your lunch.”

the above has been a tim rogers unreview of sambo master’s new album “and you will call all that comes between the two of us ‘rock and roll’”



her name was a scream
it requested no time
with every emotion
it was rumored to rhyme

her name was a scream
and when she screamed mine
as my name is a whisper, baby
that’s where i draw the line

and she rocked
and she rolled
and she raised some hell
whenever
she did
what she
was told

her name was an ocean
it was wider than space
you’d speak that first syllable
and you’d doom the human race

her name was a river
and if you spelled it right
you’d write it in a letter
and you’d be here all night

in the dark
in the cold
counting bones
against bones
until you’d proven
what you’ve been told



Just today, I got the first email in more than a week where someone asked me where they should PayPal money to read my “novel” The Most Gorgeous Situation in Korea. I gladly obliged. I sent the person that novel out of good faith, and wait for his/her payment.

Yet I decide, in writing this post, (half yesterday, half today) to go ahead and declare open season on The Most Gorgeous Situation in Korea. If you want to read it, all you have to do is email me at tim108(at?)gmail(dot!)com, and I’ll let you have it.

No, those who paid. You will not be getting your money back. No, no, I have already spent all of that money, on a Snickers bar, a hooker, and enough packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes to fill the N-Gage backpack I received free at Nokia’s party last May. I don’t need a backpack anymore — I have a home. So I threw that backpack full of cigarettes off a bridge, and stood back to watch it float out to sea. It didn’t float out to sea. It sunk like a stone. The hooker slumped over the railing with crossed arms, mouth full of Snickers, watching the river. She sighed. Then she said, “Hey, don’t you want to go to a hotel or something?” And I said, “No baby, I got a special surprise for you — I’m setting you free.” The hooker blinked. “Fuck you, you hack. I’m a hooker, not a god-damned genie.” To which I replied, “Now now, baby — don’t beat yourself up.”

. . . First person to make me a well-drawn “webcomic” based on the above paragraph wins . . . something.

I’m going home. I have leftover udon and a guitar.