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and rattled past us. The light coming from each of the cars was luminous. If not for the chugging of the engine, it could have been just glowing windows racing through the dark.
    “We have to go to college.” Dahn sounded like he was making a pledge.
    I was too surprised to respond.
    “I’m going to be an artist,” he said.
    I felt like I was going to burst. The night breeze blew toward us over the field and seemed to carry our hopes with it, departing before us into some distant time. When Dahn and I parted ways that night, he handed me a paperback book of poetry. He said that he had just finished reading it and so was giving it to me. It was too dark for me to make out the title.
    “They say that when she died, she left over seventeen hundred poems stashed in a drawer,” he said. “Her first collection was published four years after her death.”
    “Who?”
    “Emily Dickinson.”
    “ E-mi-ly Di-ckin-son.” Even after sounding out the syllables, I still did not recognize the name. Dahn had always known from a young age what he wanted to do; he thought deeply about things and conducted himself differently from our peers. He read different books, owned different things, and had a different way of speaking.
    “She seemed to see things that were not of this world,” he said.
    “Not of this world?”
    “Things we can’t see. Like death … and so on.”
    It was the first time I had heard someone my age talk about death or things that were not of this world. That was probably why Dahn always seemed like he was a few years older than he really was. When I got home and flipped to the first page of the book, the first thing I saw was Dahn’s handwriting.
    I began to tread softly … Poor people shouldn’t be disturbed when they’re deep in thought.
—Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
    I liked Dahn’s handwriting. It looked scribbled, but the style was so energetic that it reminded me of the hoofbeats of a galloping horse. I stared at the quote and realized it was goodbye. I put the book in the bottom of my bag.
Because I could not stop for Death ,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality .
    When I read Dickinson’s poetry, I pictured my mother’s face. I wanted to savor the poems, so I read them slowly, going over each one five times. When I finished the book, I took my first subway ride to a large bookstore on Jongno Street, clinging to the strap the whole way to keep from swaying. The first book I spent money on in this city was The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge . With no clue as to what it was about, I selected it because it was the title Dahn had written in the book. On the subway ride back, I opened to the first page.
Here, then, is where people come to live.
    As I stared vacantly at the first sentence, a single tear fell from my eye, a tear that had refused to come even when I left home. Was I, too, one of those who had come to live? This city was not kind to me. It had tall buildings and many houses and countless people, but no one to greet me gladly or take my hand. Too many wide and narrow streets made me lose my way frequently. And I had no intention of getting to know the people of this city. I grew accustomed to not greeting people when I met them and behaved like a young exile.
    The cousin I lived with in the city served as my legal guardian until I finished high school. She got married around the time that I started college. At that point, it made sense for meto move out, but I had nowhere else to go. Even though my mother had sent me away, she did not want me to be alone. I stayed with my cousin in order to reassure my mother, who was still fighting her illness. But once she passed on, it became harder for me to stay there. My cousin’s husband was an airline pilot, which meant he was often gone on long flights to places like Paris and London, but he was not gone all the time, and I did not want to intrude. I would have