I came to New York with nothing but a camera.

I grew up here. I’m here now so when I disappear for another 10 years I will have all the little pieces to remember them by.

But it’s been so long that I don’t even know the place anymore. It’s not a part of me any more. The ghost hand, the grafted soul. Time and the 9-5 have blotted most of it away.

It’s Thursday. I’m standing in midtown after morning rush hour and it’s 20 degrees colder than I’m used to. More than just the January wind because, after all, everyone laughs and says I’m just in time for the fantastic weather.

The streets are no less crowded than I ever remember them. I notice their crooked noses, their razor-sharp formality, the lines in their faces that says they’re late for a meeting. The iPhones, the distracted air, the shiny shoes, the lack of color. See the whites of their eyes a second before you dodge shoulders at the curb.

The city vibrates. From desperate sidewalk salesmen to the mid-morning drugstore run, a taxi jam at the intersection, the thunder of delivery trucks. Or maybe it’s the gigantic rotating pillar that keeps Manhattan afloat. Everyone has a purpose, everyone is headed somewhere.

Except me. It marks me a stranger as keenly as the red sash around my neck.

I try to catch what I see in my hands, but they’re too quick. As clumsy as I feel standing 20 years too late on the corner, I’m fumbling to chase them with my little metal box. Wait! Wait, you’re pretty! I don’t say that out load (that’s weird), but I watch with but my two glass eyes, thinking they won’t notice me.

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Feel the air breathe quickness in your blood and break summer’s languid heat. The leaves rattle in the bony trees, papery skin softly sighing, “Have you come to stay?” Exquisite, solemn fall, the somber joy of darkness. Life’s last hurrah.

The crows are calling from above, calling for you, peppering the forest smoke with their impudent cry. One last roost, one last laugh before flying from the winter snow.

Autumn is memory. You gave it up a lifetime away and each year you regret the loss of change. The world’s cycle, completion of life and death – is it worth the comforts you got in return?

They’ll steady their ships for six months of dark, celebrating with smoke and spice, but you’ll shade the light from your eyes and look with love to the east.

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She reminds me of myself at that age: naive, disguising her insecurities with bravado. She’s tied her armor on with twine and tape, a shell so close to blowing away with the slightest wind. Her greatest fear lies in the world not accepting her for what she is, unsure of who she wants to be.

I’ll whisper that it will be OK, that after failure and hardship, loss and rejection, she’ll become someone she’s proud to know.

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I am the ghost, she said, her voice as hollow as the halls around her.

She rubbed one cold hand across her face, redolent of the leaves outside that danced on the wind once more before their earthbound rot. Her skin was so pale, thirsting for sun, an alabaster not yet willing to part from warmth and light.

I knew there would be nothing left of her when the world awoke.

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In Kiev, you lose the rules.

Rule one: Learn to stare.

Rule two: Learn to smoke.

Where does this fit into the American mind? In Ukraine I was ready to go home. In a dizzying world where nothing makes sense, there are no helping hands and the cheat sheets are 6,000 miles away.

Rule three: Shop underground.

Rule four: Question everyone thing.

The best I could do was lift my groggy head and bite back the impulse to scream. I was already marked an outlier, scrawling strange words in my book, wheezing from the endless clouds of tobacco stink. I was the one throwing the TP in the loo, smiling at strangers a little too openly, the only woman not risking everything between hip and sole.

Rule five: Get it in writing.

Rule six: It’s not a movie.

The countdown ticked away one hryvnia at a time, our hours measured by when we would arrive in the welcome familiarty of Frankfurt am Main. One more street. One more meal. One more con to avoid.

My only defense was the Ukrainian stare, the one that proved effective in warding off one stony look at a time. It got us from the government hotel where we slept beside the gurgle and croon of a thousand horny pigeons. It didn’t save us from the sick industrial fog that bridged the city and the concrete megaplexes that striped the road in cold shadows.

We clung together in this ocean of strange, trying desperately to sync and swim. If these people are as proud of their heritage as they say, it manifests itself in ways not familiar to me.

Heart of stone. Gaze of glass. And everything, everything so far away.

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Your eyes recall the indulgent feeling of sleep, the exquisite luxury of falling into the deepest well of dreaming.

Behind the velvet wall lies the mundane you’ve always known. But every moment you’re awake, you’re straining to catch a smile, a glimpse, a word. The clamor of a hundred bright smiles and the cacophony of conversation lifts your heart and stirs a quickness in the blood.

Don’t drift away. Fight for the moment, each minute to the next.

You close your eyes at last, not wanting to miss a beat but afraid you’ll never look away.

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Everyone has a guilty pleasure, and mine is Paris.

What they say about it is true: the dog poo, the price, the tourists. The Parisians. But there is so much to love about this old city that I find myself secretly smiling behind my hands when people criticize this beautiful place.

But I waited a long time, perhaps too long, to be there with my life love. I thought that it had been a terrible tragedy that I had allowed myself to walk alone along the Seine and pass so many sweet couples sharing the scenery with a bottle of wine. There is no shame in proclaiming your love in Paris. The emotion is so thick, you can feel it. It made me cross my arms and realize all I’d left behind at home.

Despite Paris’ cosmopolitan aura, I’ve never seen the rich side of the city. Walk around the corner a few times and find yourself in a more comfortable environment… This is where all stories begin. From wet-lipped concierges and coffin-sized lifts, hotels that don’t care to impress a soul, these are the places that spark the imagination. This is where we stayed.

In our room at the Plat d’Etain, there are no sweeping views, little hospitality and it’s as romantic as your local Office Max. But I sat in that room one afternoon simply listening to the sounds of the city filter in the window. Across the narrow twist of street was a pragmatic shoe store and the ubiquitous Parisian apartments that look positively petite until you think about what it costs to climb 6 stories with an armload of groceries.

I leaned over the sill and looked up, down, trying to fathom what kind of people that would live in such austere old buildings with gorgeous windows. They weren’t upscale by any means, but the age of these structures and their bohemian beauty are attractive to born-and-bred Americans. It’s lovely and inspiring and the patina lends an air of authenticity, not shabbiness.

The woman in the apartment across the way had hung her laundry out to dry. The sun slowly crawled around the corner of our hotel, casting an iconic shadow of our stovepiped roof to their facade. I thought about the likelihood of these clothes drying in the cold October air, and thought about the kind of hands who would hang her unmentionables in the window for all travelers to see. Are they young hands or wrinkled ones, aged beyond their time?

The next day they had not moved but to sway in the breeze; her life was clearly more fulfilling than mine was proving to be. Me, the watcher of laundry.

The lesson was clear as day: Leave your laundry behind, for there is life to be had.

Paris is a wise soul, ancient, stately and proud of its unmatched character. There’s absolutely no wonder how so many people fall in love with this city’s bones. Had I not experienced Paris already with three different kinds of love, I could still begin to understand that there are many flavors of passion in the world: love that we feel towards one another, our families, our friends, and for places and things that we do.

Leave your laundry behind, for there is love to be had.

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One day I will live another dream.

One day, when the stars align and every stone has been set just right, perhaps I could take that leap of faith.

There is the conundrum: the older you are, the more things you promise to do. We are given a fixed number of mornings to open our eyes and yet awareness continually breeds intent.

It’s exponential. It’s backwards.

Know good people. Work close to your heart. Explore yourself. Discover your strengths. These are precious dreams that hardly every person lives to attain, and I feel gifted that I’ve found these things so close to home.

People shake their heads and say, “Don’t work too hard,” and they don’t really get why I let work become my life. I don’t expect them to understand. But I also want to be sure that when I am finally ready to go that I have something left in my life apart from this, and that I can look back and say that I took every chance I had.

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The silence of the mountains was my only hope.

After reaching the pristine valleys of the Eastern Sierras, my one goal was to experience the stillness of Nothing for a stretch.

One can sit and stare out beyond the borders of civilization and watch the town creep across in the valley, spread beyond the gritty brown lumps of houses. Farmlands stretch from end to end, range to range, melting into the rise of foothills before blooming in year-round tips of white.

Yet somehow I never found a restful moment to spare.

Between the chitter of chipmunks and the crested birds, the act of feeding oneself and preparing for the chill onslaught of night, one is always busy. And when you have a 10 AM keynote address with the oldest of trees and a 45-minute commute, it makes for a very busy day.

An evening presentation at 6 PM by the Patriarchs. 30 minutes for break, and closing ceremonies with the rising moon.

Though I was miles from the office and thinking not of a single deadlined project, there is always work to be done. There are opportunities and stories in every step of life, in every reach of this Earth. I am indebted to craft something meaningful from our time together.

These ancient souls of wood have not withstood centuries for monetary gain, ROI, or for the interest of others… but they are no less worthy than anyone else who employs my time.

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Photo by Charlie Crane, from Welcome to Pyongyang

Growing up, SAT scores and mathematics were higher on my priority list than genealogy. I knew little about my family beyond my parents’ own lives, that they were a city girl and a country boy brought together in Seoul’s most prestigious university.

Now that I am older and my extended family has begun gathering more regularly, I’m hearing stories about Korea that seem straight out of a movie. It’s hard to believe I am of their blood.

My mother recently shared a very dark story about her uncle, my grandfather’s brother. An aspiring political rebel from Seoul, he ascended to a position of power in the medical community in Pyongyang after World War II. Through the turmoil of the following decade (and a change in regime), he suddenly vanished without a trace.

This is a typical tale coming out of North Korea, but inexcusable for any country with an ounce of respect for human rights. Should we be surprised?

It’s bone-chilling knowing that if it were not for this, I’d have a bigger family.

Moreover, my mother visited him with some regularity in the years before the division was final. She could have been trapped there; I could be witnessing the DPRK first-hand now, been executed at birth, or have never been born at all.

You can sit around and mull over all the philosophical land mines (pun intended) in the “What if?” situations, but the simple fact is this: It’s real. It’s all painfully real and I’ve never been more aware that there’s a big, nasty world out there. I only have the most distant idea of what it’s like to have family stuck in the most treacherous country in the world, but this vague ghost of terror is so much more than I already want to feel.

This is how I know that no matter what opportunities there are to travel beyond that border and take photos of a lifetime, it can never happen for me.

Perhaps my parents did the right thing not scaring their little girl with stories that don’t have happy endings.

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