It was a house with crooked walls.
We used to laugh, saying we slept each night with our wills beside us,
never knowing when it might collapse.
In those days, when redevelopment was still a distant dream,
the river of my childhood and youth rushed through that place in torrents.
That house of mud bricks—even through its prison-like windows,
the sunlight that barged in without restraint was my very lifeblood.
Everything else was piled away in my old drawer.
Our nest was neither grand nor prosperous, yet it was warm.
Back then, green diaries were written, and days ripened gently like the moon.
Now my mother, whose sphincter has weakened with age,
renders even a bidet unnecessary;
whether the affairs of the world race past like an arrow or not,
her time has come to rest at seventy-nine.
The river water, having reached the sea, lets go of itself.
Ah, life is the task of becoming the sea.
The curved wall was a line bending toward the sea.
Where is she who was once me?
And where is the I who was once her now heading?
