“Hello” by Adele, Friday, April 30, 2021

 

Today's song needs very little introduction. Most of the time I pick pretty obscure music for my playlists, sometimes even having to add the lyrics or even create the artist's Genius page. However, 2015's "Hello" is a song that everyone's mom and grand-mother knows. Furthermore, Adele is pretty much one of the least controversial figures in pop music, as shown masterfully in an SNL sketch.  "Hello" is definitely meme-worthy. Six years after its release, the emotion of the song has long since felt cliche; however, some days a cliche is really the best thing to describe your feelings.

IT'S NO SECRET THAT THE BOTH OF US ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. Today, I woke up to the news that my dad had had a mini-stroke and was in the hospital. After a trip to the emergency room, he was discharged and given some instructions to come back to see a specialist and to make some lifestyle changes. This is all happening on the other side of the world, and with the pandemic--air travel being astronomically more expensive and difficult--I feel so helpless. Today's fright got me thinking about time, more specifically how time changes the ones we love. How it puts a wedge between us. I think about how I came to Korea as what I thought would be no more than a three-year thing. After a very lousy student teaching experience, I wanted to prove to myself that I could teach and that teaching was the calling God had for my life. However, somewhere toward the end of year two, I had started a new relationship and was learning how to be an adult. I also hadn't made the connections to transition my teaching career stateside, and the finances of that scared me. So I stuck around in Korea. In 2015, I lost my first grandparent. I had made it to my late twenties with four sets of grandparents, but in the summer of 2015, my grandfather died, and I didn't go to the funeral. Time and money were the excuses. Then in 2018, my mom's father passed away. Also, I didn't go to the funeral. 

I MUST'VE CALLED A THOUSAND TIMES. I've had a sheltered life up to this point. I remember going to my great-grandmother's funeral in 1994. It was the first plane ride I took from Syracuse to Orlando. I didn't attend the funeral of my great-grandfather in 2004, but I did attend his 100th birthday a few months before. There have been some sad deaths of friends' parents and church members, but in my immediate circle, I've been sheltered. I don't say that to brag or to tempt fate. On the contrary, I say this with utmost humility. I say it with fear and trembling that when it does come, I will be unable to deal with it because I've had so little to build my immunity toward it. And then I think about the time difference between me and the ones that I love. I think of all the friends I've let go of over the years. I think about how I've constructed a life that's true to myself half a day in the future from my family and friends. How connected my family is in Upstate New York and how connected my sisters are to my parents. How I'm forging on in this plan with the person I love, but forsaking my family in a land that has built its culture on filial piety. Oh how much of a bad contrast Showbread is with Adele. And how dark my happy-sad playlist for April is.

Read the lyrics on Genius.