"Time Spent Walking Through Memories" (기억을 걷는 시간) by Nell (넬), Saturday, September 18, 2021
Kim Jong-won, singer of the South Korean soft-rock band Nell makes a third entry for the month. The writer of Taeyeon's "Time Lapse" and Kim Sung-Kyu's "Shine," knows how to write an autumny, nostalgic track. Nell became known for their bleak music in the early 2000s. Their release of 2008's Separation Anxiety is no exception. "Time Spent Walking Through Memories" would become one of Nell's most recognizable songs. However, conscription would force the band on to go on hiatus before making their comeback in 2012, changing their sad tune to the uplifting, anthemic "Ocean of Light.""Time Spent Walking" sees singer Kim Jong-won wax poetic, describing the loss of love, in similar manner to "Time Lapse" and "Shine." "Time Spent Walking," however, has a calmer, lullaby quality to the soft piano and the ending "La La"s.
FROM THE VISION OF A STRANGER PASSING BY. You probably still remember the cooler Sunday afternoons. Summer practically begins in late April in Korea these days. You realize when you're going to a spring wedding in Cheongryeong-ri and after the wedding you take advantage of the fact that you're in Seoul and it's Sunday so you might as well go shopping or eat something you can't have in Chungju and you start sweating profusely, so you fold your suit jacket underneath your now embarrassing pit-stained blue dress shirt, that winter has ended. But then there's September when you leave your apartment just a bit earlier than usual to catch a train for the coordinator's meeting, and while you're shivering, waiting for a taxi, you check the weather app and realize that every day is becoming a little cooler and you should have probably brought a jacket. So the next weekend, you keep that in mind, leaving a little bit later to meet up with Alex for brunch in Itaewon, wearing a thin jacket because it never did warm up last Sunday, and cafe, restaurant, and bookstore blasted the air conditioning like it was mid-July and outside you were just a little cold. But this weekend, the sun heats up by 10:30 with your windbreaker on, and you're left carrying your jacket around all day. And every place you go has turned off the air conditioning, and one place might have turned on the heat? But carrying a jacket around is not a problem. And I still remember your brown leather jacket covering your forest green and dark blue Gingham button down shirt.
EVEN TODAY I LIVED WITH THE TRACES OF YOU. In my younger, almost virginal state, I thought that the conversation we shared, a game of volleyball about teaching English and being a foreigner in another country, about how you too had discovered abroad, years ago in Toronto, you were like me. How you used to try to cover this up, especially when you came back to Seoul, to good Confucian parents who only wanted your financial success and for you to produce children and pass on the moral values of Korean culture. And so you tried the matchmakers your parents subjected you to, you had a few wild nights with the boss at those karaoke bars, when you were a young man building your career, getting a little too drunk. It was the mid- '90s and spending time with a prostitute on the boss's dime was expected of good employees, you told me. Of course, these days workers are filing complaints of abuse and scandal after scandal comes out about businessmen, singers, teachers, and ordinary folks getting caught--with their pants down--so to speak. But you said, let's not talk of that anymore. You never let me say the word gay. "Korean people can't follow a conversation in English," you said in the crowded outdoor foodcourt in Jong-ro, "but they do know the word gay." So we talked in euphemism about the things that I was so scared to say aloud. The things I had confessed to web forums--and then deleted my account when I felt the prick of conscience. But now I had gone too far. Alex, you were the face and spirit and body of something that I had hoped existed when I was trapped in a repressive Christian high school. And I might have run away if you too didn't talk about your conversion to Christianity in your teen years. About how you still believe that God has a place for us. About how we can't help how we are. And just as the conversation grew to an intellectual or spiritual climax, you'd get quiet and finish your drink and look at me, your muscular chest pressing against that leather jacket, and ask me, "So, you wanna go to a motel?"
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