Song essay #1 - Wave

A story about the life you're meant to be living

I am surprising myself on my 35th birthday with finally diving headfirst into this new series on my blog, one I’ve had the idea for before I even created this space. It was supposed to be one of the first things I’d ever write here (though I was planning on starting with a different song), but life got in the way, as usual.

I’m not one to despair over aging, but my birthday naturally makes me think about the passage of time and the kind of life I’m living. On this day*, I like to reflect, compare my circumstances with those of the previous years, and draw conclusions about the path I’m on. I wanted to write something personal for the occasion, and luckily, inspiration happened to hit me. Wave has been one of my favorite songs by SEVENTEEN for years, a criminally underrated B-side with the most beautiful lyrics. I listened to it this morning on my way to work and decided this would be the soundtrack of the next year of my life. Sometimes an old favorite comes up at the perfect time in the shuffle and falls into place like a missing piece in a puzzle you’ve been working on.

Even though this essay is about a song on the surface, it’s actually about my life. The point of this series is to introduce some of my favorite kpop songs through an intimate lens and show how I relate to and interpret them against my own experiences. My picks will all be tracks that I think have extremely meaningful lyrics—my other purpose with writing these pieces is to showcase some of the most beautiful lyricism in kpop. Yeah, a lot of kpop songs may have inane or outright dumb lyrics (and we love that for them), but there are just as many or maybe even more that can rip your heart out of your chest.

Knowing the song is not a requirement, but I do recommend listening to it while reading. I know it won’t hold the same power to my readers, but I think the vibe alone adds to what I’m trying to convey here.

An additional note to those who aren’t familiar with Korean lyrics, poetry, or literature: the Korean language is extremely poetic and sentimental. English will NEVER come close to expressing the beauty of these words in the original. If the pieces of lyrics I’m using sound plain or awkward, just try to imagine that they’re a thousand times more impactful in Korean.

(*I originally wrote this on the 19th, but for a few days, I went back and forth on sharing it.)

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Writing credits for the lyrics go to the usual suspects: SEVENTEEN member and main producer Woozi, Bumzu, Anchor (PRISMFILTER), but also to the SEVENTEEN performance team members Hoshi, Jun, The8, and Dino, who perform this song.

Credits for the song translation go to seventeenlyrics on YouTube, but I made slight modifications where I thought the translation could be improved. I also left out parts of the lyrics that didn’t contribute to the story being told (for example, ad-libs in the background or repetitive phrases). There’s a very different translation on Genius Lyrics, but that one doesn’t make sense to me, and from what I can understand, it does not follow the Korean original closely.

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Time is running out

It’s always overwhelming to chase after it

It’s natural and mysterious

My relationship with time is two-faced: I’ve urged it to move just as many times as I’ve wanted it to slow down. I am a person with a million hobbies and interests, so I’ve often wished for more hours in the day, days in the year, or time on this earth—there’s just so much to do and see and try. I could fill ten human lifetimes with the things I want to do, and it still wouldn't be enough.

But I also remember wishing for time to run faster when I was younger. Living under hellish circumstances in your formative years does that to you; I urged the years to go faster, so I could get out of my family’s house, my school, my hometown. I had idealized images in my mind of what it would be like to step into the big, wide world: going to college, meeting like-minded people, living in a bustling city, experiencing love. No matter how fast the years ran past me, it still couldn't be fast enough, I wanted all of that to be within my reach.

Looking back, I did spend a lot of my youth chasing after time, or the things it promised to bring. I don’t feel resentment over it; I did what I could to survive, and gluing your eyes on the horizon is a tried and true coping mechanism.

How do I feel about time right now, though, on the day I’m turning 35? Do I want it to slow down or pick up pace once again? I don’t think there are many people over thirty who still want to move faster ahead, but to me, aging has always meant progress. And I’m not there yet, where I imagined myself to be.

If you hold your breath for a moment

It would be nice if the busy times could stop

I only experienced life being on pause once, during the lockdown years. Even though those were tragic and dark times I don’t particularly like looking back on, in one way, the timing worked in my favor. I was recovering from my brain surgery, and there was nothing I needed more than hitting the pause button on everything. I knew it would be years before I would finally feel like myself again (especially because I was also healing from abuse and figuring out my gender identity at the same time), and I couldn’t afford to be left behind while the world outside my window kept moving. If anything good came of the lockdown, it gave me time to pick up my pieces and put together a semblance of a human who can go outside and interact with others.

I’m in a much better place than I was back then, but I often still feel like I haven’t fully caught up with everyone else. Like I lost years that I will never get back.

And I’ve been running so hard, all my life, just to get to the line where some people started out from. If I look around in the life I’m currently building, I have to admit that I’m still not there. I started the race with multiple handicaps, and I can’t even see the other contestants anymore, they’re so far ahead.

There are days when I want to stop so bad, to just sit back and not think about things I need to achieve, but that’s not an option. Others are depending on me, and I am the only one who even has the tools, as imperfect as they may be, to make their lives better, more comfortable.

Standing all day in front of the door to the heart

How about knocking on it?

Escape for a moment to the ocean inside your heart

I love this image because I feel like it’s the perfect metaphor for how I live my life. I am standing in front of the door to my own heart, day in, day out, but never knocking. I’m scared because if it opens up, what will I find? That what I desire the most is the life I’m currently living, the one I’m struggling so hard to build? Or something else entirely?

I’m afraid to know for sure, but I feel the answer in my body. Sometimes, when I lie awake in my bed at night, ride a bus and zone out, or shower at dawn, there is a haunting sense that the life I’m living isn’t quite the one I was meant for.

In a lot of respects, it’s shocking how little I’ve changed since I was a child. I have the same taste, interests, preferences, and not surprisingly, dreams. From as early as I remember, I’ve always had an image in my mind about my future: I’m a big city woman, living in a megapolis so big that it pushed against the boundaries of what my small town imagination could even conjure. In that dream, I lived or worked in a skyscraper, spent my time in glossy offices and bars, surrounded by interesting people, roamed the neon-lit streets at night, and lived the life of adults I saw on TV, or in games. I even had a whole imaginary megapolis that I came up with, and all the stories of myself and other characters I imagined took place in that same setting.

I guess I could just file this under ‘childhood fantasies’ and move on, but the thing is, I take tending to my inner child very seriously. Every day, I think about how I can make the utterly damaged child that I was happy, or what she would think if she saw how I’m currently living, if she’d approve.

Even back then, I knew that I had to go step by step, so my first goal was to live in Budapest. I fulfilled this dream, and I live alone, which was also part of the vision. I am surrounded by beautiful objects that I spend all my time and money acquiring—the absolute dream scenario of someone very materialistic who grew up in poverty and always had a lot of affection for objects, as opposed to people (in an autistic, rather than a capitalistic way).

I do have a tech job, which my childhood self would have been ecstatic about, although the office is not in a skyscraper, and I also don’t wear pantsuits to work (I was adamant on that detail!).

The only things missing are the megapolis and the lifestyle. While my child self imagined a glamorous and adventurous social life, I’m basically still a recluse, even though I leave my apartment a few times a week these days. I am somewhat flexible on this point because back then, before the internet, I probably assumed that the only possible entertainment could be found outside the house. I think she would have been thrilled to hear that I spend every waking moment of my life in front of the computer.

And the megapolis may seem like a childish, whimsical fantasy, but I can’t even begin to describe the ache, the longing in my whole body and mind for surroundings like that. For thousands of things to do or see on any given day, even if I probably won’t do most of them. Millions of choices and decisions to be made on every corner. An endless sea of lights and sounds and spaces and crowds to disappear and dissolve in. The backdrop of my life right now is a village, a small town, and a relatively small capital city, but they are all like prisons for my mind: I feel understimulated and dull every time I go outside and look around. I wasn’t born for this, the voice inside keeps insisting, I was born for that sea of light.

I should probably leave then and realize my big city dreams that I’ve been incubating for over thirty years. Well, maybe I would if I could.

All your cells want more freedom

With a natural tempo

Within the city with a closed-off view

Everything is distorted, wake yourself up

As things currently are, I feel tethered and tied down by a million things. I am not entirely free in choosing where I live. When I wake up or go to bed, how much time I spend on what’s important to me is all decided by my job. Other people’s arbitrary rules determine if I have enough energy left at the end of the day to write, to create, to design. Governments decide if I have a place to live, what I can afford, what my taxes will support, or destroy. And I’m forced to spend my life understimulated, which is the worst punishment I can envision for my brain.

Some of those ropes holding me down, I tied them myself, though: there are sacrifices in my life that I make willingly. Nobody asks me not to move abroad, but I have a sense of responsibility for the people and animals that make up my family, who are precious to me. About ten years ago, I read an article that pretty much changed the course of my life. “Living in the same place as the people you love matters.” Now I know that there is nothing I would regret more than not spending time with my loved ones at every possible opportunity. So I decided that some things are just not in the books for me. Things that would require me to move somewhere else, to untie those tethers and drift away, to become one of those people who will probably only see their mom or sibling 60 more times in their lives. I refuse to be at the tail end of those relationships, and I have to fight against time itself to achieve that.

Still, I dream of feeling freedom in all the cells in my body, of living in my natural tempo. Of not wasting away in a closed-off place, of waking up and realizing the potential I feel buzzing inside me.

So what if it’s a temporary blue illusion?

Swim along to the rhythm of the swaying ocean

Your dance moves follow the wave

You can find a freedom wave

But sometimes I’m not sure if it’s really something I want or maybe an illusion. I can’t say for sure if experiencing that life would make me happy. I like safety, certainty, being surrounded by familiar places full of memories and loved ones. Yes, I could be a free agent, moving about bright cities unbound, which is my most intimate and most shameful want at the same time. That vision seems empty; while my world now is small, it’s at least filled with all the pains and joys of being close to others.

I am still free in a lot of ways, but nothing changes the fact that I live on borrowed time. Maybe my dream is just my way of raging against the inevitable looming in my future: one day, I will have to move to the village, and do nothing more than care for my family members. There’s no one else to do it. There’s no way I’m not going to do it. My world will shrink to the size of a grain of sand, and there won’t be any glamor or adventure in it. Maybe I’ve had this dream since I was a kid because even back then, I knew subconsciously that I’d be the one to do it and no one else would.

So, do I want time to slow down or stop completely? Or go faster to see how much progress I can make before the race ends? Since I can’t answer and I can’t choose one, the only way to go might be to keep swimming and following the rhythm that I’m not in control of. It’s possible that there’s freedom in that, too.

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These are the thoughts that I’ve had for my 35th birthday, and the worries I’ve been chewing over were encapsulated so perfectly in this song that I was moved to write about it. I only just realized, after I finished writing, that the album this song is on is called Your Choice. I always love SEVENTEEN’s album titles, but this one seems especially perfect for the occasion.

What’s a bit surprising to me is that I’ve always considered Wave a hopeful song, but I slipped into quite dark territories as I kept writing. My birthday wasn’t depressing either, so I wonder why these feelings surfaced now.

I realize now that this series is probably going to be a downer, but I’ve always used music, and lyrics especially, as a way to process my trauma, so I guess it’s inevitable. I do have some more uplifting topics in mind as well, so let’s hope I have the energy and inspiration to transform some of those into written words, too.

This came out even more personal than I intended, so I’m kind of anxious to click ‘share’. If you thought or felt anything, do let me know what it was 💜