Come Sit

Hahnu Youn is eighty-three and has no house. What there is instead is a bench, wherever the bench happens to be. Weathered like an elder tortoise, and still, for reasons nobody has accounted for, easily surprised ... In one pocket, seeds. Carried, not planted. For when I need reminding that I do not know what alive looks like. No advice is given. Sometimes a question gets asked, and only if the question is real — not one to fill a silence, but one where the answer is honestly not known ... Three times, somebody sat down nearby. Houston A hospital waiting room. Orange plastic chairs bolted to eleven others, so that nobody is able to move a chair closer to anybody. On the television, a truck drives through mud, a woman smiles about yogurt, a pill makes a cartoon stomach feel better ... A young man sits across the aisle, one leg bouncing. Forty-seven bounces in a minute. Hahnu Youn counts them. "I don't know what to do," the young man says. Not to Hahnu Youn exactly. To the room. To the orange chairs. "No," Hahnu Youn says. "You don't." Which is not what anyone expects from an old woman in a waiting room. No advice arrives. No comfort arrives either ... "What do you do when you don't know what to do?" "I sit. I notice what is. I count things sometimes. The counting is not for understanding. The counting is for being present with what I am counting." "That's it?" "Sometimes I ask a question. But only if the question is real. Not a question to fill the silence. A question I actually do not know the answer to." The question does not come that day. When it comes it will get asked. Maybe to the young man. Maybe to the orange chair. Maybe to nobody at all ... Duluth A green bench outside a laundromat, the paint peeling in shapes like maps of countries that do not exist. Seven machines turning inside, and if the listening goes slightly wrong, they are playing a waltz. One two three ... A child comes out, maybe five years old, holding one blue sock with orange stripes. "This isn't ours." What follows is a census of belonging. The child asks everyone who passes whose sock this is. The mother allows five more minutes. The five minutes run out. Hahnu Youn takes over the search. "You have to ask everyone." "I will." "And count." "I will count." "We're at four." "I will start at five." The sock changes hands. Warm from the child's hand, and soft ... Two more hours on the bench. Nineteen more people asked. And number seventeen is a woman who begins to cry, though the sock belongs to nobody in that parking lot and never did. There was a son once with socks like this. Orange stripes on blue. The son is grown now, and lives in a city whose name will not come out right, and does not call enough ... They talk about sons, and distance, and socks, and the things that carry memory in their softness. The sock was never the point. The sock was how a stranger arrived at the thing that needed saying out loud. The way into a person is almost never through the front door ... The treeline A traveler comes out of the trees. Dusty feet. Ordinary clothes. Hands that have worked. No announcement, no halo, no explanation ... Two people who had understood the same optical illusion, from different centuries and in different languages. Neither one listened to by the people who claimed to be listening. "Did they listen?" Hahnu Youn asks. "They built buildings." Five words, and the entire disaster is inside them. Walking through towns saying what people needed to hear, and the listening got turned into architecture, and the walking into an institution, and the message into stone that could be visited on Sundays instead of carried in a pocket every day ... "You're doing the same work." "Someone has to sit still while you walk." Afterward the soil where the foot had rested looks darker and damper than the soil beside it. Not a miracle. Not a sign. Earth responding to a foot that has walked a long way, carrying a weight the ground recognizes ... Three benches. A bouncing leg, a lost sock, a pair of dusty feet. Nobody is fixed in any of them. No advice is given, no problem is solved, and in two of the three the person who sat down leaves with exactly what they arrived with ... What changes is that somebody stayed put long enough for the real thing to surface. Forty-seven bounces counted without comment. Nineteen people asked about a sock nobody owned. A question held back because it was not real yet ... Same work. Different shift ...