True Love
by Joan Kwon Glass
On New Year’s Eve, I count the number of couples I know who are happily married. Not many, but enough to put a hole in my theory that romantic love is a scam. Enough, for a moment, to make me wonder–why not me? It’s a silly question, I tell myself, shaking it off. I have, after all, survived so much against the odds–nearly a decade of active addiction, my sister’s suicide, passenger in a car accident at age 17 when I had not buckled my seatbelt–I would have been thrown through the windshield if I had not been leaning down to change the radio dial. Maybe it should be enough, that I have woken up every day this year and every day so far, I have lived to see the next.
I was in love once. I was 19 and she was an addict, and I was too afraid to stay. By the time I understood addiction and asked if we could try again, she was clean but had moved on. Like a child, I vowed to never love again: the one promise to myself that I’ve never broken. Maybe when we find true love and it doesn’t work out, the heart washes her hands of us, says coldly–you had your shot and you wasted it. Or maybe not, and my next, true love just hasn’t found me yet. In my 20s, I had a past life reading. In the earliest past life I could recall, I was a Korean man in the year 1630, a servant, in love with the eldest daughter of the family I served–doomed. I died alone, so in love, calling her name–moon whispering to the sun just before surrendering the sky.
I was in love once. I was 19 and she was an addict, and I was too afraid to stay. By the time I understood addiction and asked if we could try again, she was clean but had moved on. Like a child, I vowed to never love again: the one promise to myself that I’ve never broken. Maybe when we find true love and it doesn’t work out, the heart washes her hands of us, says coldly–you had your shot and you wasted it. Or maybe not, and my next, true love just hasn’t found me yet. In my 20s, I had a past life reading. In the earliest past life I could recall, I was a Korean man in the year 1630, a servant, in love with the eldest daughter of the family I served–doomed. I died alone, so in love, calling her name–moon whispering to the sun just before surrendering the sky.
Joan Kwon Glass is the Korean American author of NIGHT SWIM, winner of the Diode Book Prize (Diode Editions, 2022) & two chapbooks. She serves as poet laureate for Milford, CT, editor in chief for Harbor Review & as a writing instructor for several writing centers. Joan’s poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Poetry Daily, The Slowdown, Poetry Northwest, Cherry Tree Lit, Ninth Letter, Asian American Writer’s Workshop (The Margins), Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, Salamander, Texas Review & elsewhere. She lives in coastal Connecticut with her family.