Flame, Glass and Ink are Poems, essays, and reading notes by Stefania Joori Suh

Tag: memoir

  • prompt 216

    Tell us about your favorite pair of shoes, and where they’ve taken you.

    Sound: My cats’ pleading sounds, especially Toro’s, for paying attention to them while I was WFH until 7:00 pm today. No matter how hard I tried to ignore them all the time, it was impossible because I simply couldn’t. Then there’s mom’s ever-neurotic shrieking for my letting the cats out to the living room, which is her domain. I am getting crazier and crazier by day.

    Smell: Mon Paris by Yves Saint Laurent. I got the smallest size of the lovely perfume from a Sephora store that happened to be an hour away from home. I ordered it online yesterday for the same day delivery. Anyway, I got it, and it smelled lovely. It makes me feel like I am a beautiful sultry French chic. Plus, it’s cheaper than Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle, which I will get in the future.

    Taste: I had Coffee-Flavored Hagen-Daz ice cream during an afternoon break. It’s both proportionally and favorably perfect. Small but fulfilling. I used to be biased against the brand because I thought it was overhyped, but as I get older, I like the flavor, which pleases my taste buds.

    It was a long day for me. I prefer WFH to WFO even amid the cacophony of my cats’ caterwauling and mom’s shrieking because working in such a small office with people half my age gives me an awkward vibe, and I believe they will feel the same way. I think I am wired to be alone. Good-hearted but socially gauche. Anyway, tomorrow is WFO ! But I have no choice of obeying it because if I don;t go there, Alan will complain about handling the incoming mail by himself, which will be rolled into a bid snowball of criticism about my not keeping commitment to WFO two days a week. Nevertheless, I hate going to the office.

  • prompt 208 on what brings me peace

    What brings you peace?

    The bliss of peace is made of these: a baby’s laughter, the soft flurry touches of my cats on my face, and their purring and meowing, listening to my favorite tunes and singing along alone, getting my hair done nicely, saying I love you to my cats with their little hearts on my heart.

    Peace may be transient, a precariously illusory daydreaming, or a timed reprieve from existential responsibilities. Still, peace is happiness when the breeze of peace envelopes me with a fragrance of acacia and takes me to the sea of skies.

    Peace be with you, readers.

  • Prompt 69

    Do you spend more time thinking about the future or the past? Why?

    When I was young, I used to think about my future, jotting down the years ahead and thinking about what I would be.

    Now that I have reached the time from the wonder years, I look forward to futures, while setting my foot on present. Although I am not as faithful as I used to be, I still regard the Bible as the source of practical wisdom that has survived for thousand years:

    Matthew 6:34 Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.

    Waking up every morning is like every birthday to us, and we can live these moments to the best we can, doing our daily tasks. I know I am also afraid of what tomorrow will bring, but it never knows, and honestly, I don’t want to know. Saint Teresa of Avila knew it hundreds of years ago:

    Let nothing disturb you,
    Let nothing frighten you,
    All things are passing away.
    God never changes.
    Patience obtains all things.
    Whoever has God lacks nothing;
    God alone suffice    s.

    God bless you all. ⭐️✨🍀🧚‍♀️

  • prompt 67

    What colleges have you attended?

    Those were my green salad days on the following Sylvan campuses with pleasantness on memory lanes.

    Bergen Community College in Paramus, New Jersey– It was more of a preparatory school for me to prepare for a four-year university. English is my second language (“ESL”) – and the most beloved-and the college had an excellent ESL program equivalent for TOFEL or CELT. I was enrolled in an Honor Program, which helped me to transfer to the higher-level of university.

    Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey – I lived in the dorm and loved everything about the school. My major was English, so you can guess my initial intimidation of the subject as an ESL competing with native speakers. But I was on a Dean’s List in my senior year, and I am very proud of it. I loved reading Renaissance and Victorian literature classes in their original forms, which were exhilarating. I joined Army ROTC as a student cadet and the NJ Army National Guard at Rutgers. I also joined the Color Guard and Scabbard & Blade, a military honor society. I was a very active student and miss those days.

    New York University, New York, New York – While working as a legal secretary at Dorsey & Witney in New York, I attended evening classes for a certificate in Paralegal Studies at NYU. The instructors were all practicing NYC lawyers passionate about sharing their practical knowledge with us. I graduated from the six-month program with good grades, and it was an enriching experience.

    Looking back under ever foreign palm trees in California, I miss the east coast where all my college years and my prime times are buried.

  • Prompt 31

    What principles define how you live?

    Ask any acclaimed mountaineers, such as Edmund Hillary and Reinhold Messner, why and how they climbed up the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. Their answers were simple: there was a mountain to climb, and they had to move forward. Likewise, here are my life’s three guides: imagination, creativity, and hope that accompany me in this life’s journey.

    I am a figure of paradoxes, contrasting light with dark, ideal and worldly, bright and melancholy. I see myself trapped in the Labyrinth of Crete, where the Minotaur lurks in the corner of the maze, waiting to ambush, yearning to eat me. (It is more poetic than being lost in a level of the dreadful Backrooms, as it were.) Normal is not default, and insecurity constantly stalks me like a haunting revenant, resisting departing this world that it longs to remain for an unfinished business. And yet, there is always this impalpable, mysterious sense of what-if flickering in its iridescent halo from a distance. So, I follow the light, walk forward, and never look back because moving forward keeps me alive. Didn’t Stephen Hawking also collaborate with it by saying that it is possible for humans to travel to the future but impossible to return to the past?

    Creativity is essential because it gives a sense of existence, of what it means to be a human. Viktor E. Frankl said three values shape a meaningful life, which are creative value, experiential value, and attitudinal value. I enjoy appreciating the artistic works of others and learning to accept who I am. But I am also delighted in creating my own creations, however good or bad they may be. Writing is such a means of expression by which I can express myself. It is fearful of disappearing like a speck of the world, and I am not nothing.

    I can imagine myself one day arriving as an acclaimed memoirist, diarist, or essayist. Novels are not my forte because I can’t write things I pretend to be or know. That is why I prefer reading nonfiction, and I like to think that I can write it well.

    Thus are my principles – or, more fittingly, my guides – in life. I am a Dante who imagines, a Virgil who creates, and a Beatrice who hopes through life’s journey.

  • Prompt 6

    Write a letter to your 100-year-old self.

    Hello Stephanie,

    You used to wonder what and where you would arrive in each age of life: at 13 you would count the years when you became 20s, 30s, 40s, and so on. Then all of sudden, you are pitchfolked forward, leaping two bridges of 20th and 21st centuries. Still, it all seems like yesterday, and you never changed at heart.

    Who would have known that you will adopt cats and love them to the bargain? Who would have guessed your letters to the editor of your favorite British history magazine have been printed several times? And who would have doubted that your age could not wither you away, nor custom would stale your resistant spirit and hunger for knowledge? 100 years of time in evolutionary scale does sound antiquated or anachronistic, but in truth it amounts to a millionsecond on our 24 biological clock, an amount so infinitesimal that such difference of time is ludicriously insignificant. So don’t sigh but sing that you just hit the centanarian chart. Awesome.

    FRancis Bacon assured us that we don’t have to be anxious about how we should prepare for the end of life because nature will do the job for us. It will let us know at that time when a psychopomp will appear to bring your soul to the beyond. Or in your case, it will be Mothe Mary to whom you used to pray a rosary when you were little. Wouldn’t it be nice for you to meet Mother Mary rather than some scary-looking death angel? I know you have come a long way alone, but this is not the end. Nobody but your fate knows where you go or will go. Yet it would be best if you lived like you are living the second time to keep your youthful spirit.

    All the best,

    Stepheni from the Past