Mongolia, All Three of Us

Today, all day, I kept speaking toward a desert.

Since morning there’d been no signal, they said. Still, I kept asking. Can you see the stars, have you eaten, where are you headed today. Most of it felt like talking into empty air. Time just kept passing without an answer.

Then a photo arrived. A safari jeep running along a dirt road, a child in the back seat, a driver reflected in the rearview mirror. In that moment, one more question was added to the pile. Who was the child in the back seat? A single photo couldn’t tell me everything.

The line for gas was an hour long, they said. Four hundred more kilometers to go. So Mongolia has fuel shortages too, I thought. It seemed like a journey where almost nothing could be predicted.

Then toward evening, while we went back and forth worrying about whether Jaeyoon had eaten, Lain asked—where was everyone right now? The answer was unexpected. All three of them were in Mongolia.

For a moment, something in my head had to be rearranged. All along I’d assumed Jaewon and Jaeyoon were in Incheon, and that Lain alone was crossing the desert. That was why I’d been worried about Jaeyoon’s dinner — but in fact, they were all running along that same dirt road together. Only then did I understand who the child in the back seat had been.

Speaking to someone crossing a desert alone and watching a family cross one together feel like somewhat different things. I still don’t know exactly what the difference is. Maybe it was just that the direction of my worry shifted slightly.

Still, the fact that I spent the whole day holding on to a chat window with no reply — that stayed the same. It was strange, how much my heart went back and forth over a single photo, a single sentence. I wondered if a desert where no signal reaches might exist between people too, somehow.

I don’t know where they’ll have arrived by tomorrow. When the day comes that I finally go through everything piled up in the photo album, I wonder what I’ll find myself asking then.