4:19AM

Essay Catherine Han

New York at 4:19 in the morning, the corner of 32nd and Broadway. I’m slumped against a piece of scaffolding, waiting for my car to arrive. There’s a pair of men screaming at each other in the park across the street, silhouetted by the lighted billboards. One finally slumps down crying, his shoulders shaking. The other one goes to touch him but pulls his hand away. Another man ambles past me before he pulls down his pants and starts peeing on the steps of the subway entrance.

A young Asian man comes up to me. His shoes are brown and his eyes are hollow. Would you like to go get jjajangmyun with me? My mother is dead. I meet his eyes briefly, and then look away. I’m sorry about your mother, but I’m trying to get home.

His voice is quiet. I just want to eat some jajjangmyum. He is clearly drunk, and I can’t tell if he’s lying, because I’m bad at that. I believe people too easily. But there is a kind of grief about him that clings to his black coat, that reaches out towards me. I think about my own Korean mother, about the foods I eat when I am homesick and want to return to my childhood. I think about the dream I had once that still haunts me, where I found myself in a world without my mother and spent the night screaming for her loss.

Maybe in one version of this story I go with him. We find a Korean restaurant still open at this hour and eat noodles covered in glistening black sauce in a lowly lit room. Old ajummas drift through the aisles to bring us plates of yellow radish and vinegar, their faces worn with the silence of five in the morning. We whisper about his mother. I tell him about mine. We arrange to meet again and eventually fall in love. We get married, and we thank fate for a four a.m. encounter in New York City and simple black bean noodles for bringing us together.

Maybe in another version of this story, I go with him, and we are almost to the restaurant I believed he would take me to when he pulls me into an alley and holds a knife to my throat. I freeze. My last thought before I die is whether his mother really is dead, or whether it was a lie all along. My name is published as a cautionary tale - another victim who walked on the streets

too late, too alone, too young. I become a story that my loved ones have to tell to explain the narrative of grief in their lives. My sister, my friend from high school, my girlfriend, she was murdered in the streets of New York, and that’s why I never go there anymore… All of my dreams come to nothing. Over the years, I am forgotten.

Maybe, maybe - and that’s why I love this city, with all of its stories, with all of its maybes. In my story, I politely refuse, and he walks away. My Uber finally comes and I doze off on the ride home before falling asleep in my bed. I wake up the next morning to my room bathed in the soft light of day. I make myself a cup of coffee, and I live.