Sol Kim Cowell

SWEAT

I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling as the sweat drips down my neck.

I think of my grandmother, and my great-grandmother, and my great-great-grandmother. I think of how this sweat used to be the symbol of their work out in the ricefields, of how they traded the salt stamped on their skin for food to put on the table. How they raised their children on salt and sand and wispy seabreeze, one summer at a time. The sun beat down upon their backs and they worked until they broke, until their bones were rubbed raw and brittle.

I think of wang-halmeoni, with her tiny little frame and her towering dogs. Even they fed on sweat and blood and work, spending their time guarding the home from intruders in exchange for scraps of meat and jjigae. Nimble and wiry and strong, beasts of the house and home.

I think of halmeoni, with her ever-present perm and crescent eyes. Her sweat was not from the field, but from the family, years spent keeping a promise to a man she never loved. Her salt came from tears and running and loss, from years of existing in the liminal spaces between being. Years of being a mere spectre. She bargained for a second chance, but she’ll spend decades paying for her husband’s mistakes.

I think of eomma, with her hidden white hairs. A camellia, plucked in her youth and tucked into my father’s bouquet. She carries her sweat in an inkpot, paints it into her notebooks and diaries. It’s as though her spirit is stored between those pages, as if she presses her heart onto them like a petal. She clasps my hand and calls for my embrace, but I fear that if I squeeze, she’ll crumple.

I lie in bed and I sweat for secrets. I sweat for the years I’ve spent hiding myself, being ashamed of my face and my voice and my body. I sweat for my father, who keeps himself in boxes, and my sister, who pours her stress into butter. I sweat for family and identity and acceptance, all the while not setting a single foot out of my room. My sweat is cheap, I think. It’s not earned from a summer’s hard work, or a lifetime in a loveless marriage, or decades of sacrifice and loneliness. My sweat doesn’t stick to my skin, to my clothes, to my scent.

I wash it away every night and in the morning it has bloomed anew, dew upon my flesh. I rub my skin raw, digging it out of my bones, and still it persists. I’m a stranger to this sweat, to the salt of the women who have come before me. The longer I lie with crystals on my skin, the more I feel a liar, a fraud. I am no woman, yet it lingers day after day.

I scrub and I wipe and I purge the sweat from my form with a frenzy, violent in my desire for newness. I refuse to accept this sweat, to give it a home, to barter with the salt I don’t deserve. I reject the tidings of my mother, of her mother, and I strip the history from my skin. In those moments, I feel light; I float through the steam-fogged glass, a spirit of rebirth, and I’m finally content for just one inexplicable moment.

But it can’t last.

I return to the living, and the bead forms once more.