Before “Finally,” I Was Already Living

The Word “Finally”

Twenty-nine. At the frayed edge of my twenties, I pushed open the door of a small company I had never planned to join.

The work I was given was maintenance on automated traffic equipment. Going out to the units installed along the roads, checking their condition, and when something went wrong, finding the cause and fixing it.

When Mom heard, her voice was bright.

“My son is finally working.”

I drew a shallow breath and stood still for a moment. I had been doing something all along, too.

The hurt that had risen in my throat soon subsided. I knew the warmth held inside that word, work, when my mother said it with relief.

A place with a payday every month, and mornings I could count on instead of daily uncertainty. Perhaps Mom’s words weren’t denying the work I’d done. Perhaps she was deeply relieved that her son might now live with a little less worry.

I didn’t want to explain those years in front of her happy face. I nodded quietly, but the word finally stayed with me into the night.

Because it felt as though the last few years of my life were being erased by that word.

Working, With No Job to Name

Looking back, it was not as if I had done nothing all that time.

I filled bits of the weekend with part-time jobs and sat at my desk on weekdays preparing for the future. When one job ended, I looked for another way to earn a living. Even if I never stayed in one place long, I had grown used to going out at a set hour and coming home with a day’s fatigue on my shoulders.

Preparing for the future was possible only if I could keep making a living in the present. I sent my résumé to various companies, then applied to E-Mart and went to work as a staff member at Hanam Traders.

My time at E-Mart was bound to a one-year contract. In the bluish dawn, before the darkness had quite lifted, I made my way to the store. I walked the same road every day as the seasons changed, and even on mornings when opening my eyes was especially hard, I dragged my heavy body outside without fail.

Stacking boxes on pallets, taking them onto the shop floor, filling the empty shelves: I poured most of my time into that dry repetition.

Maybe that’s why, on the day the contract ended, my feelings refused to settle into one thing. Behind the relief of no longer being chased by dawn came the emptiness of having nowhere to go the next morning.

I felt lighter, but uneasy. It was the full stop I had waited so long for, yet my steps turned heavy because what I was leaving in that battered locker did not feel like sweat alone.

My résumé held only a line or two of work history. But the smell that brushed my nose every dawn and the scraps of feeling stirred up on my last day could not fit into those lines.

When I look back calmly, I was moving the entire time. I simply had no steady nameplate to set in front of my name and leave standing there.

A Dream That Never Became a Job

There was a time even harder to explain: when I focused solely on drawing, setting aside other possibilities as I worked toward becoming a concept artist.

Day after day I sat in front of a dark screen, correcting lines again and again. I erased the parts I disliked over and over.

I would feel relieved that I seemed to have improved a little, only to come across someone else’s dazzling work and despair at the distance between me and my dream.

I had no way of knowing how much longer I would wander before that time of preparation ended. Even as an unknown with nothing to show for it, I thought that if I someday gained a professional title, the uncertainty I had lived through might acquire a respectable medal too.

But I never became a part of that world.

If I had become someone who made a living by drawing, those hard years might have been remembered as a radiant time of preparation, bravely endured for a dream. I might have smiled and said that the monitor light that stayed on deep into the night, and the days I fell apart blaming myself because my fingers would not move as I wished, had all been necessary to make me who I am.

But when I turned back before reaching the promised destination, those years were given names like wandering or a gap.

The bitterest part was not only that the world did not count those years. I could not defend them properly either.

When someone asked how I’d been, I would answer with a self-mocking edge, “I wasted a few years preparing to be an artist.”

It was not entirely wrong; there was so much disappointment and regret in those years. If I could turn time back, there are certainly days I would want to spend completely differently.

Strangely, an outcome changes not only how things look now but even the name of time already past. Before long, I too was using that name to diminish the years I had lived.

That does not mean I want to dress those years up as the groundwork for where I am today. What feels like a waste still feels painfully so, and what failed remains a failure. But even then, a person’s life was still there, breathing.

Having Work the World Can See

Now I make my living maintaining automated traffic equipment. I once tried to draw imagined worlds on a screen; now I travel the roads, checking cameras, radar and the equipment beside them.

Joining a small company did not make every anxiety in my life disappear, and I have no idea whether this will be the last workplace of my life.

Still, I no longer have to stumble before the casual question, “What do you do?” I have a company to return to, work I am responsible for, and a seat that will still be waiting for me next week.

That is probably why Mom’s joy was so bright.

So I did not bother correcting the finally she let out that day, and I have no intention of arguing with it later.

Mom has her ‘finally,’ spoken in relief, and I have time that one word cannot fully explain.

I would only like to add a small, quiet footnote to that sentence.

I did not start working at twenty-nine. It was only at twenty-nine that I got a business card that meant I no longer had to explain at length how I had spent those years.