I recently saw people online reviewing songs from John Mayer’s Continuum album when it dawned on me that it will be twenty years since its release this September. Time flies when you’re having life. Continuum was my go-to album when I was down in the dumps back in early 2007. I was seeing this woman named Hyesuk Oh since late 2006. She’s a licensed associate counselor now. I adored Hyesuk then. She was cute, polite and generally soft-spoken. We had plans to meet another one of my friends and his now wife for his birthday at a restaurant in February. I met Hyesuk at one of these New York University labs in Manhattan to walk over to the restaurant. It was a cold evening that day and we were now on the street. I wasn’t sure if I was going in the right direction, so I told Hyesuk that I would go to the corner to see which way we should walk and come back to her. When I came back over to her, she somehow didn’t hear me and thought I just left her alone as if I wasn’t coming back. I told her I just went to the corner to get my bearings.
She started yelling at me about the cold weather and leaving her by herself which wasn’t true at all. I felt so embarrassed by her yelling and when people were laughing at me as they walked by the both of us, that didn’t help things either. She had never yelled at me ever before and became her own version of Gaeddong-nyeo or the dog poop girl in Korea. I wasn’t going to yell back, so I just walked away, feeling pissed and disrespected. I found the restaurant and went there to meet my friend. I wasn’t in a good mood and tried my best not to dampen his birthday dinner. A day or two later, I spoke to Hyesuk on the phone. She apologized for how she treated me that night, but I felt that the apology over the phone was a cop-out and that it should be done face-to-face. That somehow enraged her even more, and she started ranting about bringing a woman or someone with her so that when she met me, she wouldn’t be alone around me. She was sounding insane, and that was it for me and her. I was mad and sad at the same time, but the songs on Continuum made those weeks ahead easy to digest, and eventually it was a blessing in disguise to get away from Hyesuk. I was on the cusp of meeting a beautiful soul that May of the same year. And Continuum revived and revitalized my broken heart and my broken soul nineteen years ago.
