Can I Go to Your Room Now, Unnie?

🎼A Room of One’s Own_Lucia

When I was young, I wanted to grow up quickly. Hearing that I was mature or adult-like for my age always made me feel pleased and wonderful. Now that I really should be an adult, lately I feel increasingly distant from adulthood, like an unripe person, and it’s confusing. Can I truly be more of an adult than my friends who drive smoothly to their destinations, or those preparing for their second act of life after promising marriage, or my younger siblings who find their own studios and manage their households? As I approach the threshold of my 30s, I feel lately that I haven’t achieved or accomplished as much as I thought I would. At times like these, I pull out Lucia, Shim Gyu-seon’s “Recipe for Becoming an Adult” and listen to it. Just as this unnie says, if I add a moderate amount of sugar to heavy cinnamon and zesty lemon, boil it with red longing, and take a sip, I feel like I might become a little more adult.

I don’t have an older sister (unnie). I’m the eldest daughter with two younger brothers. I’m used to solving things myself rather than being taken care of, and I grew up independently. Sometimes I wished I had an older sibling who walked the path of adulthood before me, to lighten my load a bit. If I had the choice of an unnie, I would pick Shim Gyu-seon without hesitation. Coincidentally, the album <A Room of One’s Own> was released when I was twenty, and it felt like a neatly organized manual from a kind-hearted unnie, detailing the various emotions one would feel and endure upon becoming an adult. On days when the adult world felt overwhelming and I wanted to act childish, I would listen to one song from the album as if receiving a prescription. Then, unnie would offer mature comfort with a voice like a cashmere sweater pulled from an old drawer in early winter.

An unnie who has become strong after passing through the first and second rooms on her journey to adulthood, experiencing raw, unadorned love and pain. That unnie, finally reaching her own room, whispers that it’s okay not to be a perfect adult, that a good adult simply needs to keep the room of their heart open and say “hello, hello” to those who come and go, greeting and bidding farewell.

Among the countless beautiful and valuable things with which humans can waste their lives,

I chose music, songs, and unfiltered emotions,

full of impurities, that simply express themselves.

But today, I am a person without sorrow, a person who knows no tears.

And I will gladly continue to live this life, making a mess of it.

This is a sweetness without carbonation or calories, containing not an ounce of guilt or responsibility,

so I gladly allow it.

Please, would you waste this?

Lucia, Shim Gyu-seon.

Such a dazzling unnie, with such a beautiful outlook on life…

Can I go to your room now, unnie?