“A piece of chocolate at 6 AM in Tainan, and Camus’s The Stranger.”

“A piece of chocolate at 6 AM in Tainan, and Camus’s The Stranger.”

Mornings start a little earlier here in Tainan.

Elementary schools in Taiwan begin at 7:40 a.m., so every day I wake up at 6 a.m. to prepare breakfast.

One egg.

And a small piece of chocolate we saved.

My child and I made a promise: instead of eating chocolate at night, we would save it for the morning.

It’s a small, sweet promise that begins our day.

After sending my child to school and quickly finishing the housework, the day begins again – a day that often feels exactly the same as yesterday.

Today, I picked up an old notebook I had stopped reading long ago.

I am Korean, but I met my Taiwanese husband in the United States.

We married there, and now we live in Taiwan.

I spent my teenage years in Korea.

My twenties in the United States.

And since my thirties, I have been living in Taiwan.

Sometimes I realize that in all three places – Korea, the U.S., and now Taiwan – I have always felt like a stranger.

Even in the places I once called home.

There are moments when that quiet loneliness appears unexpectedly.

And today, it felt as if it echoed perfectly in a sentence from The Stranger by Albert Camus:

“It occurred to me that anyway, one more Sunday was over… and that, really, nothing had changed.”

Today, that sentence sinks deeply into my heart.

But I still believe something else.

Even if nothing seems to change,

if we place one small dot every day,

one day those dots will form a picture.

How was your day today?

Even in an ordinary day where nothing seems different,

I hope you continue doing your best in your own quiet way.