Both and Neither (Pt. II)

(For pt. I see here)

    Sometime last year when my mom took Warden and I out for lunch, she brought up the idea of travel - how nice it would be if she could take me to Korea to meet her siblings, see the cities, the countryside, the ocean. I reminded her that my paperwork was inadequate - that if I had maybe just one or two more pieces of identification to prove I was a citizen for the process of getting a passport, that it would be possible. I paused, turning to Warden with a joking smile.
    “Actually, now that I think of it, if I were to get married to an American, in addition to my other papers the marriage certificate would probably be enough for me to get a new passport.”
    Though Warden and I laughed, my mom became very thoughtful. “Yes,” she said, thinking: “Yes, that would work. About… three years from now, that would be a good time to travel.”
    “No pressure,” Warden quipped, but we’ve been talking about it ever since - everyone from both of our families views it as an inevitability that we’ll marry, and though we joke and pretend it’s only a maybe, we both talk about it the same way, dreaming of our future together. As strange as it feels to me, one day going to Korea has become a possibility again.

    I decided that I needed to take learning the language seriously, and subscribed to a website that taught it (though admittedly I don‘t study as hard as I should). Excited and grateful that all the resources I needed to teach myself the language and the history of Korea were now at my fingertips (not to mention free or very cheap) I also started researching the culture of the country that had led to me, and was shocked by what I found.