Lost in Inyeon
My heart whispers fine stories to my soul about time and love. I eavesdrop on their benevolent conversations, and I too, whisper of inyeon.
I cannot help but lose myself in an irrevocable lulling lift at my soul, begging to whisk me away in its fiercely delicate arms and the caress of my heart. My heart whispers fine stories to my soul about time and love. I eavesdrop on their benevolent conversations, and I too, whisper of inyeon.
Inyeon, In Korean tradition, is the concept of karmic ties between souls—the thread that pulls people toward each other across time, and lives. Every stranger brushing past you on the street, even if your clothes brush past each other, is a story you once began. Each stranger holds a personal weight in relation to you. "If two people get married, they say it's because there have been 8,000 layers of inyeon over 8,000 lifetimes" (My Sassy Girl, 2001).
I can’t stop marveling at how gently this idea wraps love in a shimmer of fate. It makes everything feel purposeful, enchanted—like love isn’t random at all, but a soft echo calling us home.
I feel deeply inclined to savor this. To feel the threads of my soul surrender and collapse completely into this concept. I have always believed there is a deeper layer to love than ‘right person, right time’. After all, time is not random, time is not a coincidence. It is the conversation channels where we meet whatever higher power we believe in.
How simple minded of us to have diminished the magic of love—the ultimate human complexity. We have twisted, turned, and chewed the poor thing up. We spit it out at the faces of the people we love most—this half deformed thing, sloppy and misconfigured—then expect something pristine to glisten off their faces in return.
We demand our partner to show us the love we yearn for, yet we set them up to fail. We do not give them the tools to succeed in the idea that ‘if they are our true love, they will understand without being told’. Yet, in Inyeon there has been this silent communication for 8,000 turns of time. This silent dance in which you trust without knowing, that at 7,999 times, you will brush past this person once more. That for 8,000 moments have been shared, perhaps unbeknownst, but unwaveringly pure.
This beautiful perspective brings back the magic we so often forget. The magic is simply this: someone chooses to love you every day. That someone, without hesitation, joins your life and devotes themselves to loving you.
Love is not a coincidence, but a strategic dance that must take more than one lifetime to complete.
My mom told me she believes that my boyfriend and I have been together in another life, but our relationship didn’t survive. She thinks the reason we are so fond of each other now, is because we lost each other in a past life and something in us remembers.
Sometimes, I feel it: the ache, the heartbreak, the fear. Maybe this is self inflicted. But I cannot help but think that having learned about inyeon a couple days later means something. I feel, at times, as if I am screaming across timelines to myself begging to treasure this love to the fullest. I am certain he is the love of my life—but I do not have that same certainty in the grace of time.
I love entanglement, parallels, uncovering the confusing bits that make perfect nonsense. This is exactly that.
I touch My Love often, hoping to preserve the memory of daily closeness. To feel his shirt against his body, his sun-warmed arms, his hands cold from the car’s air conditioning. I never know when it will all disappear—when I’ll no longer have access to this quiet luxury. I hug him often, just in case time travel is real and my body is the only vessel I can send, one I can’t control (because control would distort the projection of time). This way, I can be certain that I will touch him again. That I will hold him.
Of course someone like me will be inclined to believe in inyeon.
I look at My Love and I see pure beauty: I see him for himself, and I see us. I see us over a thousand lifetimes, in a thousand different roles. Perhaps once, I smelled his cologne, and maybe it still lingers in my lungs. Perhaps one time I served him a coffee in the wee hours of the morning, and maybe it still pumps in his blood.
I hope to love My Love so deeply that he still feels it when we’re strangers again in the next life.
