In a Single Hamburger

These days, I have been ordering hamburgers quite often.

When I lived in the United States, my mother and I would occasionally go to a drive-through together to buy hamburgers.

I was in second grade at the time. My parents had just divorced, and we had recently immigrated to America.

Even now, simply recalling those moments fills me with happiness.

I remember waking up one weekend morning and hearing my mother call to me from outside the window, asking if I wanted to go get hamburgers.

Memories are inevitably romanticized with time, but I miss that particular moment more than I can express.

We had just settled in America after the divorce, and everything around us was unfamiliar and confusing. Yet when it came to that one hamburger, I could feel a kind of pure, uncomplicated happiness.

These days, when I return home from school every two weeks, I head straight to my own small apartment.

I do not have a room of my own at my family home, and my younger siblings are so noisy that I can hardly get a proper night's sleep there.

Naturally, I have fewer opportunities to talk with my mother or even see her face.

And there is even less time for us to go to a drive-through together.

Perhaps that is why I often feel a certain sense of guilt.

I should talk to my mother more. I should spend more time with her.

But having only recently emerged from adolescence, I have grown rather fond of this selfish comfort.

Perhaps that is also why memories of my time in America have been returning to me so frequently lately.

My maternal grandmother, my mother, [쉼이있는], and me.

We had immigrated to a country we knew almost nothing about, so we had no choice but to rely on one another, and especially on my mother.

Looking back now, I realize just how extraordinary she was.

She was not particularly fluent in English, nor did she have a husband to depend on. How did she manage to survive in that unfamiliar country while taking care of a family of four?

Where did that strength come from?

And will I be able to inherit even a fraction of it and endure my own life studying abroad?

At the same time, I sometimes worry that once I leave to study overseas, seeing my mother will become truly difficult.

Of course, studying abroad is bound to come with such challenges. But for someone like me, who already spends relatively little time with his mother, the prospect feels especially burdensome.

My mother is not the kind of parent who pays particularly close attention to every detail of my life.

Perhaps because I have always been good at managing things on my own, she has never felt the need to worry too much about me.

Even so, there are times when I wish she would visit me at school more often.

When all my friends go out with their families while I remain lying alone in my room, I cannot help feeling a little bitter.

Yet I hesitate to tell my mother how I feel because I know just how busy she is.

Since opening her own practice, she has been working seven days a week. I know very well that she is far too exhausted to make time for frequent visits to my school.

Even when she apologizes for not being able to come and sends money for snacks for my classmates, I cannot shake off that bitter feeling.

I feel guilty because she feels guilty toward me.

Ultimately, I have decided to choose the discomfort of being together over the selfish comfort of being alone.

Even if I do not have a room of my own, I want to choose to spend time with my mother and see her tired face before the much greater separation of studying abroad arrives.

A hamburger, after all, is nothing special.

It is an ordinary food that I can eat whenever I want.

And yet, why is it that every time I eat one, memories of America return to me?

Perhaps it is because a single hamburger holds within it the few precious memories I share with my mother, the bitterness I carry, and the fears I have about the future.

I want to ask my mother if we can go to a drive-through together.

I suppose I should order hamburgers more often.