The coast road north of Gangneung ran close to the water for most of its length, close enough that on the left side of the path you could see the sea through the sparse pine trees that lined the shore, their trunks tilted inland from decades of wind, the way trees grew when the dominant force in their lives came consistently from one direction.
We walked at the pace of people who had nowhere to be by any particular time, which was itself a thing worth noting. For eleven months I had moved through the world at the pace of the case — the continuous low-level urgency of work that demanded progress, the way each day contained tasks that required completion and completion led to the next requirement. The pace had become so thoroughly normalized that I had stopped perceiving it as pace and had begun perceiving it simply as the texture of time. Walking as if there were no requirement at the end of the walk was a different experience than I had remembered it being.
