Red string tingz

On In-Yun, hula hoops of grief, and a fabric that connects us all

May 09, 2026

“May whatever brought us together keep us apart.”

I wish I wrote that. I heard it two or three years ago, the last line in a message from one ex-lover to another, sent upon learning of the other’s wedding to someone else. The rest of the message was beautiful, some Olivia Dean A Couple of Minutes type shit. But that last line was the one that stayed. Resolute. Resounding.

I randomly think about the unseen realm sometimes. The invisible architecture underneath the things we feel but can’t quite name. The strings that connect us all, the way grief circles us like a hula hoop, the way atoms look like biblically accurate angels, the aura all the youngins talk about farming.

I didn’t plan to write about love again. I know, I know — last post was basically a love letter to love letters. My bad. But I think I’m actually writing about something bigger than love. I’m writing about the fabric underneath it.

I have a theory that a significant number of people had their most unhinged situationship start and probably end in 2023, and have been quietly rebuilding ever since. Whatever love was in the air that year was an audacious variant. Even the movies mirrored the shit. Celine Song dropped Past Lives (click the link to watch for free) and terrorized the lovers of the world with lines like “You dream in a language I can’t understand. It’s like there’s this whole place inside you I can’t go” and the quieter gut punch: “Getting married is hard for idealistic people like you.” Barry Keoghan glamorized eating box with red sauce in Saltburn and the perks of being a city boy. But the concept that stuck was In-Yun. Nora, Past Lives‘ protagonist, explains it like this:

“There is a word in Korean. In-Yun. It means ‘providence’ or ‘fate’. But it’s specifically about relationships between people. I think it comes from Buddhism and reincarnation. It’s an In-Yun if two strangers even walk by each other in the street and their clothes accidentally brush. Because it means there must have been something between them in their past lives. If two people get married, they say it’s because there have been 8,000 layers of In-Yun over 8,000 lifetimes.”

I’m fascinated by the invisible ways we’re connected to the people we were “meant to meet.” When things end in romantic situations, people often think, “Will I ever find someone like this again?” Valid. I’ve thought it too. But that’s just scratching the surface. When we’re healed enough to see it clearly, it’s really just an attempt to understand the end of something. The therapy’s gotta be working because I’ve been finding more understanding in the acceptance.

It’s even redefined the “end.” It feels more like an addition to a spiritual mausoleum of sorts. Words, sounds, smells, pulling you back to moments only acknowledged in the spirit.

Damn. I hope I’m making sense. I haven’t been on here in a min.

On Nights, Frank says, “Did you call me from a séance? You are from my past life.” He might be talking romantic love with that one, but I mean relationships in the widest sense. Friendships. Family. Anybody who made you give a fuck, or whatever your definition of lasting impression looks like.

I went to a screening and talk at Gladys recently to watch Exhibiting Forgiveness, followed by a conversation with Andre Holland. He said: “Grief is like a circle. The inciting moment is a dot on that circle. Over time, the circle grows larger — but you will always run into the dot. Hopefully, as the circle grows, so does your capacity to hold it.”

(Quick note: Exhibiting Forgiveness is a heavy one. It’s about loss, forgiveness, and art. I recommend it, but it might make your eyes well up.)

The quote was offered in the context of Holland’s character grieving and forgiving his parents, respectively. But it can also speak to the breadth of grief — lost friendships, lovers, homes, moments, the life you thought you wanted. Just imagine all those things as different dots on this invisible circle. Shit, imagine it as a hula hoop, but you don’t gotta move your hips like Aunt Viv. My Virgo brain wants to color-code the dots — red for love, black for death, blue for places, yellow for friends (I like that one, the yellow feels fitting).

I sometimes hesitate to write about loss on here because I don’t want to be part of triggering someone’s dot to draw closer on their circle. This post isn’t really about loss, though. It isn’t about love either, even though I’m waxing pretty poetically as is. It’s the fabric, guys. The fabric underneath it all.

Okay. Hold two images.

The first: the hula hoop around you, lined with little dots.

The second: a thread, however long, whatever color, whatever material you want, visible only to you, running from wherever on your body outward toward people you haven’t met yet. People you were supposed to meet. People you may meet in another life, perhaps.

Does your culture have a word for it? A visual? I’m curious. Doesn’t have to be romantic. Could be ancestral, spiritual, something your grandmother just quietly believed.

Yaa Gyasi does something similar in Homegoing. The novel follows two sisters who never meet, and their descendants across eight generations — Ghana to Mississippi, the Civil War to Harlem. Their mother gives them each a black stone necklace. One gets passed down through the generations. The other is lost the night one sister is captured into slavery, left behind in a dungeon, never retrieved. Two threads from the same source, one carried forward, one buried. Both felt.

That’s the unseen realm. Not mystical, exactly. Just the part of us that remembers what our minds have forgotten and what our eyes have yet seen. May never see.

Still figuring out what my corner of the internet is and where this blog fits in the bigger picture (me trying to say rebrand without saying rebrand), but I missed writing here, so here we are. Life’s been crazy busy, good and bad. But better. Purposeful. More love, more long walks, more great moments with great people, sometimes more bullshit. Comme ci, comme ça.

This week’s music video has no music. It’s the Eames’ Powers of Ten, written and directed by married industrial designers Charles and Ray Eames in 1977. Starts at a picnic, pulls back until the universe is just a scale, then plunges inward all the way to a single proton. If you watch, you can imagine all the invisible shit.