School started up again last Thursday. From Friday through Sunday we were off on an orientation retreat just outside Seoul. Coming home this afternoon, cotton clouds drifting across a blue sky, traffic moving at an easy pace, I cracked a cold beer and tried to savor the small pocket of the weekend I had left. That’s when I saw RM had posted a letter to ARMY from the City of Angels. The Weverse translation, never the strongest, was especially off this time, so I hope my translation below brings you closer to what he meant.
RM opens with an honorific greeting you almost never use unless you’re writing to grandparents or people you deeply respect: 무탈하신지요 (mu-tahl-hah-sin-ji-yo). Literally, it asks, “Are you free of worry and illness?” The casual version is 무탈하냐 (mu-tahl-hah-nya), but we would normally never say that to a friend or an equal. I’ve only ever used it, once in a blue moon, when writing to my old SNU professors. I think he chose it because he’s genuinely worried about ARMY in this record-breaking summer heat across the globe, and because he wants to show real respect.
In the third paragraph he writes, “어디론가 부지런히 움직이고 있다,” literally, “I’m busily moving toward somewhere.” What he’s really saying: I’m not sure exactly where this (whatever I’m doing currently) leads, but I’m working hard. It’s a poetic way of saying he’s immersed in many things he can’t quite name yet.
In the fourth paragraph, he reaches for the seldom-used word, 허허롭다 (huh-huh-lohp-dah) (empty, lonely), but he doesn’t mean he’s slumped in sorrow in his rented house. It’s more the hush that settles after work: he comes back, sits by himself, and the quiet—so unlike barracks noise or the bustle with the guys from one or two until eight or nine—feels unfamiliar. He’s not desolate; he’s adjusting to solitude, and the stillness is simply hard to take in.
By the fifth paragraph, in the quietness of the house, RM deepens that thought in the third paragraph (“busily working toward something”), pulling in science and even religion to map the state of mind he’s in. Turning to the question of self, he invokes the Buddha, reflects on 인연 (in-yuhn) (connection, relationship), not just “connections,” but the Buddhist idea of causes and conditions (pratītyasamutpāda). In that view, nothing stands alone: what we call a “self” is a pattern that appears when countless causes and conditions come together, and it changes as they change. RM wonders if BTS, too, is like that, not a fixed thing, but something that keeps arising anew from the flow among them. This is my favorite part of the letter.
And in the sixth, he brings it home: whatever he’s trying to do right now, what matters is that, even with most of the members now in their thirties (in Korean age), including him, they’re still striving to do something 함께 (hahm-ggeh) (together).
As he always does, he closes by asking what ARMY are up to and telling them how much he misses and loves them. The whole letter reads like a quiet evening of looking back, looking around, and looking ahead, perhaps with a small glass of soju, less ornate than his usual lyrical mode, but still thoughtful and philosophical. RM’s letters are always a pleasure to read.
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Hello. I hope you’re all right, safe and sound.
Summer’s heat is overwhelming.
Two months and a little change have passed since my discharge.
I’m out in Los Angeles, a long way from Seoul,
living with the guys, working and having fun together.
It’s a strangely familiar kind of adventure,
something like Bon Voyage: Pyeongchang.
Odd already, no?
Still, I feel myself moving, busy, toward somewhere.
Being here, I’ve had a lot of time to think.
I get up around ten every morning, work out, eat,
head to work around one or two and leave around eight or nine.
Back at my rented house, I sit in solitude,
and sift through the tenses:
the head-spinning past, present, and future.
Truth is, I can’t grab hold of any single thing.
I’m not exactly laughing or crying;
I’m just running toward somewhere, day by day.
People say the self is a mirage—
Scientists might call it a sum of signals in the brain;
the Buddha would say it’s something born of change and the web of causes and conditions.
It occurred to me: maybe our team is no different,
not a fixed object, but something that keeps arising anew.
In each of our hearts,
“Bangtan” is probably a different scrap of colored paper.
Even I’m not sure what it is, what it was,
in all honesty.
But I do know this: even as I’m now in my thirties,
I want to give myself to this moment,
making something ‘together’ with these friends,
with gratitude.
I’m still feeling my way toward
whatever our next album will be.
The thing I’d let slip for too long,
these hours of being together, far from home,
may it ripen into a kind of beauty.
I write my hope from this summer terrace.
What color are you carrying today?
I miss you.
It’s been a long stretch, hasn’t it?
But when we finally meet again,
it’ll feel like there was never a gap at all.
I mean it.
I’ll fly to you soon.
Until then, I’ll give it everything I’ve got.
I love youuu.