Every velvety tremor from that glockenspiel
ripples these scissored dreams further from the deepest point
of this deepest blue sea.
I imagined I heard a faint choir linger over the whitecaps,
resonate, and then mercifully evacuate.
I will not listen to this song again for fear.
Fear of drowning,
flooded with impossible memories
from an impossible youth.
I knew you then
as one knows a shadow.
and years adrift, apart
have left nothing but a shadow,
endlessly eluding my trembling grasp.
I am awash with memories,
fleeting, fragile, kinetic memories,
of Seodaemun, Sinchon, Ilsan, Gangnam, Jongno, you.
My name is Michael Sean Gallagher. I am a Lecturer in Digital Education at the Centre for Research in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. I am Co-Founder and Director of Panoply Digital, a consultancy dedicated to ICT and mobile for development (M4D); we have worked with USAID, GSMA, UN Habitat, Cambridge University and more on education and development projects. I was a researcher on the Near Futures Teaching project, a project that explores how teaching at The University of Edinburgh unfold over the coming decades, as technology, social trends, patterns of mobility, new methods and new media continue to shift what it means to be at university. Previously, I was the Research Associate on the NERC, ESRC, and AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund sponsored GCRF Research for Emergency Aftershock Forecasting (REAR) project. I was an Assistant Professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (한국외국어대학교) in Seoul, Korea. I have also completed a doctorate at University College London (formerly the independent Institute of Education, University of London) on mobile learning in the humanities in Korea.
