Make Heoni see.

Mom, make Heoni see.
Mom, make Heoni see.
Mom, make Heoni see.

We’re sleeping on the floor.
Okay?
Mom, make Heoni see.
Mom, we’re sleeping, sleeping on the floor.

Happy birthday to you.
Happy birthday.
Happy birthday to you.
Alles Gute für dich. (German: “All the best for you.”)

Mom, I missed you.
Mom, I missed you.
Mom, I missed you.
Mom, I missed you.
Mom, I missed you.
Mom, I missed you.
Mom, I missed you.

Mom.
Mom.
Mom.
Mom.

Mom, did you open your eyes?
(repeated 145 times)

Mom’s eyes… did you open your eyes?
Mom? Mom!!

I put my child to bed every night.

One evening, when my child was about two and a half years old, he stayed awake for hours, resisting sleep. I said, “Mommy’s tired, so I’m going to sleep first. You can sleep when you get sleepy,” and turned my back to him.

Then he burst into tears and said,
“Mom, stay with me. Stay with me. A lion will come and eat you.”

The moment my gaze withdrew, he felt it as absence—and that absence became fear. In his own way of understanding, he invented a story about a scary creature that might make his mother disappear, expressing his fear through imagination.

The next day, I turned on a recorder and captured his words:
“Mom, make Heoni see you.”
“Mom, I missed you.”
“We’re sleeping on the floor.”
“Mom, did you open your eyes?”

These phrases were repeated hundreds of times. Even though I was right beside him, my presence—without a face or gaze—was perceived by him as nothingness.

A large figure, headless and hollow, cradles a smaller being that resembles itself, crouched on the floor. From within the dark, furry form comes the child’s voice, repeating, “Mom, did you open your eyes?”

That voice amplifies the fear of absence, while also becoming the bodily impulse—the trace of existence—that tries to call the vanished presence back into being. The soft texture of the fur and the child’s voice meet at a crossroads of warmth and unease, comfort and tension.

Through childbirth and motherhood, I came to recognize death intensely within the act of caring for life. My child’s existence was always bound to my body—fragile, dependent, and vulnerable to disappearance through my condition, my choices, or even chance.

To conceive, give birth, and care for that life means constantly facing the boundaries between presence and absence, safety and fear, life and dissolution.

This work lies within that tension—between comfort and anxiety, faith and fear, life and death. In our everyday lives, we affirm each other’s existence, yet the shadow of absence always lingers where our gaze rests. That gap of absence, like the child’s voice, reveals the deep, hidden fears that dwell within us.