My last evening in Korea, two days before the move to Vietnam

The lift in my building has gold walls and mirrors on three sides, and in all the years I lived there I never once looked at myself in them. That evening I did. The camera was on my chest and I had tilted it up to check the frame, and there I was, hair still damp from the shower, pressing one eyebrow with a finger like it might come off. Two days left. I had not said that out loud to anyone yet.

Making faces at the lift mirror

I had told myself I would film the last evening properly. Not the packing, not the suitcase on the floor with the zip that only closes if you sit on it. Just the walk out of the building and whatever happened after. So the Pocket 3 went on before I locked the door, and the first thing it recorded was me pulling faces at a gold mirror while the floor numbers counted down.

The corridor on my floor has the same pale grey door it has always had, with a card lock and a paper note taped beside the frame that I walked past for years without reading. The fire cabinet next to it has a red bell I have never heard ring. I noticed both that night. Leaving does that. Things you stopped seeing come back for one last look, and they look a little cheap, and you feel bad for thinking so.

The scooter under the pillar

The car park under the building is the cleanest room in it. Blue pipes and pink pipes run along the ceiling in bundles, the floor is painted white with grey arrows, and the pillars are dark blue with white numbers. My kick scooter was leaning where I always leave it, under a pillar by the disabled bay, with the yellow bumper strips on the corner that I have clipped with the handlebar more than once.

There is a small Korean flag sticker on the stem. I put it there ages ago for no reason I can remember, and I stood looking at it a second longer than made sense. The scooter is not coming with me. Neither is the sticker. It is the sort of thing you do not think about until you are standing in a car park at half past nine with a camera on your chest, and then you think about it more than you would like.

I unlocked it and pulled it round, and the camera swung with the handlebar, so the footage from that bit is mostly my hand and the brake cable and the blue paint of the bay. Then the ramp, then the barrier, then up into the air, which at the top of the ramp was the wet kind that sits on your arms and does not move.

One last lap of the neighbourhood

The shops on the main road were still lit. Olive Young with its green circle and the rows of bottles under white light, the coffee place next door with the chairs put away, a red sign glowing on the building above. The pavement was empty. I rode slow, the way you ride when you are not going anywhere in particular and you know it.

I stopped across from Olive Young and looked back at the camera without meaning to, that face you make when you are counting something in your head. What I was counting was how many times I had walked in there late at night for a toothbrush because I had forgotten again. A lot. I had a grin I did not plan and I let it sit there.

Further down, the traffic lights at the end of the street were all green in a row, and past them was a stretch of brick paving in front of a car showroom, white cars behind the glass, weeds pushing up between the bricks where nobody had bothered. That is where I got off. I stood on the bricks and looked at the lights and the overpass behind them and thought about how none of it was going to look like this again, because next time I saw it I would be a visitor.

Walking the road and the green lights

A friend met me there, in a light blue football shirt, and walked half a step ahead of me along the road at the edge of the neighbourhood. There is no pavement worth the name out there. Just the shoulder, a double yellow line, and a fence on the far side with faded banners tied to it. The streetlights are far apart and the sky between them was the grey of a screen that has gone to sleep. On the other side of the fence there was a raised road or a rail line, I could not tell which in the dark, and I realised I had never once wondered.

I do not remember what we talked about, which is probably the point. It was the kind of walk where you both know the subject and step around it, and the stepping around is the conversation. At one point they cupped a hand to their face and laughed at something, and the camera caught the back of their head and the ear and not much else, which is the way I want it.

Then the boardwalk. There is a wooden walkway that runs between a bamboo hedge and the brick side of a building, with green lights on top of every fence post and short flights of steps where the ground rises. I had used it as a shortcut for years without thinking of it as anything. That night, with the green lights in a line and the bamboo leaning in and the deck damp under my shoes, it looked like somewhere I had never been. Leaves on the boards. One white floodlight at the foot of the wall so bright it turned the next few metres into a photograph.

My friend went up the steps ahead of me and got smaller under the lights. I stopped for a moment at the bottom, which the camera recorded as a long still shot of steps, and then I went up too.

That is where the footage ends. Not at the door. Not at the suitcase with the bad zip. On a wooden walkway with green lights, going up, two days before I got on a plane to Vietnam.