From Seoul to You

Hi. I’m Melody.

And welcome to From Seoul to You, a new part of the Melody of Her Seoul universe.

For almost fifteen years, Seoul has been one of the most important places in my life.

It has been home, even when it didn’t feel like home.

It has been exciting, lonely, overwhelming, beautiful, frustrating, magical, and sometimes all of those things within the same week.

But Seoul gave me something else, too.

Stories.

So many stories.

Some are about romance.

Some are about friendship.

Some are about the strangers you meet when you’re thousands of miles away from everyone you’ve ever known.

Others are about getting lost—sometimes literally, sometimes in ways that take much longer to find your way back from.

From Seoul to You was born from two things that have always been important to me: relationships and Seoul.

Here, you’ll find fictional stories about love, connection, heartbreak, friendship, culture shock, immigration, loneliness, and finding yourself in a city that can sometimes make you feel completely invisible—and other times make you feel like anything is possible.

Some stories will be romances.

Others might be about learning to live with your own thoughts. Finding yourself. Starting over. Navigating mental health struggles. Or discovering who you are when you’ve moved halfway around the world and suddenly realize that nobody around you knows the person you used to be.

At its heart, this project will largely explore the Western expat and immigration experience in Seoul.

But I want to be clear about something.

This is only one perspective among many.

There is no single experience of living in Korea.

The experience you have in Seoul can be shaped by where you come from, why you moved there, your race, language, age, career, relationships, finances, personality, and a thousand other things.

Two people can live on the same street in Seoul and have completely different stories to tell.

These are simply some of mine to imagine.

I loved writing when I was younger.

As a teenager, writing was where I disappeared into other worlds—and sometimes where I understood my own a little better.

Somewhere along the way, I lost that spark.

Life became busy. Work became important. Content creation took over. There was always something to film, edit, post, or plan.

And writing somehow became something I used to do.

But lately, I’ve been coming back to myself.

I’m home now and taking the time to recuperate after several difficult health challenges. For the first time in a long time, I’m being forced to slow down.

And somewhere in that quiet, I found the part of me that missed writing.

The girl who used to create characters and stories just because she wanted to know what happened next.

So I’m writing again.

And I’m starting here.

From Seoul to You is a collection of stories inspired by a city that changed my life—and by the relationships, mistakes, coincidences, heartbreaks, and unexpected moments that can happen when you leave everything familiar behind.

The stories here are fictional.

But the feelings behind them are real.

Welcome.

I hope you’ll stay for a while.

From Seoul to You.