Jun 14th, 2001
Departure from Seoul
And now I know that no one could have loved me like she did and that is probably the most important thing I can take from my experience. If you don’t know why, then it’s probably impossible for me to tell you because it won’t make any sense to you.
It’s not something that you can really come out and say because that would defeat the whole purpose of why it happened. How can I describe how she looked at me while I was sleeping? Or the way that she would stroke my hair in a way that would remind me of being a kid again and for a moment in time, everything was perfect and I could have died if it meant remembering that moment for eternity.
Or how despite all the shit she could find a way to chip away at my muddled soul until she found something inside of me that was worth recovering? Or how she was essentially the most singular wonderful thing that could have happened to me?
Waking up on a Sunday morning with her next to me, her smooth warmth pressed against mine, our mingling essence sparking me to consciousness of life in a delicately rare manner, superimposing images of childhood on existing frames of reality while lazily hovering my fingers over the small of her back, smelling the faded perfume interwoven with cigarette smoke from the previous night, that pain tingled fog in my head spreading into peaceful sleepiness drenched with her affection, opaquely aware of her soothing brightness over me.
It was all those different things for which I had been searching the Earth. I found it and I never realized it until it had passed me by. Transient statues of glorified life bludgeoned me into a sculpture of distorted proportions that was incapable of lucidity. They had pounded my eyes until my vision flew multitudinously and I became one of those insects upon that hill in Kang-Chun, living and dying in the breadth of a glance, twirling around life frantically until the dizziness became overwhelming and I was forced to immerse within myself.
One you are completely inside, it is the same as death: just one continuous sheet of black consciousness. Boredom turns to fear turns to hate turns to boredom and that’s when you realize what you had and didn’t realize, while you were concerned with the pursuit of glory you neglected happiness and you are left alone with nothing. Sitting immersed in dark, you begin to dwell on everything and anything. You see that energy that was once inside you, compelling you to dance and scream and cry and laugh and shout and fight and love and live and die, slowly fade as you push it away because, as you think to yourself, that is what growing up is about.
Sitting at your desk, you hear a song and begin to hum and something starts to grow: a resonance of your soul, but that was yesterday and now is today - time does not smile at soul you tell yourself, you grow up and see the real world you tell yourself, when you have people depending on you, you have to buckle down you tell yourself, I’m not a kid anymore you tell yourself. You tell yourself these things every day and push and grind and before you know it, you have arrived but where have your arrived?
Before you know it, you have more money than you could count in five lifetimes, you have vacations on the beach, and you have beautiful things. But you have lost life in the exchange and you realize that you got the short end of the stick. Frantically, in a desperate attempt to win back some of your chips, you hurl yourself into the atmosphere with reckless abandon. But it is too late, when you come to earth, you are dust.
Sensations flow from you like water until all that is left is consciousness. Visions pass like clouds in a state of ambivalent nihilism as you realize what had actually happened to you. Anger turns to apathy and slowly, you accept your fate - to die engulfed by boredom. Resigned acceptance of death seeps into your consciousness and you just sit there waiting for nothing.
Then, a very strange thing begins to happen: out of the corner of your eye, a spark flickers. As you tell yourself that it was a delusion, another spark flickers. As you watch intently, the sparks increase until you realize that they are revealing your black panel to be a window. You weren’t in darkness, you were just in a place that lacks light. Shapes and forms appear before you and then sensation reemerges.
Ready to do it over again?
