I could finally understand the horrific and cruel clarity of what he considered to be meaningful. The desperation and immense fear that your life, as well as the future to come, hinged on a moment. I could also understand how, in a situation where there was a single person who could kill you but also save you, all your survival instincts would be used toward satisfying that one person.
Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.
Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession. Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too. My parents and their parents’ generations, after surviving the Korean War, had always, just like the generation that survived World War II, set their purpose not to live a human life but to have an animal’s instinct for survival.
Still, understanding and forgiving are completely different things.
He whispered, “Will you tie me?”
I nodded.
“Will you be able to leave after the night is over?” I asked.
“I don’t know.” Then he said, “What are you going to do after I’m gone?”
I couldn’t answer. He asked again. “Will you go back to your country?”
“No,” I said. “I will never go back again.” My own answer surprised me.
Quietly, he said, “Then I will stay here with you.”
“Thank you,” I whispered back.
When I woke up the next morning, he wasn’t with me. I opened the bathroom door. Just as he had looked when he died, he was hanging by the neck from a radiator, his eyes closed.
I tapped him lightly. He opened his eyes.
“Do you want me to untie you?”
His throat was constrained by the cord around it, so he blinked in answer.
As I undid the cord, I listlessly sang along with him.
… If I could make a wish
I wouldn’t know what to say.
What should I wish for
The bad times or the good times
I had no hope anymore for good times, but I didn’t want to wish for bad times, either. I was waiting for something but didn’t know what to hope for. There was no future. All of our survival skills were trapped in the past.
For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts. Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive. That moment is short, but long after it has passed, good times as well as bad slip like sand through their fingers as they meaninglessly repeat and confirm their survival. Those who are unaware of their lives slipping away while they are ensnared in the past—him, his grandfather, his mother, me—are in the end, whether alive or dead, ghosts of the past.
… If I could make one wish
I want to be just a little bit happier
If I’m too happy
I will miss the sadness
I released his neck and wrists.
“How did you do this?” I marveled. “How did you tie your own hands and noose?”
“I thought about it for a long time.” He seemed slightly proud of himself. “I had to do it alone, because if I made a mistake, I wouldn’t die but only get hurt, and that would mean a lot of suffering.”
I hugged him hard. I imagined him alone in that empty apartment, pondering for a long time the most efficient way of hanging himself.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Thank you.”
And he was gone. I was alone in his empty bathroom.
No one asked us, when we were still nameless
Whether we wanted to live or not
Now I wander the big city alone
Looking in doors and windows
Waiting and waiting for something …
There was nothing left for me to wait for.
But there I remained, standing in his bathroom, waiting for someone to miraculously find me, to release me from my ties to this life.