Lemon

by Kwon Yeo-Sun

The imagination is just as painful as reality. No, it’s more painful. After all, what you imagine has no limit or end.

Life begins without reason and ends without reason.

Rather than try to find the real culprit, the detective would have considered whom he could—or should—crush and turn into the culprit. And that’s exactly what he tried to do.

Her beauty was urgent, precarious, like the piercing wail of a speeding ambulance. I could not look away.

I would have had nothing to say, other than to mention her terrible beauty that would send a shock both big and small through me each time.

her laughter which always told me exactly where she was sitting, without me having to look.

Though we were only two years apart, whenever I saw her, I wondered if I’d also been as full of life when I was her age, and I, like an old woman, couldn’t help but sink into sadness.

The kind of scene she described—that’s probably what I’d wanted. And that’s why I was feeling stunned and confused and ashamed. I had the sudden urge to lash out at Da-on, just as you’d want to kick an injured dog that had growled at you. Though I knew it wasn’t right, I wanted to say something to hurt Da-on. I wanted to attack her, because she’d attacked me.

Since both Mother and I were falling at a very slow speed, I didn’t realize we were falling at first.

Lacking the most basic thought that we needed to climb out of the well, we lay face down in the dank darkness, as if dead, for a long time.

Her voice was like trickling water or the song of a bird. Things barely heard, like a gentle breeze that grazes your ear, a sound so lovely it could cut your heart, a sound that faded the more you strained to hear it.

Da-on had walked this path for a long time. She had mulled over these thoughts until no rough edges remained, to the extent that her views on death seemed more terrifying, more resigned, than ones held by those on death’s doorstep.

“Death turns us into junk. In the blink of an eye, we become meaningless, like scraps.”

Does life leave only misery behind? Could the fact that we’re alive—the fact that we’re in this life where joy and terror and peace and danger mingle—couldn’t that itself be the meaning of life?

Couldn’t each moment we’re living now be the meaning of life?