We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively—brazenly—hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?

The thing is, every time it snows, it comes back. I try not to think about it, but it keeps coming back. So in my dream that night, to see your face whited out by snow…as soon as I opened my eyes to the dawn, I thought, my baby’s dead. Aieee, all I could think was that you were dead.

We Do Not Part, I answered. Approaching me with the kettle and two mugs in her hands, Inseon echoed the words. We Do Not Part.

If Inseon had come to me as a spirit, that would mean I was alive, and if Inseon was alive, that would mean I was the apparition. Could the same warmth be spreading through both our bodies at once?

What did those rebels ever do, he’d say, except kill some cops and take revenge on innocent families, then run and hide in the hills while two or three hundred souls were slaughtered in retaliation in their villages alone? All to build their earthly paradise, but what kind of paradise is hell?

After surviving that hell, would he still have been the kind of person who made choices we could understand?

Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away. Over what was no longer human—no. Over what remained human even now.

I remember the feeling of aching love, how it seeped into my skin. Clogging the marrow in my bones and shriveling my heart…That was when I realized. That love was a terrible agony.