We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

I’m sure the last three to four years of my life as recorded there must resemble a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife’s edge. A body desiring to live. A body pricked and nicked. A body spurning, embracing, clinging. A body kneeling. A body entreating. A body seeping blood or pus or tears.

Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease—so easily, and by a single decision.

That is how death avoided me. Like an asteroid thought to be on a collision course avoids Earth by a hair’s breadth, hurtling past at a furious velocity that knows neither regret nor hesitation. I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.

When had everything begun to fall apart? Where was the fork in the road? Which rift and which break had been the tipping point?

There are people who brandish their sharpest weapon as they are taking their leave. We know this from experience. They do this so as to slice the tenderest part of the person they are leaving with the precision that proximity grants us.

Beauty—but the wiring inside me that would sense beauty was dead or failing.

There are people who actively change the course of their own life. They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So that in time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.

Her words and gestures revealed a quiet strength, which made you believe that all our acts had purpose; that even when it led to failure, every attempt we made was meaningful.

It can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness. I thought about how difficult it can be to tell these emotions apart on the basis of facial expressions and gestures, about how the person in question may struggle to distinguish these feelings in themselves.

But when does the day end for a bird?

Vivid memories play out before me. In no particular order, and without context. Like a thousand dancers spilling onto the stage at once to each perform a different movement. Their bodies, suspended in their poses, shimmer like crystals.

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?

Dreams are terrifying things. No—they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t even aware of.

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.