We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.

Strange, the sensation of contact with a living thing, how it can remain imprinted on the skin. As if touch alone can singe and break flesh.

As ever, pain isolates me. I am trapped in the torturous moments my own body generates second by second. I am dislodged from the time prior to pain, from the world of the not-ill.

I wonder about the bird. Inseon had told me that to save her I had to get her water within the day. But when does the day end for a bird?

I looked at the candle, observed how the flame soaked up the rippling pool of melted wax through the wick as it burned. Its fire was small and calm, not at all like the violent blaze inside the workshop stove. There was a bluish heart undulating deep within it. Like a seed with a beating pulse. Each pulse seemed to ripple out to its flickering orange edges.

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

I sense something oozing from the page, something viscous that trickles out caked and thick like red-bean juk, and blood-metallic, following the candle’s trajectory.

How much further into these depths can we go? Is this the silence that lies below the ocean in my dream?

In lieu of an answer, I placed my hand over the photo of the bones. 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.

She stroked the back of my head, my shoulders, my back. 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.

She spoke to me less and less, and the words she did say were sporadic and scattered, like islands. Then she stopped saying even yes or no in response, and with that her desires and requests seemed to vanish too. Still, when I placed a peeled mandarin in her hand, she would split it and give me back the bigger half out of lifelong habit, and smile. At which my heart would fall open. I remember wondering if I’d feel that way too toward my child, if I were to have a child.

At some point, as the materials piled up and began to take on a clearer form, I could feel myself changing. To the point where it seemed nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again…Something