We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

people walked past the window in bodies that looked fragile enough to shatter. 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.

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.

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.

At first, I mistake them for birds. Tens of thousands of white-feathered birds flying right along the horizon. In fact, they are snow clouds scattered by strong gusts of wind over the offing. Snowflakes glisten in the sunlight shining between the clouds. The doubling effect from the light reflecting off the surface of the ocean has created an illusion: white birds sweeping over the sea in a long, shimmering band.

The snow I had seen not even four hours earlier as I left the hospital and climbed into a taxi had resembled countless white threads finely stitching the expanse between asphalt and ashen sky.

Each time the raging winds scatter dark clouds over the offing, sunlight falls on the horizon. Snowflakes resembling a flock of tens of thousands of birds appear like a mirage and sweep over the sea, vanishing with the light.

I can sense a migraine coming on like ice cracking in the distance.

As the snow lands on the wet asphalt, each flake seems to falter for a moment. Then, like a trailing sentence at the close of a conversation, like the dying fall of a final cadence, like fingertips cautiously retreating before ever landing on a shoulder, the flakes sink into the slick blackness and are soon gone.

And with the dispassion that marks people who have long suffered and been tempered by anguish. An equanimity that signals their readiness to withstand whatever misfortune might still be in store, all while remaining vigilant, even in the face of joy and goodwill.

It can be difficult to distinguish forbearance from resignation, sorrow from partial reconciliation, fortitude from loneliness.

People say “light as snow.” But snow has its own heft, which is the weight of this drop of water. People say “light as a bird.” But birds too have their weight.

The scene changes to a shot of the older woman, though I couldn’t tell whether or not she was grasping what her daughter was saying. She sits in her wheelchair, wearing a cardigan the color of rice with mother-of-pearl buttons, and stares absently at the sunlight outside the window.

Sometimes I think about those numbers. And how these places are all islands. Isolated.

Her hands lie small and cold in my palms like two dead birds.

The clear melted wax pooled beneath the flame suddenly overflowed. It whitened instantly and formed new nodes down the pillar.

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

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.