We Do Not Part

by Han Kang

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.

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.

Snow had an unreality to it. Was this because of its pace or its beauty?

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.

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

I knew about the organization, how back in 1948, after the first government was established, whole swathes of people were categorized as left-wingers in need of education and made to join the League so that they might benefit from its purported goal to convert, protect, and guide. If someone in your family had ever been in the audience of a political talk, you had to join. The government had set quotas, and many people were enrolled by village and neighborhood heads intent on meeting those quotas, or signed up voluntarily after hearing about the rice and fertilizers they would receive. Entire families were enrolled as well, meaning its “members” included women, children, and the elderly, and when war broke out in the summer of 1950, everyone on the list was preventively detained, then summarily executed. The estimated number of people killed and buried in secret around the country is said to be between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand.

I understand why Inseon denied any intentions of making a film about these events. The smell of blood-soaked clothes and flesh rotting together, the phosphorescence of bones that have been decaying for decades will be erased. Nightmares will slip through fingers. Excessive violence will be removed. Like what was omitted from the book I wrote four years ago. The flamethrowers that soldiers deployed on unarmed citizens in the streets. The people rushed to emergency rooms on improvised stretchers, burn blisters on their faces, their bodies doused in white paint from head to toe to prevent identification.

In the suffocating stillness, I wondered: Is this it? The brink of a gaping trench opening up below the abyssal plain, the very bottom of the deep sea where nothing emits light?

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.