Nowhere to Be Found

by Bae Suah

So while I was busy not having any conscious thought, I became a cog.

Every now and then I picture a subway train at night packed with people I used to know and random people whom I will meet by chance in some distant future. Most of the people I knew long ago now live their lives without me, and those whom I will meet by chance one day do not know me now.

I was only twenty-four, but I was tired.

Even now I think maybe my family is just a random collection of people I knew long ago and will never happen upon again, and people I don’t know yet but will meet by chance one day.

“What kinds of people commit murder?” “Murderers, I suppose.”

We were too far apart in age to really feel like sisters, and we hadn’t had much opportunity to spend time together as we were growing up.

instead we lived our lives barely aware of each other’s existence.

Being poor or being lonely could be either fortunate or unfortunate, but the truth is that the distinction was meaningless. Whether we were fortunate or not, we were still different, and that’s all there was to it.

After quitting he’d become one of the many ordinary people who failed at everything they tried to do.

He just looked blank sometimes. While everyone else was tormented by a restless anxiety, like the dizziness you feel on a spring day, which made them question what they were doing with their lives, Cheolsu was yawning and working on a crossword puzzle. He knew how to accept the tedium without the ennui.

What makes a relationship special?

Time passed clumsily.

If you gently stroke my lips and the palm of my hand right now, you will find them strangely cold and icy, a feeling of endless distance that even I can sense. Someone once said to me, “You’re so cold that I shake with despair. The whole time we’re together your lips never once flush, and your body is like slippery ice. You have the eyes of a wolf-girl whose heart has never once been moved. When I press my ear to your chest, I hear only wind and emptiness.”

But then I see her: another me passing by like a landscape of inanimate objects outside the window of the empty house quietly collapsing in the rain.

But leave your voice behind; when I come back to this place a hundred years from now, the moment I

open the door a colony of bats and your voice will greet me.”

Every time winter rolls around I find myself longing for things.

Human beings are capable of becoming perfectly pure at some moment in their lives. It doesn’t matter if they’re royalty or literati, middle class, working class, or the lowest class. For many people that moment must be the moment when they are clasping hands with each other. Memory finds its way back through blood, through body heat. Right at that moment. But now is not that moment. Right now doesn’t mean anything at all.

The Rose Garden,

What was real and what was fantasy? And what was it that I really wanted—reality or fantasy?

Up until that moment I’d never really understood sadness. The fierce, mob-like sadness that would come over me, clear and strong. Where did it come from? Was it real? This sadness that crept up and cut through all of my routines and my boredom and my repetition and my drama, like a sliver of glass piercing my flesh and sticking in the soles of my feet?

No one opened my door to check whether I was alive or dead.

You know as well as I do that this is all just theater.

Despite having eaten at the same dinner table with my family long enough to feel ashamed of them and turn red with embarrassment because of them and feel wretched with them and never breathe a word of my own feelings to them, I would in the end encounter that other me in the mirror.

Rain falls on the corpses of time.

She was the only one among us who had hopes for her future.

The prison of class and circumstance.

No one is ever completely innocent.”

You were born with a knife in your heart.

The shadows of the brave receded.

Back then Cheolsu was nowhere to be found, and it would be no different in the future.

Time pushes away that which is intended, rejects that which is rejected, forgets that which is sung about, and is filled with that which it turns its eyes from, such as the white hairs of a loved one.

I do not think of it as a betrayal.

What he had left to me was a long-long-lived frigidity. The stillness of a beautiful, taxidermied want.

In a flash his face twists with fear and desire and disillusion. I work hard to become his fear and desire and disillusion. It comes back simultaneously as my own fear and desire and disillusion. He enjoys seeing another version of himself through me, a version that he could never become.

Clouds drift through my head. Blue sky so deep you’d never know

An hour when even the radio is silenced by rain.

He leaves teeth marks on my arm that will outlast memory.

And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing and survived time.