Nowhere to Be Found

by Bae Suah

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. They walk by apathetically, their faces gloomy beneath the dim lights of the city hall subway station, jostling my shoulders as they pass.

Tired. I was tired. 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.

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.

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.”

I thought about getting mad at her but gave up on the idea. I must have been too tired.

ouch 😣

knew full well that what my father wanted was not these silly notes telling him how the family was doing. Silence. The silence inside a prison. The prison of time called life. The prison of class and circumstance. The prison of a code untranslatable into the language of the other. The prison of the flesh. The prison of sweaty hands that can’t let go even at the moment of falling.