Nowhere to Be Found

by Bae Suah

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.

Tired. I was tired. I was only twenty-four, but I was tired. For a long time I’d been feeling dizzy just from getting up from the toilet. On the bus in the morning, I would doze off while standing, one hand gripping the hanging strap.

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.

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.

My body felt heavy, like it was sinking deeper and deeper into the underpass.

“I’m a little tired, but it’s manageable,”

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.

but when boys are too selfish in their insistence, you always have to say that: you can’t have it entirely your way.

That was what he’d wanted so badly? Boys were so strange.

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.”

Burn me. Pour gasoline over me and set my body on fire. Burn me at the stake like a witch. Wrap me in garbage bags and toss me in the incinerator. I’ll turn into dioxin and make my way into your lungs. Stroke my face lightly with a razor blade and suck the blood that comes seeping out. Lap it up like a cat. I want to be covered in blood. I’ll cry out in the end and weep for fear of leaving this world without ever once discovering the me inside me, the ugly something inside me.

The me that is nowhere to be found now, the me that will turn to ash and vanish, turn to darkness and rot—that me extends a squalid hand at the final moment of this crash, having entirely deserted and abandoned my life.

In truth, I was not me. The me that was born into an animal body and lived as a slave to poverty and insult was nothing but the emptiness that had been momentarily bewitched out of me by an evil spirit. That distant me is precious and beautiful.

I will, like a desert orchid that blooms once every hundred years, come to you bearing th...

I tell him, “All you have is my...

You’ll forget about me for the next hundred years. 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.

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

Get your hands off me. Don’t stroke my face. I’m not an animal.

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?

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

Send me letters on poisoned paper. I’ll swallow them whole.”

There’s got to be something completely different out there—not just what our eyes can see.

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.

“Everyone, including you and me, is living the life they had coming to them.

You were born with a knife in your heart.

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.

What my brother had promised when he squeezed my sweaty hand as if he’d never let go was not money or letters. It was the erasure of time that goes by the name of money and letters.

The sort of time in which people could become the purest they’d ever been; cancel any unimportant plans they had; and long for a random, distant ideal. Our blood, which refused to be moved by a warm prayer over breakfast, a conversation with a loving family, a life that evolves step by step—that was what made my brother free.

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

I work hard to become his fear and desire and disillusion.

I’ve heard that what appears in a hallucination is an image of the dead.

Clouds drift through my head. Blue sky so deep you’d never know the end of it, clouds from Africa, a slow-moving breeze, thunder and lightning.

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

When you die, I’ll have you taxidermied. Then I will have you forever. I will spend the light of morning and the despair of midday and the lunatic peace of evening with you. Never will you lie at rest in a royal tomb.

And that is how I became an absolutely meaningless thing ...