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.

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.

tell him, “All you have is my emptiness.” “Then where are you? The you that bleeds when I devour you like this?” “You don’t see? I just passed by outside that window and now I’m gone. This is the first and last time I will encounter you in this life. Give me some water. Sweat pours off of me like rain. 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.”

“I’m taking my voice with me to the grave. I wouldn’t leave it in a place like this. My blood is no vagrant.” “Then I’ll become a snake and I’ll find your grave.” “You’re too lowly. You can’t trespass upon a royal tomb.”

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?