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.

just as with other social institutions, domestic violence has less to do with any inherent characteristics of the family as a primitive community of relatives and more to do with the changes wrought by modernization with its complex and diverse variables. As the causal factors, triggers, and control factors correlated with domestic violence intensify and diversify, it becomes harder for us to draw a clear conclusion.

She’d worked as a nurse before she started drinking. It was dirty work, too awful to describe. She did the kind of work that not even the patients’ own flesh and blood would do for them.

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?