Nowhere to Be Found

by Bae Suah

Memory finds its way back through blood, through body heat.

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.

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. The prison of Cheolsu.

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.

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