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I say from time to time, if you want to know about someone else’s desires, you should have them pack a suitcase. Or take a peek into their suitcase. Someone who packs his bag with all kinds of stuff ends up suffering from just that much fatigue and stress, even while traveling. The weight of the bag alone will guarantee that. The trip, intended as a way to unburden yourself, suddenly becomes a burden in itself. People who care about what other people think of them, like my sister, can never go on a trip.
Whenever my sister came back from her trips to the department store, both her arms would be laden with shopping bags like clusters of apples. She looked even more tired coming back from her trips. She didn’t gain any wisdom, even as she picked and ate the apples that hung from her arms. The apples only enticed—when she bit into them, they didn’t taste like anything at all. Nevertheless, my sister’s journeys for sweet apples that did not exist never came to an end. She spent nearly all her income adorning herself. The only thing that can stop the rule of desire is death. My sister won’t be able
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I’m standing in the middle of the “Edward Hopper Room” recommended by the woman. I grow reverent and solemn, as if I’m at an art museum. Quietly, I take in the paintings on the walls. The paintings make me feel as if there’s cold wind blowing in from somewhere, even though it’s midsummer.
I browse through the books on Hopper on the bedside table. They say that Hopper, who was born in 1882 and died in 1967, was a major American realist painter. A painter who traveled like me, and did sketches and paintings on the street. Hopper says, “Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.”
Paintings that resembled me and felt familiar to me. I came on this journey because I was lonely, but I’m still lonely. At that moment, someone flashes through my mind like a lightning bolt.
There’s something that my inventor father always used to say. “The past is always consecrated for the present, and the present is always sacrificed for the future.” Just as the words say, the today that is sacrificed will make tomorrow shine brightly. Thinking that, I put the letter in an envelope and seal it.
From the adjacent room comes the sound of a woman moaning. An awkward feeling hovers between the woman and me. At times like this, I wonder why the act of love was created to be accompanied by noise. Couldn’t the human body have been made more pliable, so that the intimate act could be undertaken in silence? I feel as if the creaking noise is causing cracks between us. I wish I could go next door and oil up the couple’s bodies. I’m well aware, of course, that there’s no pleasure without pain. Perhaps it’s noise that allows pain to turn into pleasure, and pleasure into pain. The moaning next
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“Why do you care what other people carry in their backpacks?” I ask in return. “Because they must have packed what they need the most, which must be their most necessary desire.” “An MP3 player and a novel.” “Those things are poles apart.” “What about you, 751?” “A harmonica and a laptop.” “Music and words. We’re not all that different.”
The impact of the movie lingers on longer than I expected. There’s something about a movie based on a true story that doesn’t let you to think of it as just a movie. When a movie starts out by putting brakes on the notion that movies are fiction, we grow nervous. This happens because there’s a subtle but great gap between things that can happen and things that can’t, and things that did happen and things that didn’t. But at times, fiction becomes reality, and reality fiction. And at times, you just can’t bring yourself to believe something that took place in real life—something you experienced
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