Almond

by Sohn Won-Pyung

neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic.

Love, according to Mom’s actions, was nothing more than nagging about every little thing, with teary eyes, about how one should act such and such in this and that situation. If that was love, I’d rather neither give nor receive any. But of course, I didn’t say that out loud. That was all thanks to one of Mom’s codes of conduct—Too much honesty hurts others—which I had memorized over and over so that it was stuck in my brain.

Specifically, she had wanted her to be an “unmarried woman of words” who spent her entire life in solitude yet aged gracefully. That was the kind of life Granny would have wanted for herself, if only she could turn back the clock. It was part of the reason she gave Mom the name Jieun, which meant “author.”

To be more specific, I felt connected to the smell of old books.

Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I’d never met and lives I’d never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn’t experienced could all be found in those volumes.

Her dating life followed the same pattern. It always started with men approaching her and ended with her clinging onto them.

Seasons didn’t matter to her. All year round, lotus lanterns and Christmas ornaments hung side by side over her stall.

“It must have been difficult for you. Is there anything I can help you with?”

As soon as she asked me the question, I said I was fine.

It was incorrect to say I was fine to her question yesterday. You can just leave me alone. That was what I should’ve said.

“Parents start out with grand expectations for their kids. But when things don’t go as expected, they just want their kids to be ordinary, thinking it’s simple. But son, being ordinary is the hardest thing to achieve,”

But on second thought, hunches aren’t usually just randomly felt. The brain subconsciously sorts your daily experiences into conditions or results and keeps a growing record of them. And when faced with a similar situation, you unconsciously guess the outcome based on that data. So a hunch is actually a causal link.

“It’s good to help others if there’s no harm.”

It was his eyes that silenced the room. He was like a wild beast killing his own cub first and baring his teeth at people who had no intention to harm.

“Why do I need to get out of your way? I’m just gonna go about my way as usual. If you’re not there, I won’t see you. If you are there, I’ll see you.”

There is no such person who can’t be saved. There are only people who give up on trying to save others. It’s a quote by the American accused-murderer-turned-writer P. J. Nolan.

When he thought of his wife, he was reminded of the savory aroma of bread. She would always bake for him, and to him the taste of bread was nostalgic. It aroused in him his long-forgotten childhood and brought back faint little snippets of memories.

To borrow Granny’s description, a bookstore is a place densely populated with tens of thousands of authors, dead or living, residing side by side. But books are quiet. They remain dead silent until somebody flips open a page. Only then do they spill out their stories, calmly and thoroughly, just enough at a time for me to handle.

Mom was everything but a businesswoman. All her decisions—except the ones related to me—were made based on hopeless romanticism and whim.

People say that May is the queen of seasons, but I don’t quite agree. The hardest job is transitioning from winter to spring. Frozen ground melting to let sprouts shoot up, colorful flowers blossoming from each dead branch. That’s what tough looks like. As for summer, it simply needs to take a couple more steps forward using the momentum of spring. That’s why I think May is the laziest of all the months. A month that’s overrated. And May was the month that always reminded me I was different from the rest of the world. Everything on the earth glittered, vibrantly.

“It’s not always great when you understand emotions that you were once unaware of. Emotions are tricky business. You’ll suddenly see the world in a completely new light. Every little thing around you might feel like sharp weapons. A subtle expression or a few words could sting you.

hanja for love, 愛.

It was their choice to have me, but that doesn’t mean that I have to accomplish the missions they’ve set up.

“Do you know why your heart rate is so high now?” “No.” “Your heart’s excited because I’m close to you, so it’s clapping.”

Life takes on various flavors as it flows.