Almond

by Sohn Won-Pyung

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.

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. They were completely different by nature from TV shows or movies.

But books were different. They had lots of blanks. Blanks between words and even between lines. I could squeeze myself in there and sit, or walk, or scribble down my thoughts. It didn’t matter if I had no idea what the words meant. Turning the pages was half the battle.

“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,” he said.

There is no such person who can’t be saved. There are only people who give up on trying to save others.

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.

Even though my brain was a mess, what kept my soul whole was the warmth of the hands holding mine on both sides.

Dora. Dora was exactly the polar opposite of Gon. If Gon tried to teach me pain, guilt, and agony, Dora taught me flowers and scents, breezes and dreams. They were like songs I heard for the first time. Dora knew how to sing the songs everybody knew, in an entirely different way.

From what I understood, love was an extreme idea. A word that seemed to force something undefinable into the prison of letters. But the word was used so easily, so often. People spoke of love so casually, just to mean the slightest pleasure or thanks.

“What does love mean?” Mom asked mischievously. “To discover beauty.” After Granny wrote the top part of the character 愛, then the middle part, 心 (meaning “heart”), she said, “These three dots are us. This one’s mine, this one’s yours, this one’s his!” Mom’s eyes teared up but she turned and went back to the kitchen.

Now I understood a little what it meant to be frightened. It was like desperately gasping for air in a place without oxygen.

People shut their eyes to a distant tragedy saying there’s nothing they could do, yet they didn’t stand up for one happening nearby either because they’re too terrified. Most people could feel but didn’t act. They said they sympathized, but easily forgot. The way I see it, that was not real. I didn’t want to live like that.