Lemon

by Kwon Yeo-Sun

The imagination is just as painful as reality. No, it’s more painful. After all, what you imagine has no limit or end.

I needed to see him. I needed to know how he was getting on, so that I could figure out who I was supposed to become, how I was supposed to live. I needed to see him if I wanted to go on.

Some lives are unfair for no apparent reason, but we carry on, completely unaware, like miserable vermin.

I still can’t help but wonder, do our lives truly hold no meaning? Even if you try desperately to find it, to contrive some kind of meaning, is it true that what’s not there isn’t there? Does life leave only misery behind? Could the fact that we’re alive—the fact that we’re in this life where joy and terror and peace and danger mingle—couldn’t that itself be the meaning of life?

Couldn’t each moment we’re living now be the meaning of life?