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.

This life full of misery, as the lyrics say.

Then I start wondering if this miserable life has any meaning. I don’t mean life in an abstract or general sense, but the life of an actual person.

Life has no special meaning. Not his, not my sister’s, not even mine. Even if you try desperately to find it, to contrive some kind of meaning, what’s not there isn’t there. Lif...

Before deciding to lie, you should have gotten your story straight.

We each had our own guilt to manage.

I’m scared he’s going to disappear. I’m so scared he’s going to disappear one day because he feels bad he can’t bring any money home.

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

We have nothing, absolutely nothing of our own, and everything we have is borrowed from Him.

If birth means begging to join the side of the living, then death has the power to kick everyone out. That’s why I think death, with its power to sever things forever, is far more objective, more dignified, than birth,

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?