Cursed Bunny

by Bora Chung

“Mother, the state of your body has a direct effect on my appearance. This is because my entire existence depends on you.”

Her constipation worsened. Her bladder became inflamed.

Not the cries of someone driven mad with fear, but the tears of someone who understood and was saddened by their own loneliness—the tears of a human being.

Every person has only one childhood, and instead of being full of hopes or dreams, his had been crushed by the fight for survival.

Life is a series of problems. Especially when one is married and has a family. Because even when you manage to avoid the problems of the outside world and return home safely, your family is there waiting with a whole different set of problems of their own.

In order to survive, children come to their own understanding of their place in their world. It looks as if children are limited in what they are conscious of, but they comprehend very quickly the intention of adults and the trust given to them, better and more precisely than adults themselves do.

But she didn’t know whether that love was for the prince or for her own excited emotions.

I didn’t believe in any bright future for me. I didn’t know if I would even be able to make a living. Therefore, “a moment ago” was always the best moment, and the present was always better than the future.

Once you experience a terrible trauma and understand the world from an extreme perspective, it is difficult to overcome this perspective. Because your very survival depends on it.

Parents who destroy their children’s lives, who suck the life out of their children’s futures, not only for the sake of maintaining their own illusions but also to zealously expand them into the lives of their children—such parents can almost be understood from the perspective of obsession. Following the words “Be grateful I raised you” is the implied clause “instead of killing you or leaving you for dead.” They probably mean it, too.

understanding and forgiving are completely different things.

For some people, their lives are ruled by one shocking event reverberating through their survival instincts. Life shrinks into a trap made up of a shimmering moment in the past, a trap where they endlessly repeat that singular moment when they were surest of being alive.

Those who are unaware of their lives slipping away while they are ensnared in the past—him, his grandfather, his mother, me—are in the end, whether alive or dead, ghosts of the past.