Empathy essay, joke, solitude
It was early winter with a chilly wind. A friend, who had been drinking every other day under the pretext of not being able to solve his life, was talking half-baked at a bar famous for fried shrimp near Hongdae that day. They were the so-called “what is solitude” and “why does it keep wanting to disappear?”
Rather, stories like “Why do you do this to me?” might have been more appropriate for us, but for me at the time, “Solitude” and “ambitiousness to disappear” were problems that I repeatedly thought about quite seriously. The point was that no matter what exciting place I was in, no matter how glorious it was to me, if I could choose even at the time of the whispering of love, I would like to disappear from space forever.
Disappearance was different from the act of “suicide” which chose to die on its own. My killing myself was still trapped in the cosmic order of existence. I have parents who will grieve for my child’s death, friends who will be shocked, and perhaps even close friends who might think it’s a fitting ending for me..
The situation in which they remember ‘me’ and commemorate ‘my death’ was not the end I wanted. I wanted to be erased as it is. I dreamed that the fact that I existed in anyone’s memory would disappear completely. If I were a part of the universe, I was obsessed with the impossible urge to wipe it off with an eraser.
If I were to think about my friend’s position for a moment, what would come to my mind when I said in front of my eyes that the person who was tilting his or her glass was ready to disappear at any time? Wouldn’t I have felt a little bit sad that even I couldn’t be any consolation to this person? My friend was kind and indifferent and seemed to have responded appropriately to the idea that my repertoire was repeated to a certain extent. The road to escape from the system and order of the universe and disappear forever was perhaps in line with the concept of nirvana or nirvana, which Buddhism refers to. I dared to be a Buddha. A few times a day in thought, I dreamed of my eternal demise.
The friend listened to me with a constant murmur of his head, and the night went so deep as to savor the chewy flesh of the fried shrimp. I looked like Sung-jin, the main character in the novel “Gu Un-mong,” who fell into the human world while mocking the eight fairies, but could not overcome the emptiness of his heart. No, it was itself. Except that I was a poor self-sufficient student unlike Sungjin at the time. It was me who wanted to disappear, saying that wealth and honor that I had never experienced were fleeting.
It was time to cross the crosswalk at the entrance of Rodeo Street, which is always crowded with friends on the way home. A car that didn’t recognize the signal has invaded the crossing a little deeper. I stared at the car, pulling myself out at the moment. But at that moment, my friend said,
“But you don’t want to die.”
For a moment it seemed to have been hit hard in the back of the head. Feeling dazed, I finished crossing the crosswalk and sent my friend at the bus stop. Yes, I just let it go! All the way home I felt like every conversation we had lost its weight in an instant and evaporated far away. The value of my solitude seemed to have been crumpled and undermined to the full extent in the circumstances of instinctively avoiding a car that had suddenly entered. Friend certainly laughed at me the moment I was avoiding the car. Perhaps it was a warm joke? No. If I had, my steps back home couldn’t have been so miserable.
Some words are engraved in the marrow. Ten more years have passed since then. In the meantime, I felt my friend’s bony jokes repeated several times, and I came to think that I was not recognized as the most like myself. Friends have also become a relationship that has not been met as often as before, as the industry has been running its own way at the same time as marriage. In other words, we are almost out of touch.
I regret not being able to properly protest, ‘How can you say such a thing?’ to my friend at the time. I regret not being able to properly respond to my friend’s “safe jokes” that provoke me with sarcastic language several times after that. I could have maintained a little more productive relationship with the friend if I had the ability to repulse some bony jokes. There may have been some kind of love and loyalty in the combination of exchange and exchange.
But I was so weak at the time, I often missed the timing, and when I turned around, I would chew solitude like chewing gum, which I saved again in regret and resignation. I didn’t open my heart to anyone, but it was a time when I further isolated myself by blaming the depth of the relationship. Even now, I still memorize my friend’s cell phone number, but it has become a relationship where I can’t make a call. Like the fossil of a frozen mammoth deep in the glacier, it has now sunk deep. Even if I find a way to melt it, I won’t do it, only to be recalled from time to time to a moment in the past when I sometimes recalled my friend’s rascal laughter and was pleasant and painful at the same time.