* * *
‘……Are you really crazy?’
‘Are you dying to die? Huh? You crazy bastard. Hey.’
‘Hey! You fucker, are you in your right mind?’
Memories are originally things that disappear without you knowing, like flowing water, but Eunha truly had almost no memories of that time. There were two reasons: first, because he repeated similar patterns every day without any special events, and second, because within that repetition, he had never once been in his right mind.
He drank every day. Either sleeping or drinking. It was one of the two, and within those simple choices, the functions of the house gradually lost the boundary lines called areas. The reason was that he absolutely couldn’t lie down on the bed where he used to sleep and wake up with Kim Jiwoon every day. That alone seemed absolutely impossible.
One day he woke up on the floor of the utility room attached to the kitchen, and on other days he woke up on the shoe cabinet and bathroom floor. Then he fell asleep somewhere else without knowing how he’d fallen asleep. He slept in the morning and woke up at night. He slept for two days straight, and cried for two days straight without sleeping.
He mostly just drank, and if he forced himself to go to school once a week, he at least swallowed something resembling food. At home, he forced himself to get up and eat once in a while when his stomach shriveled and burned so much he felt like he’d die. On some days, he suddenly did the exact opposite and binged like a madman. Then he drank again…….
He thought he might die at this rate. It wasn’t that he wanted to die, but rather a premonition. After repeating such trash patterns, his body was breaking down, and he began to clearly feel his organs sending warning signals from various places.
A sense of crisis steadily sounded alarms that something inside his body would properly break down and cause big trouble. He was often startled and scared, and worried too, but the will to take care of it hardly settled in. Eunha didn’t want to do anything. So he lived doing nothing. Blankly experiencing the feeling of time passing. In that house where he’d lived with Kim Jiwoon. In that house where all the traces still remained.
All of that was fine, but on some days he couldn’t bear it so he put a knife to his body. Because he was horrified by himself doing nothing. Because he wanted to escape even briefly from that horrifying self. He hesitated somewhere on his thigh and forearm then made cuts. When the physically stinging sensation arose, everything else that formed him would fade to a pale white and disappear, and he seemed to like that a little. And when he saw the hideously split skin bleeding, nothing was good again.
He felt horrified again and roughly collapsed and lay down, then fell asleep crying blankly. Those were the kinds of days. Then one day Gu Haebin burst into the house. After forcibly breaking down the door.
Twenty-five. College students or first-year workers. It was a time when everyone was busy in their own positions. Everyone must be doing well. They must all be living well. Within that vague trust, days where only indefinite promises were occasionally exchanged—let’s meet sometime when we’re free, let’s all meet when we can match our schedules. Updates delivered only through contact. Relationships no different from usual. The only consolation was that everyone knew nothing, but from that day on, even that became a bubble.
Though at the time, his nerves didn’t even reach the point of caring about pride or shame that had ultimately been destroyed. Because as always, he wasn’t in his right mind.
‘……Lee Eunha.’
It was a time when he was awake while imbued with the spirit of alcohol, and the place he was lying was the middle of the living room. Thanks to that, the face he encountered was very clearly visible, and Eunha still hadn’t forgotten that appearance. He remembered everything in detail as if looking at a photograph. An expressionless face frozen pale as if seeing a ghost. A face that crumpled around the eyes as if doubting, then slowly became terrified. Footsteps approaching haltingly while still doubting.
He thought it must have been quite a grotesque sight. Because unfortunately the timing was also bad—it was a day when he’d self-harmed.
‘You crazy bastard. Are you really fucking insane? Huh? Look at me. Hey. Hey! Lee Eunha, try to get it together, you……’
He was the only one who knew about the relationship with Kim Jiwoon. So he knew to some extent that they’d fought all summer that year, but he hadn’t conveyed the news that they’d broken up. In the first place, because he couldn’t believe it, he’d lived like a mud pit for another two months after Kim Jiwoon left the house. Kim Jiwoon was the one who cheated, and Kim Jiwoon was also the one who said they should break up first—he couldn’t understand it at all.
Because it felt like something had been completely stolen. Because it felt like five years had been entirely robbed. Because it was unfair and incomprehensible and fucking awful.
‘Why are you like this? Why are you doing this, you. Why……’
Gu Haebin, who had been pouring out all the curses he had and urging him to get up, later grabbed Eunha’s shoulders with both hands trembling. Then when Eunha closed his eyes, not wanting to listen, he shook his shoulders like crazy. As if he would die right there if he lost consciousness.
Don’t overreact, and more than that, let go because it’s making him dizzy—he had those thoughts but the words wouldn’t come out. Gu Haebin looked at the arm that was hideously split open and bruised with a face that had become extremely weak-hearted. Like someone who had witnessed a scene that was utterly disgusting and nauseating, and painful just to look at.
Eunha thought even that was a ridiculous reaction. It just felt like Gu Haebin was making a fuss with unnecessary exaggeration. What was the big deal?
It didn’t hurt at all. That kind of thing didn’t hurt.
However, there wasn’t a single corner that didn’t hurt either.
Right after the belated discovery, Eunha was led by Gu Haebin’s hand and hospitalized for several weeks. While recovering his broken health like that, the worst lifestyle came to an end, but even after being discharged, except for when he went to school once a week, he lived shut up in the house the whole time. He spent the last semester of his long and eventful college life in a messy, half-hearted way.
There were things he’d been preparing, many things he had to do, and more than that, many things he wanted to do, but he let them all go. He couldn’t even remember well what they all were in the first place. It was deep helplessness and emptiness.
What’s the big deal about love…… What’s the big deal about one person? They’re just another person anyway. He’d lived just fine for 20 years without that person. What’s so special about it that he’d ruin his life like this on his own?
The blue army occasionally rebuked him like that in a corner of his head, but it didn’t lead to any hopeful resolution or change of heart. Eunha still had no motivation. What on earth is it about mere romantic feelings, that one thing?
But it was also true that Kim Jiwoon had once been his everything. The time when merely one person felt like the entire world was five years. He didn’t know whether it was because he’d liked him first and clung to him so they ended up dating, or because even during the relationship he’d always suffered alone and had a form of romance where he only wished for something.
Maybe it was both. It was a relationship where an invisible emotional superiority always hung like a curtain. A relationship where he had to make an ‘effort’ to some extent.
So perhaps, all expectations for the act of ‘effort’ had disappeared.
And Gu Haebin became extreme from that point on. He paid more attention to exchanges with Mom, increased his nagging, and sometimes suddenly visited out of the blue to kill time before leaving.
It was also Gu Haebin who acted as an appropriate filter between Eunha, who wanted to distance himself from his friends, and the friends who wouldn’t stop showing interest in that Eunha.
The reason for wanting distance was simple. Because he didn’t want them to know. All the things that had happened. The inner self that had all split and crumbled.
These were connections made while living a seemingly decent life. As the saying goes about birds of a feather, Eunha’s friends were objectively good people. They overflowed with self-confidence and aspirations for their dreams, and since they were born holding bloodlines that could support them in every way, they would become even more wonderful people in the future. And they would still be friends.
He disliked that. Because he alone hadn’t moved forward and had stayed in place. It wasn’t that he couldn’t move forward, but that he didn’t move forward, so he had no regrets about the present, but it wasn’t something to be proud of enough to display either. At least he had objective awareness. That he was in a very pathetic state.
