𝐔𝐍𝐒𝐄𝐄 ✓

13: TWISTED

Words could be twisted into any shape. Promises could be made to lull the heart and seduce the soul. In the final computation, words meant nothing. They were labels one gave things in an effort to wrap their puny little genii around their underlying essences when ninety-nine percent of the time the totality of the reality is an entirely different beast. The wisest man was the silent one. Examine his actions. Judge him by them.

"I did not feel empty!"

For then, a few shaky whiffs of the tall man's rhymed poems of truth, Shu-nam chanced to explain himself, to soothe his contradictory soul. Some wounds that never show on the body are deeper and more hurtful than anything that bleeds.

He bridged a wide river, and then everything changed. There were no more meadows, no houses, no trees, not even telephone poles. Even the colours were gone, all of them except the brown and grey and blue of the late-afternoon sky. The world got emptier and emptier until it looked like a brown ocean of dead velvet, just a chasm covered with short dry grass and low scrub.

But that wasn't enough to signify the utter emptiness behind his shadow heart.

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. However, the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

And life was never a crisis to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.

The Almighty laughed at his innocence, and the poor man tried to compensate for his own sorrows by telling a lie of despair.

"And I don't feel any pain..."

His eyes racked through the oozing crowd until they locked upon one certain celibacy, "Chim, the elf of Tewuni. Remember how you felt when you decided to fall for another creature and the whole star turned against you? Remember the nuances of curves that made you stand at the edge of our constellation? What did you feel?"

Dissociation was numbness and nothingness; it was a feeling of being lost; it was floating on a cloud that threatened to suffocate. The pale guy stood bewildered at the creeping realisation that his people degraded him for a wish to feel the emotions that always befuddled him.

What was his mistake?

Chim stared at nothing. The Almighty wasn't wrong, he never could be. When the entire Tewuni had decided to discard him for feeling a sense of love towards that one man, he was despised. Without even knowing the name, they had bad-mouthed the man he fell for, insulted and cursed him.

"I was l-lost Almighty, when I had to le-let hi-him go..." He barely looked up, trembling at those rushing memories, "But now they feel like burdens upon me, I should have spoken, should have fought..."

The weight of forbidden love pressed heavily upon Chim's slender shoulders. The memories of stolen glances and whispered confessions haunted him like disembodied spirits. He had dared to defy the norms of his celestial society, to reach across the vast expanse that separated him from his heart's desire.

And in that moment, as Chim's gaze met the unwavering eyes of the Almighty, he saw a flicker of understanding pass between them. It was a silent acknowledgment of the depths one would go to for love, the sacrifices made in the name of a feeling that transcended all boundaries.

Faen smiled at his innocence. He knew every bit of each one's story who stood there, some fighting for Kwan and others fighting to yank out his life.

He walked up to the bleeding man, crouching to his level as he softly swayed the hairs out of his wounded forehead, "Does that hurt?"

Kwan stared at the man, slowly comprehending the fact that God himself was fighting for him, and he soon swung his head from side to side, indicating that he felt nothing.

"Oddly, the wounded head didn't seem to hurt much anymore; it is only numb. It would have been better if there had been a pain. The pain was at least real. Look at him! Do you want to feel empty when it hurts?
Do you all want to feel numb when you fall in love for the first time?
Do you all want to feel numb when your child walks for the very first time?
Do you want to- KWAN!"

For then all the fantasy came to halt. One second was all it took. A soaring arrow flew amidst all the brouhaha and pierced the numbed man right across his heart.

No pain was felt, no agony, no trauma - he felt free. All his numbness spreading across his veins, Kwan was lifted off the curse of living.
The Almighty's terrorised eyes blinked in a frenzy until he caught hold of the woman standing afar, the crooked bow clutched in her grip.

"Geisha!"

The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd: the longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world's existence. All these halftones of the soul's consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.

For everything had come to an end with a single blow, "Hyung!"

Stumbling through the crowd, Jeong ran to the man, pulling out the blade adorning his back and striking the chains, breaking them free.

It was strange how at that moment of tragedy, it had seemed so unreal, like an old-fashioned movie reel playing on a screen for all the eyes. The pain and broken hearts were blocked off for a little while, leaving them all numb with disbelief.

"Hyung, please, hyung!"

His pleas and sobs kept his fluttering eyes open.

Life was at stake; truths and lies playing their parts.

__

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, "Lenore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, "Lenore!" —
Merely this, and nothing more."

—Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

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