How to Be Human

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ACT ZERO

Love.

The concept of love is mythic: a fairy tale stuffed with inconsistencies and unrealistic consistencies that makes it nothing more than something only the children believe in. It is an idea that people cling to out of a deep and unshakable desire for it to be true, while their marriages are hanging off the hinges and damned for destruction.

It is an ideal that has ruined more than a few lives: a storybook dream that, if believed in, can lead one to an ill-timed attempt to win over someone else and a painful, sometimes humiliating rebuke by the one being courted. In other, more severe cases, people leap into the arms of each other in search of the opportunity to feel loved.

Love in film paints a connection between a man and woman so exaggerated that it seems almost impossible to experience such a thing in real life, as though the very notion of love itself were a figment of the imagination (spoiler: it is). It's a fading light the one can only attempt to grasp out for, arms outstretched, amidst all the darkness.

Love is a concept that Jisung Han doesn't understand. It's useless to try. Love has never been openly expressed in his life.

"I love you"s are baseless—foreign even.

A meaningless exchange of syllables spoken in order to induce a feeling of love that's never present to begin with. His family's hanging by a loose thread—constant back-and-forths between his mother (who claims she wishes she had never met his father), and his step-father (who claims that the feelings are mutual).

Yet in every photograph tucked neatly into a frame, they're smiling happily, as though they're in love.

Sure, as the years go by, the yearly 'family smiles' start to seem more unnatural, like glass, but at least the family is still there.

Jisung supposes that it's always been this way, since the fake, 'too-perfect' smiles seem to show up in his childhood photos as well.

Perfection. On the surface, the "Hans" are the perfect family. It's a lie that the well-established family perpetuates, and all his life, Jisung has hated it.

They're wealthy, living on the wealthiest side of the neighborhood to house a family of three and a timely maid. On the surface, his mother and his father are madly in love, dining out at the most expensive restaurants every chance they get, or schmoozing at PR events.

To an outsider, a naïve fool, the Han family is the epitome of what the ideal family should look like, with no problems. They've done a good job at gaslighting people into believing that way, as if his mother didn't see green when she accepted the  marriage proposal.

Jisung knows it's all for show; that their "happily-ever-after" has long been buried in the graveyard.

Still. Naturally, being in a perfect family, Jisung had a lot of practice with being perfect.

Perfection is a concept he knows far too well. In fact, what makes perfection so attainable is that as long as the imperfections can be hidden well enough, anyone can be perfect. Perfection, however, is only skin-deep. It is nothing but a façade—a false identity that has the sole purpose of deceiving others. And in Jisung's case, the perfect façade is meant to deceive the world, and ultimately himself.

For a while, Jisung believed he could hide all the imperfections away, stuff them in a box and lock them inside for an eternity.

For a while, he thought that this perfection could never be tampered with, that his heart would never waver from its perfect, unbreakable state.

For a while, he believed.