Dream Walker

4밤, 24일 12월

4밤, Night 4
December 24, 2013

For a long time, I have always found comfort under the gloomy night sky. Under the starless black skies. I never questioned myself about this; Why would I?

There wasn't anything wrong in that, there wasn't something to wonder about finding peace between the late hours of the day. It wasn't complexity in its most difficult form - complexity such as love - but simplicity at its finest work - simplicity such as being kind.

Where dark shadows claimed their territories and the fogs roamed among the streets, it was comforting to know that though a population of people labeled the moon as a dangerous hour, somewhere, in the midst of this darkness, there were two people who remembered the moon as the hour they met; the hour they fell into a typical thing called love.

Days spent under this gloomy night sky and I've never questioned myself.

Until now...

"What's today's date?"

"It's the twenty-fourth."

"Of December?"

And I nod, "Of December."

Looking up into a full blue sky, and a sun, Hani laid quiet.

Today marked my fourth night returning, meeting her when the sun died out and the moon took its place in the sky, among the world of people. If said 'living', then, souls were living, too. It was simply that all souls existed on a different plane than those like me...

It was winter break; School wouldn't reopen until the end of January and snow had fallen heavily on Daegu. I sat on my window ledge, around four o'clock, witnessing the height of the snow grow from the ground, in my hands: Please Look After Mom. Read almost too many times, over and over, I often found myself coming back to this novel like how I come back to Choi Hani, or simply, Hani.

'Most things in the world are not unexpected if one thinks carefully about them. Even something one would call unusual-if one thinks about it, it's really just a thing that was supposed to happen. Encountering unusual events often means you didn't think things through.' Shin Kyungsook, author, Please Look After Mom.

That was how I felt. Like somehow, even in an ambience of awkward tension, something about this meeting read no coincidence; Like somehow, my falling into this heaven was supposed to happen. Life works that way, doesn't it? Even in such confidence, everything about this, may have been just that - a mere coincidence.

"What's it like?" - her voice suddenly speaks - "In the other world?"

I lied beside her, our bodies parallel to each other with our ears lined together. Her presence was near and my personal space was stirred but being the way I am, I didn't mind. Not at all.

"Which world are you speaking of?" And of course, I knew which one she meant, asking in a sarcastic tone, but as I listened to Hani, she recited to me a story.

"When I died," she began, "I was told about three worlds; There wasn't a voice that spoke to me when I came here and not a soul, I saw, but it was as if I had suddenly became...known to that fact, like I needed to know...

The world you live in-where you're alive-that's one; The life of rebirth. The world I live in-my heaven where every other soul is forbidden but I-that's two; The point of judgement, and three-the world neither of us live in-the world of those unspoken of. I've heard that no one returns from there, not even for a compromising settlement. It's eternal hell without any kind of release..."