Han Kang

My face, the look in my eyes…my face, undoubtedly, but never seen before. Or no, not mine, but so familiar…nothing makes sense. Familiar and yet not…that vivid, strange, horribly uncanny feeling.

Suddenly, everything around me began to slide away, as though pulled back on an ebbing tide.

I was alone, the only thing remaining in all of infinite space.

A hazy feeling I can’t pin down…but remembered as blood-chillingly definite.

Everything starts to feel unfamiliar. As if I’ve come up to the back of something. Shut up behind a door without a handle. Perhaps I’m only now coming face-to-face with the thing that has always been here. It’s dark. Everything is being snuffed out in the pitch-black darkness.

If only I could sleep. If I could shrug off consciousness for even just an hour.

One time, just one more time, I want to shout. I want to throw myself through the pitch-black window. Maybe that would finally get this lump out of my body. Yes, perhaps that might work.

Nobody can help me. Nobody can save me. Nobody can make me breathe.

but to him she radiated energy, like a tree that grows in the wilderness, denuded and solitary.

The moment she’d tried to take her own life had been a turning point. Now there was nothing anyone could do to help her. Every single one of them