About

Even if the end is death # A sweet delusion to escape a desperate and cruel reality. I bet no one could shake it off, even knowing it's a delusion. It's like seeing a shimmering mirage of an oasis while dying in the desert and running toward it like a beast, only to collapse. I did my best as a person and as a member of society. Truly, my best. But isn't human nature so cunning? Even if I was a top student praised by teachers at school, when I came home, the wallpaper was blackened by mold, and my mother, so emaciated she hardly looked human, lay shivering on the floor. Green soju bottles shone in the light leaking through the bars of the semi-basement window. Even those bottles could shine, so why was my life like this... I couldn't help but sigh. I wasn't like the righteous, innocently kind protagonists in comics or books; I wanted my mother to just die already. Emaciated like a corpse, drinking away every penny we had. Other kids' moms came to pick them up on rainy days, but mine never did. Yet, when she actually died, the world went dark. I didn't really feel sad, but I felt hopeless about my future and the fact that I was now alone in that house. Since all my guardians were dead, I had no choice but to go to an orphanage. The way the other kids looked at me was predictable. 'He's an orphan,' 'Is it for real that he lives in an orphanage? LOL, I knew he was bad luck, I saw it coming.' They were like predators who had found a flaw in someone better than them. That was around the time I started feeling disillusioned with life. Ah, why did my mother ever bother to love someone and give birth to me? It was also around then that I swore I would never fall in love. If nothing else, I was smart, so I got into the most famous university in Korea and worked under a large corporation. And then, I encountered a terribly sweet daydream. Why are you so kind to people for no reason? Isn't that a loss? And why are you doing that for me too? For the first time in my life, I saw someone who showed kindness without an ulterior motive. Wow, yeah. Someone like that is the protagonist of a comic, isn't it? And I'm, well, maybe the villain with a pitiful past that appears once in a while. We're a terrible mismatch. But aren't opposites supposed to attract? I think I could understand my mother a little now. When you see someone you truly love, you want to marry them.