Memories of childhood haunted him like sugar-sweet phantoms.
It was his first time sleeping alone. His mother sat beside him, her fingers passing through his hair. From her steady hand, gentle vibrations descended from the crown of his head, adding weight to his reluctant eyelids. He couldn't remember if she said anything to him that night. The two never spoke much. The family gathered in the dining room each night, but no one said a word. Their hands would work silently, passively assuaging their respective hungers as their minds raced galaxies away.
The dining room was a new addition to the house. Made mostly of glass, copious amounts of sunset poured into the room and left everything with a subtle sense of departure. The same silence filled his bedroom that night.
She tucked the blanket underneath his body and rose to leave the room. As she turned off the light, she bade him goodnight in Korean and left.
His bed was far too big for him. He was so small compared to this bed that each morning, when he rose out of it, there was no impression that anybody had slept on its surface at all.
He and his family lived somewhere particularly far away, called Deslinkitu. It was there that he would grow into a man, then eventually wither with age into the appreciative years of senility. He would raise his family there, and he would also watch with admiration as his wife grew old with him.
It was too early for all that though. He was still sinking in that bed, and, consequently, or inconsequentially, leaving no evidence that he'd ever been there.
When he slept, however, he designed brilliant resistances against the persuasions of time. He laid out schemes and stratagem to slow the invasions of time. When time would come in great, sweeping waves, he burrowed underneath the ground and dug intricately into a cavernous depth that Dante might understand. When time came from underfoot, enormous wings would protrude from under his arms and he would allow the wind to sweep him away. He would soar uncontrollably over glistening seas and autumn forests until he could no longer identify where he was or how he could possibly return.
In spite of his resilience, adolescence overtook him.
He spent his days lying around, thinking about his own invincibility and girls who steadily lost their baby fat. He blew smoke from his lips and it bred monsters in his system.
He lived alone in an apartment in the heart of the capitol of Deslinkitu. He had lived alone after his sister moved to America to go to art school. His parents divorced for spiritual reasons. Suddenly, life was easier for everyone if they all lived separately.
Such was the case that the days of copious sunsets came to a close.
He walked down the hill that his school rested on top of. It was an international school, which gave a likely explanation for its existence on top of such a large hill. The children of ambassadors attended the school, so in the case of riots or demonstrations against foreign influence, the school's armed security guards could fend off natives until helicopters came and lifted them away.
The walk down the hill didn't bother him after a while though. He would watch his feet scuttle across the concrete. The concrete had to be repaved every year because of the annual monsoons. Each year, after the construction workers put in new concrete, students would write their names or that of their lover's. They would become legends for a year and he would archaeologically examine their hieroglyphics like cave paintings. There were confessions of hidden passions, or sometimes of dark secrets that would only be safe in the crystallized silence of drying cement.
He had spent a particularly long time that day walking down the hill, which allowed him to notice something he never had before. Someone had wrote his name near the edge of the walkway. He knelt down for a closer look.
The color of the cement on which his name was written was slightly darker and duller.
It must've been from before the most recent paving, he thought to himself.
Beside his name, there was an "I" that was barely legible, then another word after that. He couldn't make out the other word. The life expectancies of these roads were only a year, and such was the case with this message written out to him. He stood there for a while, puzzling out the situation. He let his mind take free reign, and a drunken logic galumphed around for a while in his mind before it collapsed, exhausted.
He continued his walk home, but he couldn't get his mind off that message in the road.
What could've it been?, he wondered. It had been in decent shape, with relatively little amounts of erosion from the monsoons. He imagined the person who wrote it; he or she wrote the message with such intent that it withstood torrential rain and storm. During those days of tempestuous weather, this message of sentiment stood steadfastly to the ground.
He was quick to imagine that it was a message of passion and concealed love, which led him to walk home feeling like a warrior-king, returning home in the fashion of Odysseus. He imagined some beauty who stole a person's breath just by being present. He imagined her walking down sparkling coasts. He imagined going to war for her attention.
When he got back to his apartment, it was about seven in the evening. He learned kendo as a hobby, so when he got back it was dark and he was tired and hungry. As usual, he cleared away his school bag and chose out a light jacket to wear to dinner. As he was looking through his phone book to consider inviting someone to dine with him, he had something of a rather bleak epiphany.
The message he had seen earlier, it could have easily been one of irresistible malice and hate. Why is it that he came so quickly to the conclusion that someone had adored him? He imagined this person, shadowy in texture, writing legions of bitter messages that were never sent his way. He imagined passing this person everyday in the halls of his school, never noticing that person but always being watched and despised. He imagined this person writing volumes of fiction, where he appeared as the antagonist in every story and always ended up dead to make way for a happy ending.
He couldn't think of who it could be. Who could possibly have hated him so?
He looked back down at his mobile, which still had his phone book open. Suddenly, the names that he browsed through, those names that he passed by as not wanting to have dinner with, took new forms. The straight lines and sharp angles of the letters in their names became dangerous and lethal. One by one, systematically, he imagined their faces on the shadowy body that wrote the message on the walkway.
All along, he thought, others would pass that message and take note of it. They would see him sometime in the day and keep it lodged in their system, wondering what he could've done to have caused someone to hate him so.
He decided to order in that night.
After he hung up the phone and sat around to wait for the delivery person, he contemplated his secret admonisher while he drank a beer and watched through the window the lights of the city stretched out before him. That mysteriously alluring sight of the city at night, so full of sin, love, grief, sympathy and hate. He was drawn magnetically to the city, not only through affection, but through everything else as well: senseless remorse, blind spite, urban loneliness, irrational fear, and tragic introspection.
One of these lights, he thought, belongs to that person who hates me so.
That gaping cityscape -- he knew not whether to apologize or continue searching.
