Diary of a Madman, XVII

Kim leaned back on a leather recliner.

The moment was particularly sweet because he had meticulously prepared steps to ensure maximum comfort before sitting on the before said leather recliner. Truthfully speaking, in all matter of fact, the recliner was not, by any standard, very comfortable. The leather had yet to have worn, resulting in a rather stiff, relentless dexterity. In other words, Kim didn't sink into this recliner--he merely sat atop of it, no more to the recliner than the small particulates of dust that have accumulated upon its surface.

The preparations that Kim had so meticulously arranged before sitting on this recliner were multifarious and wholesome in approach. He had lit a stick of Nag Champa, whose burning tip twinkled like flickering sun inserted so haplessly in all of that cosmic distance. He had, on repeat, that one song that he enjoyed so palpably that he felt entirely at home when listening to it. The lighting was superb: not too bright as to alert the soul, yet not so dim as to leave it lethargic. His preparations were to mathematical precision along the algorithms of his every satisfaction.

Why did Kim go so far to prepare the comforts of that moment? How long would he sit on that recliner, conscious of those comforts, before drifting off to sleep or boredom, rendering his preparation supernumerary? Kim didn't think of these factors before or during his preparations. He didn't think of the duration of time, the spillage of seconds into minutes, awning hours, while he was relaxing on this recliner. Instead, he sat there, enjoyed the elements of his prepared comfort, and stared blankly at the air in front of him.

Kim was in a peculiar mood.

He couldn't put his finger on explaining his feelings. Its name was elusive, like a word that's simply too hard to pronounce. When his mind tried to grasp the feeling, he felt like he was grasping at nothing but the empty air before him, the very air at which he was now staring upon. At each attempt, one being more futile than the next, he could only think of Dostoyevsky's Underground Man. He could only think of Kafka's K. from The Castle. In other words, Kim was feeling particularly... redundant. For whatever reason, Kim suddenly embodied the superfluous man. In other words---excuse the overt cliche--Kim no longer knew why he existed.

What was the meaning of this blink of consciousness before the resounding depths of expiration?

Kim had a girlfriend with whom he's been going steady. Kim had many friends, all of whom would reach out to him if he needed emotional assistance. Kim had a loving family who supported him most generously. Yet, in spite of all that, Kim stared longingly at Nietzsche's abyss. He embraced the futility of the transience of his existence and he felt not scathed nor anxious, but a bright, violent, dull, boring, explosive, exciting, dry, arid, vital, cardinal, raw and ever-lasting...

...neutrality...

"How curious," Kim exclaimed to himself. How curious, indeed.

Kim relieved his pocket of his mobile phone and shifted through the list of numbers he had stored inside of it. He stopped on his girlfriend's contact, Hyo-Jin, and on that small, mobile screen, he saw the memories that they have shared. He saw his brightly smiling face, and hers, and he saw that essential fluctuation in pupil dilation that clearly indicated the activities of love. He was, indeed, quite in love with Hyo-Jin. Yet, at that particular moment, those memories, those images of two smiling, laughing, beautifully amorous people were fictitious in the face of a intimidating redundancy that was much like an extra period after a sentence as a result of a mistake of the keyboard..

Kim scrolled through his list of friends, many of whom have been such friends since early on in Kim's life. He saw all those moments of glorious youth, spartan vitality, and the days of everlasting summer. He saw them running in courtyards, smoking their first cigarettes, and eagerly gathered in a circle to talk about the mysterious beauty of women. Yet these memories, like those of Hyo-Jin, passed in silence, like quiet mourners, and Kim was again unaffected.

Kim scrolled to his mother's phone number and observed the immortality of his childhood. He saw the struggle that his mother so valiantly persevered with so much dignity and sacrifice, yet, like the others, these memories clicked by with all the sentimentality of a projector scrolling through slides.

It was as if Kim was standing on the marble floor of an intensely prestigious art museum, evaluating a precious work of cultural achievement by this or that genius artist. He stood there, hands clutched together, observing the strokes and colors of the artwork before him. It was all of this, yet he could not come to appreciate any of it. He knew that he should feel something while laying witness before a spectacle, in front of a work so elusive and wonderful that it commanded the careers and lives of so many in this world. Yet, as much as Kim tried, his eyes glazed over with the look of impertinent boredom while his mind flushed with anxiety, despairing the possibility that he may be incapable of true enjoyment.

The demands of this world are so many and so deep. There stood the modern man, at the peak of his development and the zenith of his industry. He enjoyed Romantic orchestration by Russia composers, the melodious cool of Coltrane, fawned at the work of Dali, read Haruki Murakami interspersed with Camus, and yet, standing in this dense smog with only the promise of effervescence, Kim watched the spectacle of existence before him:

the sparkling of the stars that be-twinkled the gloaming above, the passing from life to death, the interaction of all of nature's units, the miraculous ingenuity of humankind, the infinity of love in an amorous embrace, the rise and fall of dignity, the legend of father to son and mother to daughter...

and, like that prestigious work of art, his eyes glazed in incomprehension and then his mind, in a staccato of silence, in a crescendo that led to nothing, fell asleep upon that stiff leather recliner. The incense eventually burned out, its deep smell withering into olfactory incompetence. The music came to a halt, the mechanics of the machine eventually malfunctioning.

Kim, asleep on that recliner, in silence.