180807 Hwa Yang Yeon Hwa The Notes
I opened the door to the storage classroom and entered. In the unchilly air of a summer night, the smell of mold and dust blended together. For a moment, several scenes crossed my mind. The shining shoes of the headmaster, the face Namjoon had standing outside the door, the day I avoided Hoseok and went back alone. Suddenly, I felt a pain inside my head and felt a chill. Those complex feelings, anger, fear, whatever you call it, flooded in like a pain. All the signals I felt with my body and my heart were clear. I had to get out of here.
Taehyung grabbed my arm as if he saw the look on my face. Hyung, try a little bit more. Remember the memories here. I shook off Taehyung’s hands and turned around. We had been walking around in the heat for hours. We were exhausted. The other guys looked at me like they didn’t know what to say. Memories, memories that Taehyung talked about were just meaningless stories to me. Stories about that thing I did, that thing that happened to me, that something that we did together. It could be the case. It was the case. But memories are not understanding or comprehension. Experience is not something you hear and figure out. It’s something that has to root deeply in your heart, your mind, your soul. But all the memories I had there were but bad things. Things that made me suffer and made me run away.
A fight happened when I decided to go back and Taehyung tried to stop me. But we were all exhausted. The way we hit, dodged and stopped happened with a sense of slowness and heaviness like we were in a dense, hot liquid. In a flash, Taehyung’s legs got tangled with mine. I was wondering if my shoulders hit against the wall when the next moment, I lost my balance and stumbled.
I didn’t know what happened at first. The thick dust made me unable to open my eyes and breathe. I had a fit of coughing. Are you okay? After hearing someone ask, I realized I fell on the ground. I pushed myself up and saw what I thought was the wall had collapsed. Beyond the wall was a huge space. No one moved for a moment. Oh my god, but we had been here for so long Someone said. No one could imagine such space existed on the other side of the wall. But what is that? The dust settled and a cabinet standing in the middle of the empty space came into our sight.
Namjoon opened the cabinet’s door. I took a step closer. Inside was a notebook. Namjoon picked up the notebook and turned over the first page. For a moment, I held my breath. On the first page of the seemingly old notebook was an unexpected name. It was my father’s name. Namjoon was about to turn over another page when I snatched it out of his hands. Namjoon looked at me surprised but I didn’t mind. I flipped through the pages. The old notebook passed through my fingers like it was about to crumble.
It was a diary handwritten by my father about what he and his friends experienced together in high school. It didn’t tell the story of every day. Some were every month and there were even illegible pages coated with something akin to blood. But still, I could know. That my father and I went through the same thing, that he made mistakes just like me and that he ran and ran again to make up for it.
My father’s notebook was a record of failure. In the end, he gave up and failed. He forgot, turned away and avoided. He let his friends down. The diary’s last page was smeared with but black ink. The ink stained the blank page after it, after it, until the very last page. That stain was an eloquent evidence of my father’s failure.
I lost track of how much time passed by. Looking at the wind blowing through the window that had started to feel cooler, it musts be the darkest time of the day, before the sun rises. The other guys including Namjoon were sitting on the floor sleeping. I lifted my head up and looked at the wall. I once saw my father’s name written somewhere here. Under it was a sentence. Everything started here.
It was when I was about to close the notebook that I felt something at the top of my fingers. On top of the ink stains, blurry letters came into my sight. I felt the murky air outside the window. Seems like the sun would soon rise. But the night hadn’t ended yet. It was neither night nor dawn. In the stains black like darkness entwined with the hazy light, between lines and lines, were faint letters.
The notebook held more memories than it recorded. What my father decided to forget, what my father decided not to remember was left as it is on the letters, between the margins and the space. The color had faded but the many times my father went through, his fear, his despair and frail hope that he would never overcome it were swirling under my fingers like letter punches, left marks as they are once pressed. The distorted map to my father’s soul was left as it is.
After closing the notebook, my tears fell down. I sat still for a while. When I turned around, the guys were still sleeping. I looked at each of them. Who knows, maybe we had to come back here. This was where everything of us happened. We learned of the meaning of being together and the joy of laughing together. My first wrongdoing, my first mistake that I had never been able to admit myself was left like an open wound.
The thought that none of these was a coincidence crossed my mind. In the end, I had to come here. Only then would I be able to find the meaning of the pain and anxiety I faced because of the mistakes and wrongdoings I made and for the first time, take the first step towards finding the map of my soul.
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