Hatred - 2Min/Minmin

17

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WONPIL:

The burden of genius isn't an easy one to carry.

Twenty-nine years of lugging it around had worn Wonpil down. He had stopped treating it as anything other than a curse

It was fun in the beginning, he had to admit. The effortless exam scores, the feeling of superiority, the unabashed admiration, it was all quite heady to be honest. But slowly, the pressures that came with all this started to mount.

He was put in groups with other boys and girls with similar or greater intelligence, sent to competitions where he was reduced to a really slow computer.

And slowly, the headstart of having a greater IQ faded.

Numbers stopped to matter and hours spent teaching himself courses way ahead of his time went up. The competition between geniuses is fierce and it stripped Wonpil of everything else in life.

He was the only twelve-year-old who refused to go on family vacations, or watch cartoons, make friends or even go outside to play.

Instead, he would stay locked up in his room and attempt questions of advanced calculus. He had practically brought himself up. His parents, concerned at first, had resigned to their kid being abnormally precocious.

The only relationship he had had were with his teachers and professors. It wasn't until his late teens that he learned to hold down conversations.

These were little sacrifices though. He wouldn't give up jis position as a child prodigy, and later a promising young scientist, for anything in the world. He had got usee to the attention, the promise of a legacy he would leave behind.

He spent a good eight years of his adolescent life locked up in labs, or in his room poring over books, research papers, publishing his own reports, criticizing the report of others.

The scientific community is a hostile, unforgiving place. New discoveries, inventions, technologies are frowned upon at first, looked with suspicion and envy, most scientists are driven by the fear of being left behind.

But just like in every book, every movie, every play, he fell in love and everything changed.

The girl was young and beautiful Understudy, and Wonpil was a young, good-looking professor. Their conversation started at the laboratory, and soon they were talking about their dreams and aspirations, things they loved, cuisines they liked and movies they hated. In a month's time Wonpil knew she was the girl he wanted to spend the rest of his life with.

He had finally found love outside his research and his quest to leave a mark on the scientific community and the world.

It was the most beautiful thing he had ever experienced in his life, something science or logic could never explain. They were the best six months of his life. He got quite obsessive with the idea of love and power it was.

Every turn in his story had been a cliche and so was what happened next-the girl left him.

She went to Germany on a research scholarship. Wonpil was ready to go along but the girl insisted she would go on her own. Having just found the joy of having someone to love and be loved by, Wonpil was miserable and lovely without her.