Dream Walker

9밤, 29일 12월

9밤, 29일 12월
December 29, 2013

There was a peculiar whisper in my ear sometime tonight that I couldn't decipher. It was muffled, and sounded smothered almost, but it was soft and it was faint. Much less of a whisper, it began to sound more like a cry and not long after, the noise had only heightened. I shielded my ears as it mocked a piercing sound, like the cry of a child; a newborn - I tossed in my bed, then, and awoke from the unsettling thought in my head.

My eyes stirred open to the clandestine darkness of my bedroom and I lied on my back, staring up to the somber-seeming ceiling. The cry of a child, I wondered. It was an unusual thought to wake up to, the kind that both piqued but disturbed your curiosity and caused you to question the single notion.

Straying away from what had startled me awake, I huddled myself towards the wall and closed my eyes, not to sleep, but to Choi Hani. It seemed uncanny to believe I had fallen hopelessly in love with somebody I could never be with, but then, again, it was bizarre to fathom the very idea of being in love . . . It was euphoric to repeat that: love. I was in love with Hani.

I am in love.

It was baffling, too, to reminisce the moment Hani had warned me about falling into love. I was aware of the consequences and I recognised the punishments yet . . . Somehow, I was anxious to see how it would end.

With my mind at ease, a strange beam of light had begun to seep into my eyes and I averted myself from the sudden illumination. Taken aback, I squinted towards the source of luminescence, and past the bookshelves and the curtains, a familiar beacon had lit its path from the window, but dissimilar to the warmth I had become intimately familiar with, the light was cool. However, still, it beckoned me out.

Arms raised above my sight, I guarded myself from the flourishing radiance of moonlight imitation and pulled back the covers. Meeting the hardwood floor, an arctic sensation had begun to bleed itself into my skin, like an upward stream, and had raised the hairs of my leg. In the mundane netherworld I was too common with, I had discovered a new universe; one that had contained one of many failed love affairs.

In the unknown crepuscule, the curtains swayed to the magic of candle splendor, glistening like a prism of a million colours dispersing beyond the walls, and I wanted to fall prisoner to Aphrodite. Hand outreached, I wished to seize the light and struck with complete awe, a bokeh of glimmering stars were casted in every direction. I gasped, a single mnemonic of this event, arising from my remembrance and found under my palms were intricately designed works of art as they were traced, strings of frost in pursuit of one another. Swallowed into the hypnotising luminosity, my skin had begun to glow like phosphorescence, my hair floating as if gravity had disappeared, and I smiled. Into the light I had trusted myself with, returning to Hani.

I landed on my feet, falling more gracefully than the first time, and met with the grass more kindly than I did before as a gentle breeze swept across my cheeks. I smelled the scent of autumn weather and began to ask myself why I had come back. Why had I returned? I questioned, I'd made a fool of myself already. I'd be an even more pathetic one if I tried to prove something -

And unfortunately, I was overdue.

"Hello,"

I stood stationary, stiff; I was a mannequin, foreign to emotion yet afraid to meet eyes. Timid, I had made a joker of myself once, hopeless in my attempts to convince someone I was something as ludicrous as in love with her . . . She couldn't believe me, so to see her again just short of a day later, it was too soon.

I turned around hesitantly, "Hello, Choi Hani."

And there she stood, in her own existence, between the physical and the netherworld. She was imperfection in its most incomplex and stereotyped form. She was lucid in many ways; With her coffee irises and almond eyes, her abbreviated lashes and ordinary eye bubbles. Dressed in her frosted ivory gown, her bister coloured hair had neither grown or shortened, and I accepted her, despite such faults. It was inevitable beauty in the afterlife and she was the only example, known to me, to display it so effortlessly.