波浪

Emotions are like ripples; behind a large and passionate turbulence, smaller ripples remain for a long time like afterimages, filling the vast sea. Where was the starting point of these deep and heavy waves? Where was the starting point of these deep and heavy emotions?

I thought about it until late into the night. Since when did it begin? Since when did a deep wound remain in the depths of my heart like an indelible scar, making me feel pain every time salt water touched it?

It must have surely been because of my parents' lives during my childhood. My parents were people who had even less reason to live than I did. Everything they had worked so hard for over the years was completely burned down due to a sibling's playing with fire, forcing them to become beggars on the street. Because of an economically powerless grandfather, my father had to play the role of the breadwinner at a young age, serving those above and below him. A life of mere labor, working only to feed others instead of himself. The ancient seed of resentment embedded within that life was like a massive sinkhole clearly visible even to my young eyes.

I used to wonder. If it was that painful, why did they keep on living?

The lives of the adults I witnessed were lives of despair rather than laughter. Presumably, the impact of the IMF crisis was immense. With children to feed lined up one after another, and elderly parents to support, yet with no place to earn money, they had to move from one menial job to another just to make pennies. Since I, too, was born in a place where such people gathered, the landscape I witnessed in them was filled only with lives struggling merely for survival, agonizing under the weight of responsibility, with unclear reasons or purposes for living.

Though the times have improved a bit compared to back then, to me, it still often looks like the exact same landscape of the world. What on earth is living that it makes a human being so utterly wretched? Why must people inflict wounds upon one another to make things even harder, when everyone is already suffering so much? Why did I have to be born and listen every single day to shouts stained with verbal abuse and endless criticism? What did I do so wrong?

I detested God immensely. I thought He was giving me some sort of grand mission, if He was going to send me to a place like this. But there is no such thing. In a world full of people who live lives more wretched than mine and disappear without leaving a single trace, am I the only one with a special mission, and do they die that way because they are discarded people? Life was a curse. Birth was a tragedy.

Having a child is for the purpose of giving love. If humans possess an object they love more than themselves, it would be their own flesh and blood—above all, a child born through them. If you gift hell instead of love to that child, what kind of human does that prove you are? Why must that child be born and live in hell for absolutely no reason?

Human life is a truly sorrowful story. No matter how much they laugh and chatter to escape reality, they clutch onto their pathetic, meat-like physical bodies, struggle somehow to survive, and then die. In that process, they give birth to yet another life for their own sake, and feed upon countless other lives. Guilt has long been castrated from us. For our survival, for my survival, we kill life, exploit it, or raise it merely for amusement. It is so profoundly human. And that is why I loathe myself for being a human.