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You shouldn’t mourn a man who dug his own grave.
You shouldn’t shed tears for a man who lies six feet under, covered in a thin layer of soil with his eyes wide open.
But if the man is deep enough in the sediment— fusing himself in Earth’s core with his nails tearing into the crust beneath him, crying not out of pain but a reverent pleasure at the idea of meeting the God beneath his body— he does not need your pity.
He does not want the human sorrow of being grieved or missed. He no longer has the desire or need to be remembered when he has found the answer to life that most of the men he knows have shaped their entire life around finding.
Meaning.
Often, we are searching too far and too hard for something that cannot be manufactured. There is no building your purpose to life— it finds you. It scoops you up in its arms and tells you, “It’s time to go home.”
You listen. You wrap your arms around its neck as it lifts you up from the ground, beaten and bloody and covered in mud and rain as it carries you to warmth.
You listen, because no one else has ever told you something that brings so much clarity to you ever before.
Love only means so much when you don’t have a reason to seek it.
If you hold on to the hope that your reason— not your love— will prevail and find you where you are, the tenderness of a loving, warm smile greeting you before carrying you from hardship will be easier to believe exists.
Otherwise, you’re convinced you’re being carried by ocean waves. Angry ones. The kinds you hear about on the news happening on islands, sweeping entire civilizations away and putting people in danger. You will not be able to see the angel carrying you to Heaven because you have already convinced yourself that Hell is where you are trapped.
It gets easier to believe when you’ve been proven right before.
However, you are not trapped. There are no chains on your ankles or your wrists.
The perforations on your arms are from you gnawing on your skin— hoping that the feeling of teeth scraping your flesh will materialize into the comfort you wish you could replicate.
From when you met her. When you knew her.
You hope that the metal cuff around your wrist will shatter from her mere presence alone. But she doesn’t come back to you.
She doesn’t know who you are anymore, and that isn’t her fault. You’ve changed. You’ve failed. You couldn’t pick up where you left off because the world around you had not been kind enough to let you breathe.
But it is not your divine obligation to punish yourself for it.
You are not the judge, jury, or executioner for what you deserve. There will never be a reprise of peace if you continue to think that way.
He knows this already, Gihun. You are watching a man dig his own grave, and you think that by some intrinsic prophecy that it’s you who will halt death and save him. You aren’t that powerful.
But you do not hold an absence of power, either.
Everything you touch will die, that is indefinitely true. You are not the one that decided their demise for them by placing your hands on their corpse. Their lives were carefully picked by a karmic being you cannot ever pray long enough to meet or understand.
Don’t think you’re that special or unique, Gihun. God cannot do half of the things you think you can. No amount of prayer or worship will convince Him.
So why do you cry? Why do you shed tears for the cadaver that hasn’t finished living? Do you miss the blood he spilled? Are you fond of the distance you created between yourself and his desires of affection? Why must you abuse your heart, drowning yourself in soju and hoping you’ll be drunk enough to fall off the pedestal that the ghosts in your motel placed you on?
Except, they didn’t put you there, did they?
You decided that they did, because how else could you rationalize to yourself the way you handle their passing?
You saw death happen on such a larger scale at such a slower pace. Life slipped away from you and left you covered in blood and viscera that would’ve made you vomit if you were younger and more naive. You went to bed and slept next to people who could’ve decided it was time for your life to end that night. How did you get used to it? How did you get to the end, with all that money?
You lived in it. It wasn’t luck, it wasn’t knowledge of the game— you simply lived in the nightmare long enough to be awake and tell the tale. It was as if sleep paralysis could last a week— and still leave you without air to breathe when you woke up.
“You should be thankful” is the most idiotic thing someone could say to you now. Thankful to grieve? Thankful to see death everywhere you go? Thankful to wake up every day and wonder what would kill you the quickest? Thankful to never feel your blood rush through your veins because you are convinced it lays in puddles next to your dead friend?
That is absolutely moronic.
Don’t you think that someone trying to avoid the very grave that you dig for yourself would say that? You’d be right to think that, you know.
Have you ever noticed him say it? Has it ever escaped his lips when you existed in his presence?
There’s no way you noticed it. Maybe you thought it— maybe it came to you in a nightmare when you laid your head on that pillow, in the space in your mind that is adamant that you are truly alone in this world. You toss the sheets away from your body as they cling to your skin with sweat, turning towards whichever side of your bed feels less scary. You decide every night if it’s more frightening to look at the window— knowing you will never truly be alone in this world but that no one surrounding you can possibly comprehend why you’d be scared— or if it’s easier to look away from that idea and face the dark shadow on your wall that has never spoken a word to you since you made yourself at home in this building that you bought.
You bought a building full of rooms and never left any space in them for the versions of you that needed healing.
Tell me, Gihun, does healing have a face to you?
Does it smile? Does it laugh? Does its cheeks flush with pink when it looks at your scathing wounds and wraps them in the softest bandage they could find in the first aid kit?
Does it tell you a joke when you’re frustrated? Does it hold you when you cry? Does it pour you water and keep a box of tissues within your reach when you try to talk about it, even if you never say anything?
What does healing look like to you, Gihun?
If you can’t think of the answer, it’s because you have not let yourself learn how to heal. You’ve reduced yourself to a monster— a system’s perpetrator just because you survived its torture. You cannot fathom anyone understanding what you witnessed, not because it wouldn’t be true— but because the idea of anyone else knowing what you lost feels suspiciously like someone would misunderstand you on purpose if you let them get too close to your story. You cannot believe that there is any other perspective to this than the fact that you deserve to be dead for knowing this happened to you— and not having been able to do anything about it. You laid your worth in what someone hoping you would die had said to you. Convinced you of, and wrote horribly planned speeches to say to you in hopes that you would believe every word they wrote.
You have laid your paradise in the grief you feel for what you lost, and the voices that have told you it’s your fault.
Junho is waiting for you on the island. He has been since he saw you for the third time— arms raised with a barrel of a gun against your back as the number branded on the back of your jacket sticks out like a fractured bone— splattered in blood and bore into the green of the fabric that your jacket was woven into. You wore a uniform you never knew the valor of. You were given a test you did not have the capacity to ever study for.
He stood there, breath taken— wondering immediately how he could get you and everyone you loved out of there. The mask did not conceal his love for you, you were just too scared to turn around and see it. You answered his question without looking him in the eye, because staring at it meant to you that its venom would sting you— and leave you blind to what else could happen.
You have been conditioned to believe you are incapable of being loved without question or expectation. You believe mercy is not given without an incentive, because the grandest gesture of mercy you had ever been shown came with a 4.56 billion check on a credit card. Exploitation has never shown you love, so you are wary of every human who wants something from you. You always wonder if they’ll actually help you, or if they’ll throw money at you and deem it similar to the kindness a human can give a tortured soul.
You can buy therapy over and over. But you cannot buy what it takes to feel loved.
Realize that when you hold that cold blade horizontally in front of you, to act as a wall against sunshine— you are reinventing the fears that you carried a young girl through until her last dying breath. You create thunderstorms for yourself because you are comfortable in the shadows, not because you do not want to see the sun.
You are no longer numbered. You are here, human as humans can ever be. You are not a casualty in the rubble, you are a father, a man, a person. Most importantly, you are you— and you deserve the golden sun as much as those gluttonous fat cats in their penthouse lather themselves in lavish gold they acquired from spilling blood and laughing about it.
Please let the sun in, Gihun. Junho opens the window because he wants you to see the sun.
Not because he wants you to lose everything you have and jump out of it.
You never cared about worldly possessions— you wish they didn’t exist so that people wouldn’t fall victim to greed.
What has Junho taken from you that you can’t live without? You would’ve lost your time to cigarettes and alcohol, you would’ve lost your patience to the tides of time as you aged. So truly, Gihun, is Junho the danger you think he is— taking parts of you away that you had spent so long building back, brick by brick?
Or does the danger you perceive still live buried in your heart— comparing you to a race horse with no more worth than the wagers placed on your performance?
Do not mourn Junho. He is not dead. He will not die.
He will meet you in the grave that you dig for yourself. He will lay beside you until both of your fleshes rot— until you are nothing but bones caged around organs and viscera that the creatures around you feast on.
Until you are ready to become the fertilizer that you have destined yourself to be, Junho will wither away with you. Cause it’s better to die knowing you are right where you want to be, than to mourn what you could have had if you had believed you could see the sun one more time.
He will not leave you behind.