“Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere. This dream is like that.”

“I placed my hand over the photo of the bones. Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away! Over what was no longer human - no. Over what remained human even now.”

“I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”

“I knew that was where my mum had also found herself. Waking from a nightmare, splashing water on my face and gazing at the mirror, I saw the same persistent quality in my features that had branded hers. What astounded me was the sun's rays, that they returned each day. Steeped in the afterimage of my dreams, I would walk to the woods and find their brutally beautiful light penetrating the foliage and creating thousands upon thousands of light drops.”

“If, as various ancient faiths say, there exists in a celestial realm or a netherworld an immense mirror that observes and logs everyone's movements, I'm sure the last three to four years of my life as recorded there must resemble a snail coming out of its shell to push along a knife's edge. A body desiring to live. A body pricked and nicked. A body spurning, embracing, clinging. A body kneeling. A body entreating. A body seeping blood or pus or tears.”

“The summer sun flooded the west-facing corridor; the afternoon light was a revelation. I rode the lift down, passed by the guard's room, crossed the compound square - and felt, all the while, that I was witnessing something. The lived-in world. The day's weather. The humidity in the air and the pull of gravity.”

“(…) as I did, people walked past the window in bodies that looked fragile enough to shatter. Life was exceedingly vulnerable, I realized. The flesh, organs, bones, breaths passing before my eyes all held within them the potential to snap, to cease - so easily, and by a single decision.”

“That is how death avoided me. Like an asteroid thought to be on a collision course avoids Earth by a hair's breadth, hurtling past at a furious velocity that knows neither regret nor hesitation.”

“I had not reconciled with life, but I had to resume living.”

“The nightmares, unsurprisingly, continued regard-less. In retrospect it baffles me. Having decided to write about mass killings and torture, how could I have so naively - brazenly - hoped to soon shirk off the agony of it, to so easily be bereft of its traces?”

“Sometimes, with some dreams, you awake and sense that the dream is ongoing elsewhere. This dream is like that.”

“There are people who actively change the course of their own life. They make daring choices that others seldom dream of, then do their utmost to be accountable for their actions and the consequences of those actions. So that in time, no matter what life path they strike out on, people around them cease to be surprised.”

“When I turned and looked around me, patients and guardians alike were silently gazing out at the snowfall, their blank faces suggesting a familiarity with pain and endurance.”

“At some point I started hating my mum. She just sickened me, like every other nauseating thing. I despised her the way I despised myself.”

“My hatred grew until I could hardly breathe. It was like I had this red-hot ball of rage seething endlessly in my gut.”

“I finally walked out be lse I wanted to live. I felt like if I didn't leave, that rage would kill me.”

“I swore then that I wouldn't regret leaving, that I would never come back. I wouldn't let that person darken my life any longer.”

“Strange, the sensation of contact with a living thing, how it can remain imprinted on the skin. As if touch alone can singe and break flesh.”

“How does one endure it?
Without a fire raging in one's chest.
Without a you to return to and embrace."

"My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula."

“As I look down, I get the sense that this severed life is pecking at my chest, trying to tear its way in. I feel its desire to burrow inside my heart, to dwell there for as long as that organ goes on beating.”

“Can saw blades ward off nightmares? Do dreams keep well away from their serrated edges?”

“As in we refuse to part by refusing to say goodbye, or as in we actually don't part ways? (…) Is it somehow incomplete, the parting? (…) Is it deferred? The goodbye — or the closure? Indefinitely?”

“Or could it be that we never actually commu-nicated? Was he only ever a bird? Was I only ever a human in the end?”

“What was the bird trying to see? Was there such a thing as wanting to see when all that remained of you was your shadow?”

“At first I thought they were clothes floating on the water, but it turned out they were all people, dead people.”

“In the sudden lull, I feel as if I've opened the door to a dream within a dream and stepped inside.”

“I say quietly, Dreams are terrifying things. No - they're humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren't even aware of.”

“I sense something oozing from the page, something viscous that trickles out caked and thick like red-bean juk, and blood-metallic, following the candle's trajectory.”

“How much further into these depths can we go? Is this the silence that lies below the ocean in my dream?”

“(…) I understand why Inseon denied any intentions of making a film about these events. The smell of blood-soaked clothes and flesh rotting together, the phosphorescence of bones that have been decaying for decades will be erased. Nightmares will slip through fingers. Excessive violence will be removed. Like what was omitted from the book I wrote four years ago. The flamethrowers that soldiers deployed on unarmed citizens in the streets. The people rushed to emergency rooms on improvised stretchers, burn blisters on their faces, their bodies doused in white paint from head to toe to prevent identification.”

“As if the firmness of this cool wall might yield to me the secrets of this strange night. As if there are questions I can only ask the vanished shadow, not Inseon, who watches me silently from behind.”

“After surviving that hell, would he still have been the kind of person who made choices we could understand?”

“I placed my hand over the photo of the bones. Over people who no longer had eyes or tongues. Over people whose organs and muscles had rotted away! Over what was no longer human - no. Over what remained human even now.”

“In the suffocating stillness, I wondered: Is this it?
The brink of a gaping trench opening up below the abyssal plain,
the very bottom of the deep sea where nothing emits light?”

“She stroked the back of my head, my shoulders, my back. I remember the feeling of aching love, how it seeped into my skin. Clogging the marrow in my bones and shrivelling my heart ... That was when I realized. That love was a terrible agony.”

“Then she stopped saying even yes or no in response, and with that her desires and requests seemed to vanish too. Still, when I placed a peeled mandarin in her hand, she would split it and give me back the bigger half out of lifelong habit, and smile. At which my heart would fall open.”

“At some point, as the naterials piled up and began to take on a clearer form, I could feel myself changing. To the point where it seemed nothing one human being did to another could ever shock me again... Something deep within my heart had dislodged and the blood that drenched then spilled from that emptied hollow was no longer red or surging. There was only an intermittent ache, a welling at its jagged surface that only resignation could still.”

“I knew that was where my mum had also found herself. Waking from a nightmare, splashing water on my face and gazing at the mirror, I saw the same persistent quality in my features that had branded hers. What astounded me was the sun's rays, that they returned each day. Steeped in the afterimage of my dreams, I would walk to the woods and find their brutally beautiful light penetrating the foliage and creating thousands upon thousands of light drops.”

“Is someone really here with me? I wondered. In the way that light in two different places becomes pinned to a single spot the moment one tries to observe it?”

“Is that someone you? was my next thought. Are you connected to me now through faintly pulsing threads? Are you peering inside the dark tank, as you try to revive in your hospital room?”

“Up leaped a flame. Like a blooming heart. Like a pulsing flower bud. Like the wingbeat of an immeasurably small bird.”