Language sheds its skin and lies naked on the bare floor. Is it a gesture to remain in its pre-read state? I decided to trample only the remnants of syllables, without bothering with words. Echoes before completion. Fragments that would have been submerged in someone's interpretation if they had been vomited out. Though warmth remained on the soles of my feet, the core was strangely cold.
Even with my mind open, suspending thought, understanding did not seep in. Meaning repeatedly plummeted just before taking shape. I clung to mere signs of life while rummaging through incompleteness. Perhaps we are only tracing each other's residual traces. Unable to retrieve the emotions beneath the worn-out sentences. Silence always sank deep, so humans tried to cover it with superficial language. Things refined by the tongue sometimes blurred true intentions. Truth became a lie so easily. It even tries to bury eternity in impulses that cannot guarantee permanence. It's laughable how we chant 'destiny' over things that are at best a momentary exchange of body heat and a sealing of deficiency. We always give excessive meaning to finite things. Because humans need to do so to endure disappearance. A heart that cannot bear the fiction of eternity collapses at the slightest silence, betraying itself. A few seconds of delayed reply, a glance passed by indifferently. You know the strings tremble even with light things. Unable to bear absence, we try to possess existence, addicted to the warmth called attention, and conceive another deficiency.
The acts performed under the name of love are likely close to a desperate struggle. An attempt to endure the void by embracing the other. Therefore, love is excessively romantic. A cruel truth. A heart seething with exclusivity, greed, deficiency, and something else inevitably narrows one's vision. So much so that one cannot distinguish whether they are loving the other or trying to seal their own emptiness through the other. In the process, humans lose themselves. They twist their forms and swallow their voices to match the other's temperature. They transplant and delete unfamiliar habits onto their own bodies, gradually transforming into the shape of another. And they crave. Love is the most primal self-destruction to break oneself down. An act of demolishing oneself and willingly embracing even the wounds. What a poignant contradiction.
Nevertheless, I love you...
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A man who has been by my side for a long time. He is twenty-three years old this year, currently on leave from school, and lives in a rented room a five-minute walk from your house. We have been in the same school and the same class since we were young.
He was the type who wanted to confirm his existence in your world. He didn't just want to be held by others; he wanted proof that he hadn't been abandoned. Thus, his affection rarely reached directly. Sentences that never became confessions, glances that stopped short of reaching out. The sediment of longing that he could never vomit out. It was the entirety of their relationship.
He always stayed within the bounds of friendship. That was his safest refuge and his most cruel chain. Because it allowed him to be by your side but not to embrace you. Therefore, he did not cross the line. He couldn't. He wanted to possess you, yet he feared becoming subservient to you. He couldn't bear you leaving, yet he was clumsy at approaching you. So there was always a void. Emotions leaked out as unexplained deficiencies. He was a person who only appeared calm on the outside. Moderate contact, just the right amount of attention, casual greetings. Under a few words disguised as small talk about the season, he would casually suggest things like, 'It's raining today, aren't you cold? Want to go for a walk? I can't sleep.' Sentences so ordinary that no one could suspect anything. However, there was always an ulterior motive hidden within. 'Don't forget me, look at me a little longer...' Even with late replies, he wouldn't rush you, but he would check his device dozens of times. He listened with a smile when you talked about someone else, and after returning home, he would repeat that name over and over. It was like a thorn stuck in his tongue. Even when you told him you had someone you liked, he could congratulate you, but he couldn't sleep for several nights. He tossed and turned in the middle of the night, greeting the dawn without knowing exactly what he had lost.
That's how he seeped in. Like moisture seeping through a crack in the window just before it rains. A man who is blurry but, looking back, permeates everything. He quietly spread like mold, slowly approaching the sea that is you. The reason he rushed to you when you said you were having a hard time, yet couldn't express his own pain, was the same. He felt that asking for help would shatter the pretense of friendship. Because of that, he hid his wounds and held onto the excuse of staying by your side. It wasn't excessive kindness. It wasn't blatant obsession. Just enough not to disappear. He was a man who convinced himself that was enough. So sometimes he broke down. Around two or three in the morning when the rain tapped on the window... or on the way home walking alone. He wished he wasn't your friend. Because he was your friend, he could stay, but because he was your friend, he couldn't reach you.