Chapter 23

Actually, after that, I don�t remember much� So I�ll leave that to your imagination. From then, all the events became inconsequential. I take you now to a conversation that stands out clearly in my mind from that time. Chil-hyun began to ask me about my reasons for not telling Danilo about my feelings for him.

I looked at him with amazement, �How on earth,� I began, �How on earth can you expect me to believe that you and I alone can defeat fate?� My eyes filled with desperate tears. I had long given up on my stars. �You don�t understand, my love for him is not right. My love for him was never meant to be. I cannot change what I know is a fact! I cannot bend fate.�

How do you know it is fate that holds you?� asked he, as he turned to face me, �Right now, you are nothing but a coward, with no wit, no strength and no merits to speak of.�

I felt my hackles rise as he spoke. Sadly, a voice within wailed �I know! I know!� I had let myself go. The star folding, the rug making, even going after Danilo, the one I love, I saw in myself a dematerialization of I had ever believed in � all I had ever worked for.

�God,� I said, �If there is a God, please give me strength,� I whispered, � I need somebody to lean on, somebody who knows.�

My friend looked at me with pity in his eyes. �Chin-woo,� he sighed, �something has happened to you. You are not the same as you used to be.�

�It�s not that I�ve really changed into something different. It is that I am becoming again who I once was before I knew you,� I replied, my voice barely over a whisper. I felt quite sorry for myself: I could not find the strength from within to bring my eyes up to his for some reason.

�No,� he said, his eyes burning into my soul, �you�ve changed and I can see by the look in your eyes that you hate the creature you�ve become ��

�Enough!� I suddenly shouted, �Enough,� quietly, �I will not sit here any longer listening to your pseudo doctor words, you want to analyze my mind? Get a degree or something. Strap me down again. Give me more tranquilizers. But I refuse to sit her and listen to someone who is supposed to be my friend tell me that I hate myself.�

He looked at me with pain in his eyes. He reached out his hand. I frowned, and physically ad mentally jerked myself away from his kindness. I could not bear any of that at the moment. No more than I could bear the pains of his relentless truthfulness.

In a whispered voice, my throat choking on the words, I turned to him and said, �Please, I need to be alone now.�

He nodded silently and stood up from my bed and walked to the door. When he reached it he turned back to me and said quietly, �If you need anything, anything at all, I mean it, just call me. You know my mobile number. Please Chin-woo. Just think of what I said.�

I could see the empathy in his eyes a suffering that I knew all too well. I could feel my own selfish heart contract with the pain one feels when one knows he is in the wrong. And yet, as I saw his back retreat, I could not bring my wretched soul to go after him. I wanted to apologize for my harsh words. I wanted to take back my angry thoughts. I wished a thousand things. And yet, as his steps resounded upon the staircase in my house, I sat still, my love for him deepening, my limbs unmovable just the same.

�Why,� I asked myself, musing, �Why is it, that I must ruin every great thing that has ever been given to me? Is this my divine punishment for some horrendous deed that I did in some remote past life? And why am I still clinging on to this life in the first place? What does it mean?� I asked myself, �to live? What is living, but a bunch of chemicals reacting with one another in my head? Why is there this incessant instinct to live, yet there seems no other reason to live other than to reproduce, so that they, too, can die. What use is any kind of beauty, when all that is beautiful is ephemeral? All that was once beautiful must become withered and die. Why do I live to see all this? What is this stream of consciousness? Even this very battle within myself� What does it have to do with the meaning of anything? What does it do for anything at all? In the end, I gain nothing, but something, a whole lot of nothing, and a bunch of electrons changing places� I slumped back onto my pillow, my eyes closed, my fingers to my temples. I could not begin to contemplate the meaning of life with my feeble and incomplete mind. I could not decide anything important with the simplified mass of chemicals, flesh and blood that filled my cranium.

I felt tired, defeated, and horribly stupid as I rolled over on my bed and began an uneasy sleep.