Chapter Text
To live is to suffer
Nine hours before she died, Mingi took a aimless stroll through Bucheon. The city was a conveyor belt of despair. The sports center, that gray mass where her father used to go to watch her swim laps; the Mexican restaurant where she took Jongho to eat fajitas; the hospital where her mother was treated.
Jongho had sent her a message the day before.
“Mingi, I miss your voice. Can we talk? Jongho C.”
He replied that he felt “ridiculously hysterical.”
It would have been impossible for her to send him any other message; not because she no longer felt anything for him, but quite the opposite. She couldn't risk hurting him again. She had ruined his life.
“My daily life is chaos,” he had written drunkenly in a message shortly after the day of that wedding that never took place.
The universe tended toward chaos and entropy. It was basic thermodynamics. Perhaps it was also basic existence. You lose your job and then other equally shitty things start to happen.
The wind howled through the branches of the trees.
It started to rain.
He took shelter under the awning of a newspaper and magazine shop, with the deep conviction, as he would prove, not without reason, that things were only going to get worse.
Doors
Eight hours before he decided to die, Mingi entered the newspaper shop.
“Is it raining hard?” asked the woman behind the counter.
“Yes,” Mingi replied, without looking up. His despair grew like a weight he was unable to carry.
He saw the display, an issue of National Geographic. He looked at the cover of the magazine, which featured an image of a black hole, and came to the conclusion that that was what he was. A black hole. A dying star, collapsing in on itself.
Her father had always subscribed to National Geographic. Mingi remembered an article about Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. Today, no place had ever seemed so far away. She had read about puffins and about scientists' research on glaciers and frozen fjords. Then, encouraged by Mr. Seonhwa, she decided she wanted to be a glaciologist.
Mingi saw the awkward, hunched silhouette of her brother's friend, and former bandmate, next to the music magazine display. Wooyoung was engrossed in an article, and Mingi must have stood there next to him for a millisecond too long, because when he took a step to the side to move away, he heard him call out, “Mingi?”
“Oh, Wooyoung, hi. I heard Hongjoong was in Bucheon the other day.”
“Yes,” he replied with a brief nod.
“Uh... did you see him?”
“Yes, I saw him.” Then there was a silence that Mingi felt like a pain.
“He didn't tell me he was coming.”
“He just stopped by, it was impromptu.”
“Is he okay?”
Wooyoung fell silent again. Mingi had liked Wooyoung a long time ago. He had been a loyal friend to his brother. But, as with Hongjoong, there was a kind of barrier between them. They hadn't parted on the best of terms. (When Mingi told him he had to leave the group, he threw his drumsticks hard on the floor and stormed out of the rehearsal room.)
“I think he's depressed.” The idea that his brother might feel the same way he did weighed heavily on Mingi's mind. “He's not himself,” Wooyoung continued. "He's going to have to leave that shoebox he lives in. And forget about playing lead guitar in a successful rock band. By the way, I'm broke too. These days, pub gigs don't pay. Even when you agree to clean the toilets after playing. Have you ever cleaned a pub toilet, Mingi?"
“I'm going through a shitty time too. It's like the Olympics of misfortune.” Wooyoung made a sound halfway between a cough and a laugh. His features hardened momentarily.
“Sorry, you moved me. Do you want me to play something sad in the background?” Mingi wasn't in the mood.
“What's with the joke? Is it because of Pinzas en el corazón? Still?”
"It meant a lot to me. And to your brother, too. To everyone. We had a contract with Universal within reach! An album, singles, a tour, promotion. We could have become Coldplay."
“You hate Coldplay.”
“That's beside the point. We could be in Malibu right now. But no, we're in Bucheon. No, the truth is, your brother doesn't want to see you yet.”
"I was having panic attacks, Wooyoung. I would have ended up disappointing everyone anyway. I told the record label to sign with you guys. I agreed to write the songs. It's not my fault I was getting married. I was with Jongho. It was one or the other."
“Yeah, right. And how did that work out with him?”
“Wooyoung, that's not fair.”
“Fair. What a big deal.” The woman at the counter stared at them in amazement.
“Bands don't last. We would have been a shooting star. Before we even started.”
“Shooting stars are beautiful.”
“Please. You're still playing with Yeonjun, aren't you?”
“Yes, and I could continue with Yeonjun, but I could also continue playing in a successful band and make money. We had the opportunity right there,” he insisted, pointing to his palm. “Our songs were fire.”
Mingi felt bad about himself for correcting that “our” to “my.”
“I don't think your problem was stage fright. Or the fear of getting married. I think your problem was the fear of life.”
That hurt. Those words had knocked the wind out of his lungs.
“And I think yours,” he replied, his voice trembling, “is blaming others for your shitty life.”
Wooyoung nodded, as if he had been slapped.
“See you, Mingi.”
“Say hi to Hongjoong for me,” he asked as the other left the store and stepped out into the rain on the street. “Please do.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the cover of Tu Gato magazine: a Roman cat. It weighed heavily on his mind, like a romantic symphony, as if the ghost of a German composer lived trapped inside it, invoking chaos and intensity.
The woman behind the counter said something, but Mingi didn't understand her.
“Excuse me?”
“Are you Song Mingi?”
The woman, short with straight black hair, behaved with a casualness, a relaxation, and a happiness that Mingi had long been unable to interpret in front of anyone. She was leaning on the counter, resting on her forearms, watching Mingi as one might watch a lemur in a zoo.
“Yes.”
“I'm Seojin. I remember you from school. The runner. A brainiac, too. What was his name? Mr. Keeho, wasn't he the one who organized a teachers and students reunion in your honor once? He said you would make it to the Olympics.”
Mingi nodded.
“And? Did you go?”
“Well, uh... I quit. I was more interested in music... at the time. And then, well, life happened.”
“And what do you do now?”
“Well... I'm doing a few things right now.”
“Do you have a family? Wife, kids...?”
Mingi shook his head, wishing his head would unscrew from his body and fall to the floor. His head. On the floor. So he would never have to have a conversation with a stranger again.
“Well, don't dawdle, or you'll miss your chance.”
“I'm twenty-eight,” he wished Yeosang were there. Yeosang never tolerated that kind of bullshit. “And I'm not sure I want to...”
“Jake and I were like rabbits, but, well, it was time to stop. We have two little devils. It's worth it, you know? You feel complete. Look, I'll show you a photo.”
“It's just... phones give me a headache.”
Jongho had wanted to have children, adopted, of course. Mingi never knew. Fatherhood terrified him. The fear of falling into a deeper depression. If he couldn't take care of himself, how could he take care of someone else?
“So, are you still in Bucheon?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I thought you'd be the one to run away from here.”
“I left, but I came back because my mother was sick.”
“Oh, I'm sorry. I hope she's better.”
“I have to go.”
“But it's still raining...”
Mingi escaped from that place and wished there were nothing but doors ahead of him. Only doors, one after another, through which he could pass, one after another, to leave absolutely everything behind.
Like being a black hole.
Seven hours before he decided to die, Mingi was in a tailspin and had no one to talk to.
His last hope was his former best friend, Yeosang, who was more than ten thousand kilometers away in Australia. Things between them had also cooled off lately.
He took out his cell phone and sent Yeosang a message.
“Hi, Yeosang. We haven't talked in a while. I miss you, buddy. It would be great to catch up. XOXO.”
He deleted the “XOXO” and replaced it with “Kisses.”
Less than a minute later, the message appeared as read. Mingi waited in vain for the three wavy dots to appear.
He walked past a movie theater where Lee Dongwook's new film was premiering that night, a sappy romantic comedy set in ancient Korea called The Last Chance Salon.
Dongwook always looked like he knew profoundly important things. Mingi had loved him ever since she saw him play Plato in a television series and since he mentioned in an interview that he had studied philosophy. She imagined herself having deep conversations about Henry David Thoreau, through a veil of steam, in the hot tub at his house in Seoul.
“Follow the course of your dreams with confidence,” Thoreau had said. “Live the life you had imagined.”
Thoreau had been his favorite philosopher when he was a student. However, who really follows the path of their dreams with confidence? Thoreau, of course. He had gone to live in the woods, rejecting all contact with the outside world, to sit and watch the trees, write, chop wood, and fish. Life, in any case, was probably simpler two centuries ago in Concord, Massachusetts, than it is today in Bucheon.
Or maybe it wasn't.
Maybe he was just terrible at life, plain and simple.
Hours passed. He wanted to find his purpose, something that would give him a reason to live. But he had nothing. He didn't even have the small task of taking his medication to Mr. Kim, his neighbor, because he had done that two days ago. He wanted to give alms to a man living on the street, but he realized he had no money on him.
“Cheer up,” someone said to him. “If you cry because you've lost the sun, your tears won't let you see the stars.”
“I won't see the sun or the stars. I am the black hole.”