Chapter Text
It was just another day in the purgatory life of Ko Munyeong. Although it wasn't a bad life. She had carefully constructed this on her own. She was an independent career focused woman living in a posh apartment in Seoul. She had excelled in her career and created a decent name for her. Munyeong had always wanted to create her own life according to her own choices and be fiercely independent. Coming from a family where her father was a successful lawyer and a mother who was a well acclaimed mystery novelist, she had an identity crisis since childhood. Being the only child of wealthy and always busy parents meant that she had everything, yet nothing. She was that odd child who always had a lot of toys but never anyone to play alongside with.
Workwise, she wrote storybooks for children which had made her fairly popular because they garnered a lot of criticism both good and bad. All her stories although seemed like they were meant for children, actually spoke to people of all ages and with the recent global wave of mental health consciousness, she was being called upon at a lot of places, conferences and forums to speak on and talk about her way of healing through stories.
She was standing on the window in her 15th floor condo overseeing the city’s hustle bustle and reflecting on a question that a curious journalist had asked her today in the afternoon during one of her press meetings for her newly launched book “The Zombie Kid”. The question was a relatively simple one, yet had managed to make a dent in her carefully constructed mask of a sorted person doing her job right. The question was, “Whether the Zombie Kid was actually her in real life?’’ Thankfully she was able to navigate the question very carefully by answering that her storybooks are a work of fiction and she draws inspiration from everywhere and anywhere. Her manager, Mr Lee Sangin, had smartly made a move by signalling that the press time was already up and that they needed to end it just there, saving Ko Munyeong from further interrogation around that line of thought.
She was trying to introspect that whether she actually was the zombie kid or not? All her life, she had craved for love and warmth. Yet she was always denied that. Her parents deprived her of the familial love. She had never experienced the joys of living together as a family, and had given up on seeking that love very early. She had accepted that that was one love she would never experience in her life, believing it to be her luck or lack of it. She had taken years to finally get to this acceptance, when she discovered the sweetness of love that brewed when she met him in college. Moon Gang Tae. Never had she know that she could crave for unbalanced smiles, gentle pats on the head and sturdy shoulders to lean on. This love had started to feel all consuming to her, shielding her, befriending her, being in silence with her. It had started to eat away the monster of loneliness in her. She had started to believe that maybe she was worthy of all that and more, before she saw it end abruptly. Oh how wrong she had been, thinking she was worthy of that love. Didn't she know that everybody eventually left her. She wasn't worthy of company. She sometimes felt like leaving her own self as well, she didn't really like her at most times. But well if only it would have been that easy.
The best or the worst part of being human is that you always know when you're lying to your own self. You can actually never lie to your self. You might be able to trick your mind in believing false notions, but deep down you always know what's the truth.
And she knew she couldn't really forget him. Couldn't get over him. Her thoughts always went back to him. How could she when he was the only one who had seemed to understand her, be her savior in this lonely world? Or was that actually a trick her mind played on her? Did her mind believe that he understood her when he actually didn't? Whatever it was , a reality or an illusion , she thought about it often.
It had been 7 years now since she last saw him. Her rational self really laughed at her when she started going into that never ending cycle of trying to imagine the possibilities of what could've happened if things didn't go the way they did. This was a toxic pattern, her thoughts were a victims to. She always imagined too much. And her thoughts always carried grandeur. Grand happy, royally sad. It was always an extreme. Despite knowing that life was meant to be lived in a balance , something that she herself taught others in few of her coaching sessions, yet she succumbed to, in the extremities of her own imagination. One of the very many side effects of being a writer.
She quickly lit a cigarette to calm the rising negativity down and bring back her usual indifferent-attitude-towards-life mode on.
Deep down she knew the real truth and also the bigger truth that wallowing in her loneliness didn’t help. It just brought bouts of anxiousness and trauma that only worsened her condition and made her feel like shit.
As she was removing the ash of the cigarette in her miniature coffin shaped astray placed on the windowsill, her phone rang, awakening her from her melancholic thoughts and being her back to reality. It was her manager slash only person whom she could call closest to being a friend.
“Hey Munyeong. I am sending you the schedule for your next week’s corporate programme on your mail and the revised calendar invite. There has been some change in the timings of your sessions. Please go through it and let me know if want to change anything.” Sangin spoke.
She listened to him, trying to focus on what he was saying and cleared her throat before responding “Sure, I will go through it. Hope this turns out well.’’
She ended the call thinking about the corporate sessions that she had taken a year back in a big automobile company and how employees who had taken her workshop were so disinterested and lacklustre in their interaction. She particularly didn’t like corporate sessions because of the same reason, because grown up adults tend to complicate things and almost always overlooked the actual meaning behind what she wanted to say as opposed to children. In fact there were times when she herself learnt a thing or two about her stories when she was discussing them with children and the younger lot.
She opened the calendar in her phone and saw the revised schedule for the upcoming week. She had three lectures scheduled on alternate days starting from Monday which was day after tomorrow. The corporate at which she was supposed to speak at, was a brand agency called ‘Dandelion’ that had gained recognition over the past 5-6 years. She reflected and hoped that the agency people will be better participants in her workshop, who would understand and add to her concepts of mental health and healing.
With zero appetite for food, Munyeong crashed on her soft bed and decided to call it a day. She dozed off within minutes as she lay curled up inside her comforter, hugging the pillow.
The wheels of time were moving. Did they ever stop?