08/07

Oh, where to begin with this last thing? What you are about to read is horror to me, so feel free to stop if you don’t like those dangers.

I feel that I’m going crazy giving disclaimers to myself! I don’t like horror either! However, I had a nightmare that made me want to end my affair. We never share the worst of ourselves. This time, I promised myself to do so because now I have a good reason to be honest. If you’re no longer my fan after this, I understand. There’s so much that I hide. I’m getting older, and it’s not fair to continue avoiding this, not for either of us, especially the indignation that’s buried deep and long within me.

I’m sensing the darkness now. I’ll try and push through to the end, only where can I begin? Right now, I’m under a time crunch, because I should be sleeping and am scheduled early tomorrow, as usual. Waiting on the other end of the day are people, maybe this includes you, and I don’t want to disappoint.

Performing for you is the greatest joy of my life. I should say this a million times in a million ways in the hope that you believe my truth. Despite this, a premonition tells me that my secret must escape now, even though timing may make no discernable differ­ence in our world, where work is recorded and immutable. Whether or not I believe in fate, I do believe in our powers as humans to influence each other. It’s something I hold so dearly because you never know who’s listening or who needs to hear it.

So what happened? First, I woke up in the dark.

I couldn’t remember arriving in that area without walls. A dis­tant sound, perhaps the cheer of a crowd, enveloped me like a cashmere blanket on a frigid night. Above, spirits painted the sky and dripped light on my face.

Voices shouted towards me, saying things such as, ‘Why not?’ and ‘I can’t believe this.’ They asked to see my face and chanted ‘I love you, we love you.’ I couldn’t locate them.

The stars above me were so incredible. If you could only see how every star contained a whole gemstone of a memory. They seemed to hold the life of someone and were shining, round, and vital as a fresh bubble. It was a technology that held people’s souls, I’m sure of it. I found this knowledge very exhilarating yet also unnerving. I wished for the chance to enjoy this sight, however, this was the beginning of the nightmare.

I heard a maddening whooshing sound in my ears, aligned with my breathing. It continued to grow in intensity, as if my life, voice, and the world were extraordinarily open to me. I bent my head down in hopes that gravity would relieve it.

Suddenly I was yanked across a vast distance. Rather, I lurched back and forth, perpetually traveling such vast distances that I feared I would lose the last of my breath and so abandon my body.

During the journey, I was thrust into thick darkness. For a moment, at the apex of each string, I gathered enough light to see that I was in a new location. The loud pain earned from these visions was excruciating.

I saw billboards including myself in the inside of restaurants and bedroom walls, and heard myself on dance floors, in base­ments for parties, and resounding across crowded beaches. I was

there in empty trails, and on the radio in otherwise silent mobile homes in the middle of arid lands, and echoing through loud traf­fic, and crumpled in trash heaps with photos, and on stickers in stadiums with astroturf, and inside classroom lockers looking out at students who laughed and winced, playing in their earbuds, and as cardboard cutouts or hung as a poster in shops of every kind, to begin the list. I saw children and young adults wearing all sorts of things, and administrators working hard in offices, and adults of all ages dancing to themselves at night, and so many others.

Perhaps this sounds beautiful to you. Know that I type this with gritted teeth, thinking about whomever, whether it be deep within myself or something more malevolent, made me see this. The feeling was completely unnatural to be everywhere, and it hurt especially badly. It felt as if a sickness weighed on top of my skin and was simultaneously reaching into my throat like a gag­ging sort of whiplash. My ears pounded. It sucked out my breath and tore myself open. I was separating atom by atom, from out­side to in and to out again, bringing together the parts of my body that should remain disparate. There was no build-up. Instead, I was fracturing, dissolving from the first moment while screaming silently inside myself, being remade only to be torn again.

Honestly, I’m not sorry for telling you. I’m still learning to forget it.

Over the weeks since then, it’s taken me at least an extra hour to fall asleep for fear of returning to that place. Even then, I rested in an alert state. What if I’d glimpsed something real?

I don’t want you to imagine my nightmare as I did or to expe­rience how I screamed. I only want you to know that it happened.

Oh… I’m typing through tears, really.

Euaaah! Some minutes have gone by. I will go on after I collect myself.

I can do it, I know I should talk about this. It’s not your fault that you were curious.

If you can believe it, the nightmare got stranger after this pain. Indeed, the nightmare felt alive, like it was crafted beyond me by many scorned observers. While I was traveling in the night­mare, I tried to speak to those people I saw, though I didn’t have any time.

I don’t know what I would’ve asked for, maybe for time itself. I tried singing or speaking to them. I couldn’t form language as we know of it in words. What was it, how can I explain?

All the while, I was trying to put on a good face. I can’t explain why. It still makes me frustrated with myself. What is wrong with me?

I hoped that smiling through my annihilation would fix everything. I wanted to escape so badly that I considered ways of breaking my glass cage to silence as an equal alternative, only that wouldn’t change anything, because even if I could no longer wit­ness myself, everyone would still see me. Anyways, I didn’t know that I was sleeping.

Finally, the dream progressed. I found myself in my child­hood house, only it was much larger, and I didn’t recognize it. The house was a beautiful old Western mansion yet also contem­porary like the house from Parasite and had none of the warmth or nostalgia of my real homes.

You, or they, or my fans were watching the vlog that I recorded with my phone as it phased through my hand. The vlog dissemi­nated my vision in real time as much as for posterity, a live stream that represented forever.

I sought a way to comfort my fans because my safety was somehow tied to their pleasure. I wore a dress that I wouldn’t wear at home except for this. My parents waited in a nearby room, expecting me at the family dinner. Therefore, I needed to enter­tain my fans enough so that I could leave early, so that I could join my family for dinner, so that I could convince both fans and fam­ily of the incompatible needs of the other, so that I could feel con­tent enough to close my eyes and wake up from my fears, like I was a ghost with generations of unresolved guilt.

My fans asked ever more personal questions about my family. My parents heard me read one of the questions aloud. They wouldn’t have understood why someone asked it, but I had to convince them that it was alright. The question was, “Would you change anything about your family, and what would it be?” and I answered by asking, “Would the Earth still be our earth without the moon?” It left them unsatisfied.

There were too many questions to answer. They noisily accu­mulated, so that I couldn’t think. I saw less of where I was going in the house, which surely made me lost in an endless game with unfortunate consequences. It was obvious that if I ended the stream early, my parents were going to turn into pigs (I rewatched Spirited Away recently), and I didn’t have the wherewithal to deal with my poor parents if they were pigs.

At some point the house became as large as a palace, with long, dark wooden hallways. My distance from the dining room was directly related to my fans’ happiness beyond the phone. This is why I maintain boundaries in real life. The only livestreams I should accept are during concerts, when there’s no mistake that I’m performing. My vlogs are edited in post.

I conspired against my fans, searching for an acceptable excuse to hang up. I said I was lost on the wrong side of the house and needed to say goodbye soon. I wanted to scream at you all. I’m sorry. It was just a dream. Honestly, what was holding me back? I overlooked an ivied courtyard from up high. It wouldn’t have been worse to scream than to… I can’t finish that sentence.

My eyes were imprisoned on the phone as I contemplated this. And I’d never stopped smiling.

Narrating what I saw wasn’t enough for you. You wanted me to open every door, even the scary ones. These doors weren’t in my house before. Nothing lay on the other side. It didn’t cure your curiosity, neither did it resolve my fear that the next door would be different. Like you, I was pulled into the mystery of just where I was, and what private secret you were looking for through me.

We are always looking for something, I only wish we knew what that should be.

And I’ve seen movies about haunted houses where the young and naive heroine confronts the deep evil inside with a love that somehow purifies it. I’m afraid this isn’t that kind of story. I won­der if knowing these stories makes one impotent at handling them, because the magic is gone while twisted desires remain.

I asked for support without betraying the desperation in my voice. I thought, ‘Could your love be conditional?’ I hate to admit this, but I never once thought of explaining my situation to you. What does it say about our relationship that I don’t feel willing to disappoint you, that I believe you would misunderstand?

The truth is, I know it remains impossible now, though my words without my face or voice leave me strangely hopeful.

Eventually, the space between us was exhausted, so I quietly turned off the stream, and then threw my phone through the win­dow. Like the shift from night to morning, I felt a momentary relief. In a different world, I would’ve bathed in the pause like a cat under the sun.

Only this was still a nightmare. I heard someone’s footsteps in a dark hallway that expanded ever out to nothing. And I still felt the noise, sensed the incessant questions of my fans still lingering in the livestream’s chat. Just like in the real world, I replaced one stress with two others.

I closed my eyes to listen, and my vision was transplanted to an establishing shot on the other side of the house. I saw the ground before stairs that spiraled. Water pooled paradoxically over a dry rug. The water skipped the rug and soaked into the wooden floor below.

My vision followed the calligraphy-like water which swirled around my body, only it was not my body but an idol of myself, an effigy. Then my sight changed to a bird’s eye view as I watched my frozen image summon water from the stairs. Stone pillars cir­cled me, and hallways branched octagonally in every direction from the spiral. The inscription of a magic spell.

I could hear footsteps landing much closer than before, then with a jolt my vision returned to my real body. When would I finally wake up?

I walked through the corridors towards the idol of myself, per­haps guided by the same talisman that drew water to another ver­sion of me. In the hallways, many doors were closed. Others opened with a creak as I walked by, and still others were dark and cavernous, as if they would swallow me up if I tried to appreciate them.

Some walls were porous, and I could see versions of myself glitching around them, fulfilling filial duties in a stereoscope across time, deep into futures I would never occupy, wearing clothes that in this life I’d worn only as costumes. Each version of me held weight and was real, and I was no different from them except that I could see them. I wanted to join in, and I believe if I had, my life would’ve ceased as I knew it. That was the pact of this world that I understood from the beginning.

All the while walking, I feared that the ceiling may come down, and the wide porous walls were shimmering closed like the flesh of a yawning creature. If I moved too slowly, I would be digested, forget about my pig parents (by then I had). Without light, I made my way by the varying degrees of shadows, which pointed like a compass towards the other me. I only wanted to go home or wake up! Hadn’t I put myself through enough?

At one point, I stumbled upon a balcony and looked out. The world beyond was much different than I remembered. A dry storm shouted at me, and there were dark clouds that made it

hard to see until lightning revealed a great forest unlike anything from where I’m from.

Recently, I haven’t been feeling like myself and find that I’m crying about little things. I’m slowly trying to forget some per­sonal matters. These stormy threats may be the shadow of bigger fears, for example, the promise of death. I’ve been encouraged to not speak publicly about death as people already worry enough about the relentless future, and that’s not my role. However, why wouldn’t I mourn, just like you? Why can’t I walk in the direction of my curiosity? While acting, facing death is in line with my work, yet when I’m myself I’m supposed to evade it? Have I sworn to be a version catered to your innermost desires? This is a big step forward for me to ask.

I had a long conversation about the problem of expressing negative things with a friend who is also an entertainer. To be honest, we spoke explicitly about the problem of death and suffer­ing, which do not disappear by distractions, however beautiful. How can I spend my life in the pursuit of beauty in the wake of its antonym? How can beauty exist in a world where innocent children die of cancer, or disappear, or the unspeakable happens? If God asked me to justify the world at the cost of one child, I would refuse.

Please don’t mistake my timidity to speak on such matters with a lack of experience with them, or to equate my failure to articulate these thoughts with the complexity of their existence. I’m well-acquainted with suffering. Admittedly, I never directly confront the inevitability of my death, even when I mourn it in those most dear to me. I hope I can forgive my past selves who

were too afraid of becoming obsolete that they behaved impu­dently. In this way, I may’ve been addressing death from a secondary source, namely cowardice. Of the shows that I’m proud of, it’s because I lived this fear to transcend it, disappearing in the process.

I sometimes fear that each time I go to sleep, I die, and a new creature is born into my consciousness. It allegedly remembers everything I’ve lived. By this logic, every day is the only chance I get, and my lineage stretches before and after me in thousands of variations which fracture identity. Maybe this is true for each moment, though I don’t mean to get into notions of the sacred.

Anyways, with these thoughts encapsulated by a dream while looking out of the broken window of a haunted house on a hill towards a gate to a dark forest guarding from the dead stillness of night, under the stars that implied the universe, a different sort of life appeared before me and whispered about the sounds of the day. It coaxed me to die in this world. Wake up. Die. Again and again before you.

Like I said earlier, I’m too afraid of death to face it. Instead, I convinced myself that I wasn’t dreaming after questioning it. Ha, and I managed this after all of the practice doing the opposite while on stage.

I can’t remember exactly how things proceeded from there. More rules shaped the dream. They made no sense, though I was very good at learning them. For example, I was not supposed to walk inelegantly, or else the irregularity of steps could rouse unin­vited guests. Also, I had to hurry to the gathering of water across the house, or else I would be considered irresponsible and lose a

charity that I’d been fighting for in my company, to say nothing of my parents, those pigs.

I sought the correct doors and turns among the winding halls, keeping an ear towards the footsteps as they grew less distant, hoping that they belonged to someone who would always be on my side. Partners come and go, if only after a lifetime. Fans are like the sun.

I expect you know exactly who this person was. Why have I kept going back to him? We should all be lucky to have dream­friends that stay with us through the mercurial patterns of life. I knew he was looking for me, and if I kept searching for him, it’s possible that he would provide comfort, but, and don’t think I’m beyond this, I wanted to leverage him for my own salvation.

I sang a lullaby that I still wish to remember. I continued to wait.

Eventually, I heard footsteps louder than before. I stumbled upon his face from just far enough away. I called him, and called, only to discover that he spoke English instead of Korean. Can you believe it? I’ve never had a dream where language was taken so seriously!

Instead of answering my call, the noise scared him. He looked very bewildered, with his eyebrows upturned, and his lips slightly opened and pulled more faintly down. However, he was so full of love and joy too, like he’d found what he was looking for yet regretted finding it for the weight he now carried.

No, he was awfully horrified to find what he was looking for.

I couldn’t know why, only his hand was clinched up in a very uncomfortable way. I gestured to him. It looked like he held some‐

thing in his hand. And If I looked very closely, I could imagine another person holding tightly, their fingers intertwined.

I approached him, believing he was running to greet me, being similarly desperate for companionship in the darkness. He dashed right by me. I called and tried to chase him. If I wasn’t so unthreatening, you would’ve thought that I was the hunter and he was the prey, but that’s absurd.

There was a moment, right as I passed him, where I glimpsed a hand where mine fit, and a whisper of a person pulling him furtively, as if the idea of what he ran towards (or away) from could’ve been recognized by me. I’m only reporting the details because he turned in my direction as he passed, and with this, he acknowledged me. His gaze held the love reserved for families. None of it makes sense. However, I knew deep down, and still feel this way now, that he wanted to take me with him, and if I had already known what happened next, I would’ve understood that he was trying to protect me from danger, and that the only way to protect me was to not let me beside him.

It is very late, should I go on?

I’ve been writing for so long that it’s almost morning, yet I feel totally awake.

Where was I?

Dreams shift like emotions. Often I can’t recall what has made me feel one way in the moment. Still, the change is similar to when it rains after a long time, and you suddenly remember that it has been too long for nature. All will resolve. In that way it feels obvious.

I worry about describing the final events because they hap­pened beyond the way we speak. You would think that after years of making music, I could do an adequate job of explaining what something is like in words. Well, I’ve never had this space before and will try to talk about sound, though doing so is equivalent to taping my mouth shut before singing.

I suppose, to start, music requires time to become music. For example, when I sing a note, it relies on the notes before and after to make sense of. The melody slowly emerges from the repetition of sounds. You can also understand the melody because so many songs have been sung in the same key with the same range of emo­tions. In this way, there are many contexts playing together all at once, and so we’re never alone in song, but rather all contributing, including those who have since left us.

I don’t know if it’s the sound or the space between the sounds that gives us the chance to shape our own life. My best music is created when I follow those patterns of memories. This includes both the melodies and the greater currents of feelings which inform them and deviate between each performance or against each ear. My music, like my memories, is never completely happy. It is in concert with other sad emotions, which allude to suffering. However, they all swirl together to create something fuller and more sustainably joyous.

I would be lost without music. I’m not speaking about a career, rather who I am as a person. I’m happy to lose myself in sounds, for it is where I find myself the least alone. This remains true even when I’m singing to myself.

I wonder, what is a note, and how does this compare to rhythm? Notes are vibrations, which are only energy traveling through a medium. It takes a short time for sound to be produced and to travel, and the open spaces between these vibrations are the rhythms.

And then there’s the note’s pitch, which is created by the speed of vibrations. Does this sound familiar? Again pitch, like rhythm, is about time. When you focus enough, pitch and rhythm are the same thing, only pitch is revealed on a micro­cosmic scale. A scientist would explain this better, though this mystery precedes science as it precedes reality, just as love does.

It seems an important precursor to reality that pitch is made up of the same thing as rhythm, and in both cases, it’s simply the waving of energy in time. If notes make up a melody, then rhythm, being of notes, is also melody, and harmony can only exist as part of this composition with melody and rhythm. I’m reminded of school where Einstein said energy and matter are the same.

In the school of life, this is what you all have taught me: energy, music, water, love, and everything else in the universe are made with the same thing. We and our communication are all one physical reality.

If light cannot transcend the black hole of reality, perhaps music has hope, which flows between things? I’m not speaking of the sound exactly, rather its quality, what it carries.

You understand why the metaphor of the universe appears when I address my fans. Beyond crudely approximating the scale of our shared experience, it overwhelms our trivial differences,

because everything is superficial to the brilliance of stars, not to mention what is implied between them.

I could store all of my memories in songs, and you would understand it, when all I’m doing is taking the time we need in order to exist, shaping it with my breath, and imbuing it with my heart.

We build lives around these sounds, communicating what is happening inside of us through vibrations that happen so fast that we hear them as if they’re stable things. This is exactly how we imagine ourselves to be stable. Or how the language I’m writing is a translation of who I am, and surely it’s not close to who I really am, because if it was, I could give up singing and dancing and never leave my house! I haven’t put this notion into words until now, yet I’ve always been trying to express it.

I know that fans and performers follow a very similar concept to rhythm and pitch, only our energy is in the form of love…

During the moment the boy passed me, we both fell into a very compressed place where space and time were squished together. I could hear it. The moment held a high pitched, frantic rhythm, and the harmony of his voice rounded out my own existence as we shouted across an infinity which was so close as to be indistinct.

I had a long time to think.

One thought was that if I’m an avenue for people to speak to themselves or between themselves, a way to cross the distance, then my firm belief about music becomes an important meaning for life.

Then I thought, if things go ideally, a true fan will grow to resent me, because my most beautiful song is a reminder of some­thing which they cannot bear to think. That is, the insufficiency of my art for recreating their inner world, which will inevitably be much deeper than I can allude to. In the moment outlined above, I knew that the series of dreams I had with this boy were doomed to end because, whether thanks to my art or despite it, he had matured into someone with real feelings entirely his own and was bursting under the continual suppression of this truth. Of course, this is what I’ve always wanted. I don’t know, possibly I’m lying to myself, or perhaps I’ve never been more honest.

I don’t want him to need me anymore.

I wished that it would be the beginning of the end of our rela­tionship. I wanted him to be happy without me, and will only accept our coming together if he makes something of himself. This is the only way to encourage him to find what he’s looking for. As for me? I shouldn’t become too attached. While I’ve had a history of being hard on myself, this is different. He’s what this is all for.

I need to keep asking myself not just ‘why’ I do it, but ‘what do I want?’ My perfect dream is that someone is so taken by my music that the memory of it is no longer a memory to return to, rather, it’s a state of knowing that they can draw upon forever. I want them to understand how loved they are, if not by me, then by life itself.

If I could prove to someone that love is real, and that they are worthy of it, so that they can go about their lives with a

knowledge that I’ve never been able to completely provide for myself, uwah…

Maybe it’s only others who can offer the gift of love, because not only is it proof that you’re not alone, but that someone can recognize you by the lifeforce inherent in them. Like when you fall in love and at long last see someone who had been somewhat transparent before. If only one person is moved by me and knows of this love without requiring reassurances, maybe I’ll have one less fan, for they’ll no longer seek me, yet I’ll have helped them, and that’s the purest dream I’m trying to live.

Finally, something else happened in the dream, I’m trying to remember it. I left notes for myself.

It was about me and maybe my greatest fear. More even than death.

I wrote many things down and then crossed them off.

Actually, I won’t share those moments. They’re for myself. I don’t owe you an explanation, though I want to provide one. You see, telling you would make the memories more difficult than I can bear.