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"Are you there?"
"No."
"So I'm alone, then."
"No."
….
At night, the air always turns cold. Especially in late autumn, the weather was no different from any winter day. The muffled, dark air veiled in a light haze, the pale moonlight hiding behind thick, heavy clouds, the distant but somehow loud human voices, the cars, the occasional ambulance and police sirens, and the faint chirping of the tiny yet enormous sparrows that still refused to leave even though all the other birds had already migrated—weren't these the things that made this gloomy weather feel strangely peaceful? And wasn't it the soft breeze in the air that made a person feel alive?
To feel. What did it mean to be alive and feel alive?
She asked herself that question every single day. Now she watched the city from the balcony—this city that looked abandoned—while people forced themselves to appear eager with an eagerness they clearly didn't have. She watched them with the same unwilling eagerness. Everything she saw, heard, or felt—every person, every honking car, every particle of dust, the fake energy radiating from people's unwilling eagerness—only fed her own unwillingness and did nothing but annoy her. The balcony air was soothing and cool, yet she could no longer stand there under these conditions.
Who could?
Maybe another unwilling eager one like herself…
She closed the balcony door and stepped inside. She cast a quick glance around. The same familiar environment. The place felt too full yet far too empty. She threw herself onto the empty couch with nothing on it but a pile of blankets. She let out a deep sigh.
"Are you there?"
"Always."
"So I'm not alone."
"Never."
The silence was deafening—so quiet yet louder than a concert arena. She sat there for a while without a single word. The absolute presence of loneliness and silence was both incredibly deep and unbearably dull. Even behind closed windows and doors, those disturbing sounds could still be heard. To hear them, though, she had to leave behind absolute silence.
Was it really possible to be somewhere both extremely silent and extremely loud at the same time?
And if there was no one around… where were all these sounds coming from?
And the smells? Those nauseating smells. The neighbor's cooking, the chemicals spilling into the air from cars and countless factories, the filth of the birds that hadn't migrated yet and were now waiting to be slaughtered by the incoming freezing winter, and the scents of so many other things she sensed but couldn't quite identify—how disgusting they were…
What she wondered was whether people actually noticed any of this.
"Are you there?"
"Of course."
"Always?"
"Are you really that afraid of being alone?"
…..
Once again, silence fell. It was actually very disturbing. Sometimes everything suddenly froze. As if, in that moment, her body no longer belonged to her, and her soul was completely free, entirely its own. As if her soul could do anything it wanted, breathe as much as it wished, speak as much as it liked, while her body—whose strength she had already begun to lose—lost even more.
After losing the only thing that truly belonged to her, would her soul's freedom even matter?
Her body stopped completely; she couldn't even breathe. But she felt it—she felt that she wasn't breathing. She knew she was suffocating. Yet her soul refused to return to her body and take a single breath.
Was this freedom real freedom?
Was her soul a normal soul?
And what about the body?
Her soul continued drifting "freely." It was all just contradiction.
The River of Eternity…
A place so old yet familiar, but still new and foreign. After years, she still couldn't fully understand it. It was like a deep whirlpool—once it pulled you in, it never let go. Her soul felt both deeply peaceful and deeply uneasy there. The silence, the darkness, the cold, the gloom, the inability to hear or see anything, the inability to feel—while the pain of the ultimate truth struck with full force.
Words weren't enough to describe it; those who don't feel it cannot understand.
If they can feel at all.
It was truly a feeling almost impossible to put into words. Imagine existing and not existing, breathing and not breathing, drinking water and not feeling the water going down your throat. Hard, isn't it?
How can one survive in a place where no sensation, no thought, no time—not even the act of being alive—means anything?
The River of Eternity was such a terrifying, repelling place. Yet despite that, something always pulled her soul back there. Every second felt like it lasted forever—seconds refused to pass, time stopped, and the soul stopped seeing, hearing, feeling. Everything that happened felt as though it had never happened; it didn't even write itself into memory. There was no fear of forgetting.
As the soul drifted slowly, cautiously, endlessly, the body remained unaware of all of it. The body couldn't breathe, move, feel, control itself, or respond to anything from the outside. But the connection between soul and body was still there—unbroken, unbreakable.
A faint consciousness remained.
As her soul was dragged deeper, she forgot to breathe. Her body tore apart from the inside, and her soul only watched from afar. She didn't know how to escape. When the suffocation became unbearable, her soul somehow returned and reminded her body how to breathe.
A completely deep and inexplicable mystery…
Time passed slowly. Yet at the same time, time didn't pass at all. While her soul wandered separate from her body, there was no such thing as time.
Reality or imagination, existence or nonexistence, breathing, thinking, understanding, speaking, moving, feeling, not feeling—without any of the tangible signs that prove we're alive, how could we still be alive?
Yet she was alive. For now…
"Are you still there?"
"Of course."
"How much time has passed?"
"Not even a minute, child."
….
"Even the balcony feels suffocating."
"You just don't want to go out there."
"Oh, so I don't want to, huh?"
"Weren't you the one complaining over and over about the unwilling eager people?"
….
"Is that so?"