Depression.
A persistent feeling of sadness and loss of interest, which stops you from doing your normal activities.
At least... that's how the internet defines it.
Pretty accurate, I suppose. Simple. Clean. The kind of definition you'd find on a medical poster in a waiting room, sandwiched between "anxiety" and "eating disorders," printed in a font designed to be non-threatening.
But it's also wrong.
Not factually wrong. Emotionally wrong. Because depression isn't a "persistent feeling of sadness." That implies there's a feeling at all. That there's something there—a weight, a color, a shape you could point at and say: this. This is the thing that's wrong with me.
There's not.
It's the absence. The gap where the feeling should be. Like reaching for a light switch in a dark room and discovering the wall is smooth—no switch, no wiring, no evidence that electricity ever existed in this part of the house.
You're not sad.
You're not anything.
And the terrifying part isn't the emptiness itself. It's that you eventually stop noticing it. The way you stop noticing the hum of a refrigerator because it's been running so long it's become part of the silence.
...
My name was Park Jiwon.
Twenty-two years old. Convenience store clerk. Resident of a studio apartment in Gwanak-gu, Seoul, that cost ₩340,000 a month and was worth approximately half of that.
I'm telling you this because someone should. Because the coroner's report won't, and the three people who attended my funeral certainly won't, and the landlord who found my body four days later was more concerned about the smell and the overdue rent than the fact that a human being had died in the space he was renting out at an unreasonable markup.
So I'll do it myself.
Here's how it happened.
***
The apartment smelled like expired convenience store ramen.
That's the detail I remember most clearly. Not the soju. Not the pills. The ramen. Specifically, the cup I'd left on the counter three weeks ago with the lid still peeled back, the noodles inside dried into a solid yellow brick that I kept telling myself I'd throw away tomorrow.
I never threw it away.
Tomorrow was a word that required belief, and I'd run out of that sometime around my twentieth birthday.
I was on the floor. Back against the wall. Legs stretched out on the vinyl like they didn't belong to me—which, for all practical purposes, they didn't. I hadn't felt ownership of this body in a long time. It was just the thing I moved around in. Hardware running software that had stopped updating.
Above me, the ceiling light flickered. On. Off. On. Off. Two weeks it had been doing that. I hadn't called the landlord. Calling meant talking. Talking meant pretending there was a person on this end of the line.
The soju sat half-empty beside my knee. Warm. I'd been here long enough for room temperature to win. Two blister packs of sleeping pills on the floor next to it—one of them popped open, the little white tablets scattered across the vinyl like baby teeth shaken from a cup.
Here's the part where I should tell you this was planned. That there was a note on the table, carefully written, tear-stained, full of meaning. That there was a moment—a specific, identifiable moment—where I decided.
There wasn't.
I came home from my shift at 2 AM. Sat down. Poured the soju. Opened the pills because my insomnia had been chewing through my nights for weeks. Swallowed two.
Then three.
Then I stopped counting, because counting implies there's a number where you should stop, and stopping implies there's something on the other side worth being conscious for.
There wasn't.
'I should be scared.'
My last coherent thought. Not a cry for help. Not regret. A clinical observation, flat and disinterested, like reading the weather forecast for a city I didn't live in.
I should have been scared.
I wasn't.
***
Here's something they don't tell you about dying.
It's boring.
There's no tunnel. No light. No montage of meaningful moments playing on some celestial screen. My most meaningful moment was probably the time my mother called me by my brother's name at dinner and didn't correct herself, and frankly, I didn't need to relive that.
I just... stopped.
One second the ceiling light was flickering. The next, nothing.
Like unplugging a lamp. The bulb doesn't scream. It doesn't resist. It was on, and then it wasn't, and the room is exactly the same either way because the lamp wasn't lighting anything important.
...
Park Jiwon.
Age twenty-two.
Cause of death: aspirated vomit in his sleep. Choked on it. Didn't even wake up to turn his head.
Body found four days later by a landlord with a spare key and a grievance about February's rent.
Funeral: three people. My mother, wearing grief like an accessory she wasn't sure matched her outfit. My brother, in a new suit, who checked his phone twice during the eight-minute service. A girl from the convenience store—Minji, the one who did the dawn shift—who stayed fifteen minutes and left because she had to clock in at four.
Three people.
Seven minutes of remarks.
₩2,800,000 for the cremation.
The math of a life that didn't add up to much.
***
And that should have been it.
End of story. Credits roll. Empty theater.
...Except.
Dying felt like unplugging a lamp.
What came after felt like someone plugging it back in—except into the wrong socket, in the wrong house, in the wrong country, on the wrong goddamn planet.
Pain.
Not the gray, familiar ache that had been my background music for years. This was white. Sharp. Screaming. A current running from somewhere behind my sternum to the base of my skull, so sudden and so violent that my body moved before my brain came online—
Back arching.
Fingers clawing at sheets that were not mine.
Sheets that were too soft, too heavy, too expensive to belong to anyone who lived the way I'd lived.
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling was made of stone.
...
What?