Tuesday was ramyeon and an open window.
My mother's rule. Even in winter. She said the steam made the apartment feel small, which was true, because our apartment was small, and I think she understood that some problems are easier to live with if you name them yourself before they name you.
My father never argued with this.
He just opened the window.
He was good at that. Accepting the cold as the cost of something better. I did not understand this about him when he was alive. I understand it now in the way you understand things that arrive six years too late to be useful.
I am telling you about Tuesday because it was a Tuesday when I found the notebook.
And it was a Tuesday when everything else began.
Whether this means something I cannot tell you yet.
I have learned not to trust patterns that feel significant before I understand what they are patterns of.
I was nine years old the first time.
My father's study was not really a study. It was the corner of our living room where he kept his books and a chair that was slightly better than the other chairs and a reading lamp that made a small warm circle on the wall that I used to stare at when I was supposed to be sleeping.
The notebook was on the floor. Between the bookshelf and the wall. Wedged there like it had been trying to hide or like it had fallen and decided falling was close enough to its destination.
I picked it up because I was nine and it was there.
I opened it because the pages were empty and empty pages have a specific weight that full pages do not. Like possibility before it becomes anything specific. Like the moment before you make a decision that you will not be able to unmake.
I stood there for a moment holding it.
Then I went to the kitchen. Took a pen from the drawer. Came back. Sat in my father's chair.
Pressed the pen to the first page.
I wrote one word.
Not because I planned to.
Because the word was already there and the pen just found it.
Why.
I stared at it.
Then I wrote the rest.
Why does the being in level seven move different from all the others.
I have beaten level seven forty times. Same path. Left side. Wait at the pillar. Hit when it turns.
Today it didn't turn.
I died. Then I died again. Then I sat there looking at the screen and something felt wrong in a way I cannot name yet. Like the floor moved but only under me. Like the game knew something I didn't.
It changed its pattern when I found the pattern.
Things in games don't do that. They follow rules. That's what makes them beatable. You find the rule and you use the rule and you win.
This one changed the rule.
Which means it has more than one rule.
Which means it's not following rules.
Which means —
I don't know yet. I need to think.
I'm going to find out.
I filled nine pages that night.
My mother called me for dinner twice. The first time I didn't hear her. The second time I heard her but the thought wasn't finished and an unfinished thought sits wrong in my chest. Like a door left open in winter.
I came to dinner late.
My father looked at the pen marks on my hand.
He said nothing.
My mother said — did you find your father's notebook.
I said yes.
She looked at my father. My father looked at me.
Something passed between them that I was nine years old and could not read.
Keep it, my father said.
That was all.
I kept it.
That was eight years ago.
My parents have been dead for six of them.
I don't say this to make you feel something specific. I say it because it is the fact that everything else is built on and if you don't have it the rest of the structure looks wrong.
They died in a fire. Gas leak. February. I was at my friend Jihoon's house because we were in the middle of a game and I was about to win and neither of us wanted to stop.
I was winning when the call came.
I have never finished thinking about what that means. I start the thought and then I put it somewhere and close the door. I have gotten very good at closing doors.
The apartment building had four floors. Three other families also lost people. The building management was fined. A settlement was paid. I received a portion of it which was administered by my mother's sister until I turned sixteen at which point I received it directly which was ₩2,300,000 and lasted four months.
This is what I know.
This is what is documented.
I have never had a reason to know anything else.
I am seventeen now.
I live in a gosiwon room in Mapo-gu that is exactly the width of one mattress plus the distance needed to open the door without hitting the mattress. The window faces the wall of the building next door which is close enough that I can see whether the bricks are wet when it rains without going outside.
I work three jobs.
Delivery from six to nine AM before school. PC bang attendant from nine PM to midnight Sunday through Thursday. Weekend shifts at the convenience store on Worldcup-ro that is a twelve minute walk from my gosiwon if I don't stop anywhere which I don't because stopping costs time and time costs money and I have ₩43,000 in my account until Friday.
Rent is due Thursday.
I have a physics exam tomorrow.
I have not studied for the physics exam.
I am eating convenience store kimbap at eleven forty-three PM because my shift ended at eleven and the walk took twelve minutes and I haven't eaten since six AM which was also convenience store food because that is the primary food group of people who do not have time to cook or money to eat anywhere that requires sitting down.
I am tired.
This is not a complaint. Tired is just the temperature of my life now. The ambient condition. I stopped feeling it as something remarkable a long time ago. It is simply what existing at this particular level of existing feels like.
Outside my window the wall of the neighboring building is wet.
It rained while I was at work.
I didn't notice.
The notebook is at the bottom of my bag.
It has been at the bottom of my bag for three years.
I know exactly where it is at every moment. The way you always know exactly where the thing is that you're not ready to touch yet. The thing you carry because throwing it away would be a decision you can't take back and keeping it at the bottom of the bag is not quite a decision at all.
I finished the kimbap.
I should study for the physics exam.
I look at the bag.
The bag looks back.
Neither of us does anything about it.
I was good at games the way some people are good at breathing.
Not learned. Not practiced into competence. Just — natural function. The way a body knows to inhale without being told.
I could look at a game system for twenty minutes and understand it at a level that took other people weeks. Not because I was smarter exactly. Because I could see the space between the rules. The negative space. The shape of what the rules were trying to contain. And once you can see the shape of what something is trying to contain you can always find the place where the containing is thinnest.
I don't play anymore.
This is not a tragedy. I have decided it is not a tragedy. It was a decision I made when I was eleven and needed to make decisions quickly and I made it and I have kept it for six years because the alternative is thinking about why I made it and I don't have time for that on ₩43,000 until Friday.
The notebook contains four hundred and twelve pages of handwriting.
I counted them once.
I will not tell you what is in them except that it starts with Why and ends mid-sentence because I stopped.
I stopped on a Tuesday.
February.
Six years ago.
My mother's sister called me from outside Jihoon's apartment building and I went downstairs and she was standing on the sidewalk with a face that had no expression on it at all and I understood before she said anything because the absence of expression on an adult's face is its own language and I had always been good at reading patterns.
I went home with her.
I didn't finish the game.
The physics exam is tomorrow.
The rent is due Thursday.
I have ₩43,000.
These are the facts of tonight.
These are the only facts I am going to think about.
I move the bag to the corner of the room.
I open my textbook.
Outside the window the wall of the neighboring building is still wet.
It rained while I was working and I didn't notice and it stopped and I still didn't notice and now I am noticing the evidence of it without having experienced it and this seems —
I stop the thought.
I read the first line of the physics chapter.
I read it again.
I read it a third time.
The words are arranged correctly. I understand each one individually. Together they produce a sentence that means something I could explain if asked.
I am not reading.
I am holding a textbook in front of my face.
There is a difference.
I open the bag.
I move things aside.
The notebook is at the bottom.
Of course it is.
It has been there for three years.
I pick it up.
It is heavier than it should be for paper and cardboard.
I know this is not physically true. Paper has a specific weight. Cardboard has a specific weight. The sum of four hundred and twelve pages of handwriting and the cover and the memory of the person who carried it before I did is a number I could calculate if I wanted to.
I don't want to.
The notebook is heavy.
I hold it for a moment.
Then I put it on the floor beside the mattress.
I look at it.
I go back to the physics textbook.
I read the first line again.
I have been lying to you slightly.
Not about the facts. The facts are true.
I have been lying about what tonight is.
Tonight is not a night like other nights where I eat kimbap and don't study and look at my bag and don't open it.
Tonight something is wrong.
I don't have a better word than wrong. I have been reaching for a more specific word for three hours and wrong is the closest I can get.
The air feels different.
Not physically. Not temperature or humidity or the particular quality of Seoul air at midnight which I know well enough to have opinions about.
Something underneath the physical.
Something that makes the wall outside my window look slightly less certain than it did yesterday. Like the bricks are a question that hasn't decided it wants to be a statement yet.
I have felt this before.
Once. A long time ago.
Sitting in front of a screen. Looking at a being that had just changed its pattern the moment I found the pattern.
Like the game knew something I didn't.
I pick up the notebook.
I open it to the first page.
I look at the word I wrote when I was nine years old.
Why.
I read the first entry.
Then the second.
Then I read the entry on page two hundred and six which I know is page two hundred and six because I have never opened this notebook in three years but I know every page of it the way you know a route you have walked so many times you could walk it with your eyes closed.
Page two hundred and six.
One of the later entries.
The handwriting is different from the early pages. More controlled. Still urgent but the urgency has learned to aim itself.
I read the entry.
I read one sentence in particular.
I have read it before only in my memory which is not the same as reading it on the page.
On the page it hits differently.
It doesn't have a weakness because it doesn't have a self. The only way to beat something with no self is to have more self than anything has ever had.
I read it twice.
I stare at it.
I was ten years old when I wrote that.
I remember writing it. I remember the feeling of the thought arriving. The way it felt less like figuring something out and more like suddenly being able to see something that had been in front of me the whole time.
I did not understand what I was writing.
I still don't.
Not completely.
But tonight something in the air that I cannot name with physical language is making the words feel less like an old observation —
And more like instructions.
I close the notebook.
Put it back on the floor.
Look at the ceiling.
The ceiling has a crack in it that runs from the light fixture to the corner. It has been there since I moved in. I have looked at it approximately nine hundred times. I know its exact length and the specific way it branches at the end like a river delta made of plaster damage.
The crack is the same as it always is.
Everything else is —
Wrong.
Still wrong.
More wrong than three minutes ago.
I sit up.
I look at the window.
The wall of the neighboring building is not wet anymore.
I look more carefully.
The wall of the neighboring building is not there.
Not destroyed. Not damaged.
Gone.
In its place —
Nothing.
Not darkness. Not the street I know is on the other side.
Nothing.
The specific nothing I do not have the right words for yet.
Heavy.
Facing me through the glass.
Waiting.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I look down at the notebook on the floor.
Then back at the nothing.
I pick up the notebook.
I open it to the first empty page.
Four hundred and twelve pages of a ten-year-old's handwriting.
Four hundred and thirteen.
I find a pen.
I press it to the page.
I write two words.
It's here.
I stand up.
I put the notebook in my bag.
I put my jacket on.
I look at the physics textbook on the floor.
The rent is due Thursday.
I have ₩43,000.
I have a physics exam tomorrow.
None of this feels like the point anymore.
I open the door of my gosiwon room.
I walk out into the hallway.
At the end of the hallway the building's small window that faces the street shows me —
Not the street.
The same nothing.
Closer now.
I stand there.
Seventeen years old.
Three jobs.
₩43,000.
One notebook.
One sentence written by a child who somehow knew something was coming.
One question written before anything else.
Why.
— Chapter One End. —