The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness Read Free

all. The thought had passed me by for several years, and in the end, this was where I finally purchased a hymnbook.
    With the hymnbook under my arm, again I walked around the island for hours and hours. The landscape that I was used to was the plains of the peninsula’s inland region, and its springs and summers and falls and winters, but now, I am standing before the island’s unfamiliar oleanders, windmill palms and crinum lilies, and the endless rows of dark blue waves. What I realize, out of the blue, is that nature is, to all of us, a nourishing nutrient, that it is nature that pushes us to travel back in time, to a remote path inside our hearts. Back in the city, designed so that we never once have a chance to step on soil, I would once again have let several years go by before I bought this hymnbook, which I have no immediate need for.
    Ha Gye-suk’s phone call was the first I received from people from that time in my life. After her call, people from those days began to call from time to time, asking if I was that person from that classroom in that school. When I confirmed that I was that person from that classroom in that school, they said, “It’s really you,” and revealed who they were. It’s really you, this is Nam Gil-sun. This is Choe Jeong-bun. I saw you in the newspaper ad. It was your name and the face resembled yours, but I didn’t think it was really you. Still, I wondered and called the publisher. They wouldn’t give me your phone number, so I had to plead, you know. Most of the callers said they had seen me in the advertisement in the newspaper. And they said they were happy for me, as if it had happened to them.
    One of them, whose name, she said, was Yi Jong-rye, said she had pointed out to her husband my photograph in the newspaper ad and told him this was her friend, and she felt this sense of pride; but her voice turned teary in the end. “It was a school, all right, but since nobody keeps in touch, my husband asked once, ‘You sure you went to high school?’ He had brought it up casually only in passing, but it’s funny, because it really hit me hard, you know . . . How could he say that, whenI worked so hard to get that diploma? I felt hurt, left with this ache in the pit of my stomach, and for days slept with my back to him. So when I saw you in the newspaper and I was able to tell him, ‘This is my high school friend,’ imagine how proud I was.”
    Listening to her words coming from the other end of the line, I laughed, but after we hung up, I was also left with an ache in the pit of my stomach and remained sitting there for a while, caressing the receiver. It’s not just you. I am not any different. That was true. I had once been a high school student as well, but I did not have a single friend from high school, either. When middle-aged women on some TV drama not even worth your time chatted about meeting up with high school friends, I would gaze at them blankly. Even now, when someone introduces the person next to her, saying, “She’s a friend from high school,” I falter and take another look at the two of them.
    Pouting when a friend finds a new friend; pressing a fallen leaf dry and writing her name on the back; going biking with friends; writing a letter through the night and slipping it between the pages of her book—neither I nor the friends who had called me up, had ever experienced such times. No time to pout, no time to press leaves—we had none of that among us.
    What did exist among us were assembly lines at sewing factories, electronics factories, clothing factories, food processing factories.

    It is my destiny to leave my parents’ care early in life. All sorts of signs pointed toward this, even an online fortune-telling service that I tried out for fun. It said I would leave the place of my birth and experience hardships in my early years. Sometimes I ponder exactly when one’s early years end. I ponder this as hard as when I ask myself, “What is