The Bridge of Life

Somewhere along the Han River, there is said to be a bridge that goes by the nickname Bridge of Life.

Mapo Bridge, linking Yeouido and Mapo—its railings, they say, are crowded with warm sentences meant to stop people from ending their lives. That is how it came to be called the Bridge of Life.

But when I read that suicide attempts there were surging, it struck me that this had always been the fate awaiting the Bridge of Life. Just as the north pole draws the south, good fortune invites misfortune, and those who trust people attract con artists, so words of hope are bound to pull in those drowning in despair.

I know that love existed in the hearts of the people who made the Bridge of Life. Only, that good and beautiful emotion simply decayed according to the laws of nature. It is no different from an iron nail drawing oxygen to itself until it rusts, or delicious food drawing bacteria until it rots—a purely natural phenomenon.

Love between a man and a woman is the same. The more beautiful and passionate the love, the more fiercely it attracts disappointment, boredom, and hatred, and decays with savage speed. Time always proves it in the end.

People marry to keep love for a long time. It is rather like putting delicious food in the freezer. Humans seem to have an instinct: if there is something they want to preserve forever, they shove it into the freezer.

But there is something they do not know. Food left too long in the freezer absorbs every filthy smell like a sponge and ends up no different from something already rotten. When I was ten, Mom and Dad would look at each other with the expression of people forced to eat a ten-year-old frozen pork cutlet; now that I am twenty, they freely wear the face of someone about to vomit.

Yet the two of them no longer even feel wounded by such expressions. The injuries from words and fists alone hurt enough that they have no room left to be hurt by a look. They married because they loved each other with destined, blazing passion, and they gave birth to me to fulfill that love—yet now no one loves anyone.

So I do not believe in the phrase “destined love.” I believe only in that goddamn ending. Mom and Dad’s lives, and the lives of the countless aunties and uncles around me, prove that goddamn ending. Whether you meet for the first time on your wedding day and swear a hundred-year vow, or fall into fiery love and hold a ceremony, the wretched or trivial conclusion is much the same, is it not? Even Romeo and Juliet, had they not died so young, would inevitably have faced the day when merely meeting each other’s eyes made them shudder with disgust.

So sometimes I wondered. If one day, out of nowhere, that sort of thing came to my side—wearing its most beautiful face, giving off its sweetest scent, arriving with an irresistible force and seizing me by the throat……

……what would I do?

I would not be deceived. I would fight with everything I had to keep that con-artist emotion from ever reaching the destination called marriage. That feeling like leprosy, rotting little by little until it finally makes the whole body fester—I would never let it toy with me the way it toyed with my mother, my father, or countless other lovers. With all my strength I would kick it away, trample it, and shove it out.

Somewhere along the Han River, there is said to be a bridge that goes by the nickname Bridge of Life.

I wanted to go to that bridge with the beautiful nickname.

And there, I met him.

That day was the last day Woo-yeon would ever face as a high-school student.

In life there are things you once believed were absolute musts, only to discover they are things you never had to keep at all. Eating soup before the steak, for instance. Studying hard because you are a student. Saving acts of love for someone you actually love. Showing up on graduation day with a bouquet so your parents can take pictures. Things like that.

So on the morning of graduation, instead of going to school to hold flowers and pose with Mom and Dad, Woo-yeon decided to go to Mapo Bridge and make a splendid bungee jump. She had lived her whole life believing such a wicked thing must never be done—yet once she thought about it, there was no reason whatsoever why not. Deciding had been the hard part; getting from home to Mapo Bridge turned out to be as easy as blowing her nose.

Of course she did not think Mapo Bridge particularly suited a soon-to-be college student who had safely passed into the art school she wanted and was about to savor her first real freedom. Least of all with a face bruised blue and cracked raw red, in the knife-edged wind of twelve degrees below zero, wearing nothing but a thin school uniform without even a coat.

Woo-yeon hunched her shoulders and gave a weak little laugh. To be wondering, at a moment like this, whether her face was pretty or not, whether her clothes suited her or not. Just as Mom always said—she really did seem out of her mind.

……Not that it matters anymore.

The saying that giving up makes everything easier is true. Because now she no longer had to worry about what might happen next.

Of course a corner of her heart still burned with resentment; that could not be helped. She did want to see Mom and Dad writhing and wailing, Sorry, Woo-yeon, I was wrong. If she could watch that spectacle for just five minutes, she felt she could sell her soul to the devil.

Idiot. Wish for something worth wishing for.

There was no function for regret or reflection inside their brains. Mom would weep and curse her as “the bitch who drove a stake into her parents’ hearts,” and Dad would storm off to the school screaming about “what goddamn bastards bullied our kid.” Better to see nothing at all than to see that.

Woo-yeon rested her hands on the railing and looked down. With the sudden cold before Lunar New Year, the Han River was already freezing white from the edges inward.

Now only one hope remained. As quickly as possible. As painlessly as possible.

Would the heart stop faster in the freezing water, or would the skull cracking open be quicker?

……Either is fine. Just not drowning.

Woo-yeon was terrified of the pain she would have to feel while still conscious, and she felt unbearably pitiful for having to think such thoughts at all.

“It’s no big deal. Nothing to be scared of. How is it any different from bungee jumping?”

……Except there’s no cord tied to your feet.

“Just—one, two, three! Jump!—and you jump. When you actually do it, it won’t be scary at all.”

You’ve never even done a bungee jump.

“Dummy, but you’ve ridden the Gyro Drop.”

Ah, right. Last year at Lotte World.

In a span of time too short even to scream, everything had ended. It was the first experience of its kind in her life. An astonishingly clean conclusion; afterward she had felt so hollow she kept looking around for a long while.

It would be the same this time. Before a scream could form, before even a peep escaped, everything would be over. So instead of crying vulgarly or calling out some name that would never hear her, all she had to do was fling her arms wide in a victory pose and leap.

Death is not necessarily only sad, yet people never seem to understand that. At the funerals of her grandparents—who had suffered their whole lives and hurt enough to die before they finally passed—she never understood why everyone made such a noisy fuss of weeping. Of course it would feel lonely if you could no longer see them when you wanted to. But a person’s right to escape pain ought to come before other people’s right to keep looking at them. That is why the phrase “death with dignity” exists, she supposed.

Woo-yeon wondered for a moment whether her own death would count as a death with dignity, then tears welled so suddenly she abandoned the thought at once. No matter how hard she strutted and played it cool, sobs kept trying to burst from her mouth.

The cold was no longer felt. From her hands frozen scarlet, from her bare legs without even stockings, from the skin wrapped in thin school uniform—everything that reached her was simply the sensation of pain. Thinking back, it seemed that for a very long time only the sense of pain had existed. Taste, smell, touch, hearing—every one of Woo-yeon’s senses spoke only the same words: it hurts, it hurts more, it hurts enough to die. She had barely turned twenty, yet by feel she might as well have lived two hundred years.

She hated herself for being able to think only these depressing, ugly thoughts. People said that even when things were hard you should think healthy thoughts and smile brightly so that good things would come—yet no matter how hard she tried, only the bad thoughts arrived. Like alcohol addiction or cigarette addiction, perhaps thinking only bad thoughts was an addiction too.

……Yeah. Anyway I’m not normal, so whatever.

Cripple. Psycho. Crazy bitch. Psychopath. That was what Mom and Dad called Woo-yeon. Her friends described her as “4D weirdo,” “Wow, that crazy one!,” “OMG, insane!” Woo-yeon was always confused whether those words were insults or praise, whether they meant liking or hating, whether it was bullying or just her own paranoia.

She was always confused whether her actions or words were right or wrong, whether they fit the situation or not. She regretted after speaking and regretted after swallowing the words. She regretted after doing things and regretted after giving up. Regret repeated without rest. So Woo-yeon lived in constant terror, or boiling rage, or irritation, or the desperate wish to run somewhere—anywhere—else.

She wanted to start everything over. Like a lucky soul that slipped into an unknown body and began a brand-new life, like a game character that revived the instant you pressed the reset button. Her life consisted only of the most vicious high-difficulty courses; somewhere in a course like that there ought to be a hidden reset button or an emergency escape button.

And not long ago, Woo-yeon had finally found the hidden button. It was the emergency escape. All that remained was to press it, open the locked door, and get out safely…… she had thought.

But that button had exploded this morning.

“It’s fine. It’s okay. The real final escape button is still left.”

Looking back, every day she had endured while clinging to hope had only been further loss. Wasn’t the hope left inside Pandora’s box the most terrible curse ever left to humankind?

She shifted her gaze to the white railing that blocked her view. Between her two hands, neat Myeongjo-type letters were caught. The hope that had drawn her despair to itself—the beautiful fragments of sentences that had given Mapo Bridge the nickname Bridge of Life—began to approach her one by one.

Ah, shit……

It felt as if an awl had been driven straight into her eyes. Are you an idiot? Why would someone who’s doing well come here? The tears she had forced down came surging up at that single phrase. What do I do. What do I do. Woo-yeon stamped her feet and squeezed her eyes shut. Now the awl was jabbing at her throat. As she moved her steps as if fleeing, the letters written on the railing came trailing after her, wagging their tails.