Harin Park

I kept looking at the house. What was there for a child to do in a house that large? I looked at the ceiling, the floor, the stereo, my grandmother’s lipstick. Lying on the wooden floor, I watched rice weevils. Aimlessly, I wandered through the five rooms, looking over and over again at the traces left behind by the people who lived in them. I wanted to be absorbed into that place. I wanted to become a part of the house. Perhaps I was already one part of it.

To reach the middle of the dining table that seated seven people, even standing on tiptoe was not enough. I was far below their line of sight. They say people grow only more stubborn with age, and perhaps they do. When they shouted and fought themselves hoarse, made stubborn by nothing but their own certainties, they never thought to look around them. When the daughter of this house was being cursed at by a son-in-law who had come from somewhere else, they chose not to see what was happening, even when it was right before their eyes.

The shadow of the tree that fell across the wooden floor seemed to seep into the house. To trespass upon it. No—to intervene. No—to punish. No—to save. No—to shelter.

“I see everything,” it seemed to say. “You are not the only one who sees, little one.”

Lying on the smooth floorboards, I ran my hand across them. I touched the wood again and again. This floor was yesterday’s floor, and it was today’s floor. I was yesterday’s self, and I was today’s self.

Yesterday, I saw.

What made my chest feel ready to burst was not that no one else had seen. It was that there was no one who would say, “I saw it too.”

In truth, it was not that no one had seen. There was simply no companion who would say, “Like you, I saw it too.”

So I looked at the CD cabinet, the sofa, the potted plants, and asked them, “Did you see it too?”

We believed we had.

I thought we resembled one another. We see, and yet we cannot say that we have seen. And so I became a wall, a back, a chair. Perhaps that would be easier. Then I could neither see nor speak.