The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness (61 page)

The traces of my footprints continue endlessly on the mudflat. What kind of lives are they living now and where? For a long time, whenever I thought about them I would be overcome with a sense of inexpressible solitude that kept me from thinking that life was beautiful. I wasn’t aware but they have always been in the present for me. They gave me the courage to embrace the squalor of life that I encountered since I was twenty, and helped me examine myself and resume my life, coming from a place of preposterous desires. I got up from the mudflat and walked off the beach, placing my foot upon my foot. The footprints made on the beach today seem to be connected to the lone room. To that place I ran out of and was never able to return to. Today, my most evident present, I feel that if I follow the footprints I made here today I will be able to step straight into nineteen. And perhaps I shall be able to walk back out the other side, from fifteen to sixteen. This was the path that would allow me to walk out of that lone room once and for all. This path kept appearing before me. I walked off the mudflat, step by step, pressing my feet firmly into the sand. For a long time, Hui-jae was what all of my moments of fate looked like to me. To me she was the ebb and flow. She was hope and despair. She was life and death to me. And all of it was love. September 11, 1995.

I stepped off the beach and onto the paved street and walked on until I no longer could, like someone who had learned to walk for the first time. On one of the coastal roads sea birds sat in a row. When I approached, the birds flew up into the air, all at once, then landed a little farther out. I would approach again and they rose again. I looked out at the beach and there were thousands of birds by the sea, their wings tucked. I gazed out at the edge of the sea
while following the trace of the birds, at the childlike sky above it. I felt the past, once locked up, now mingled with the scattering clouds. Felt the birth of new beings entering the world at the edge of memory, giving off a new smell. On my way back I saw a child crying on one of the beaches. It looked like she wanted to play on the rocks for a while longer but her mother was taking her home. Inside a car, parked off in the distance, the child’s father was honking the horn,
beep-beep
. The child was carried away from the beach in her mother’s arms, growing farther away as she continued to cry. Will she remember that she had cried on this beach? That she had even existed on this beach?

My body was utterly exhausted but my head was getting clearer and clearer. September 13, 1995.

This book, I believe, has turned out to be not quite fact and not quite fiction, but something in between. I wonder if it can be called literature. I ponder the act of writing. What does writing mean to me?

THE GIRL WHO WROTE LONELINESS

Pegasus Books LLC
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New York, NY 10004

Copyright ©2015 by Kyung-sook Shin

Translation from Korean copyright ©2015 Ha-yun Jung

Translation was supported by generous grants from the
Korean Literature Translation Institute and the PEN American Center.

First Pegasus Books hardcover edition September 2015

Interior design by Maria Fernandez

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ISBN: 978-1-60598-863-4

ISBN: 978-1-60598-864-1 (e-book)

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