Free The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness by Kyung-Sook Shin

Gye-suk asked, of my high school years or my illiterate mother? Perhaps I had known earlier that Mom could not read. I probably made no effort to really find out because I did not want to know. Saying to myself, “See, she has a sutra open in front of her,” or “She’s reading the Bible.” All the while perplexed or hiding her in the mothers that appeared in my writing.
    Meanwhile, in real life, I would pour tender affection on Mother, enough to puzzle her, as a means of offering my apology. Perhaps that was what I was doing. At least with Mother, I was making an effort as I continued to open up and shut down my heart, but what about my high school years? The manner with which I handled those past years in real life was rather odd. Actually, I did not even realize I was being odd until a certain moment would approach and announce, “You are being odd.”
    When a poet friend who was a few years older, after reading the bio in my first book, said to me, “Hey, you graduated from Yeongdeungpo Girls’ High, I had no idea. I went there, too. We’re alumni,” her delight was genuine, but I got nervous. I was worried that she might start asking which classes I was in, whom I studied language arts with.
    As soon as I got the chance, I left. My high school years made me treat myself as someone who had a big secret to keep, and changed me from a natural-born optimist to a withdrawn introvert who refused to speak about those years except with those who were very close. And now Ha Gye-suk was flatly reprimanding the gag order that I had imposed on myself. Telling me, You don’t seem to write about us. Your life seems different from ours now.

    After we hung up, I paced the room, letting out my anger toward her. How dare she treat me like someone who had shut the door on her first true love in order to live a different life. Ha Gye-suk was right, however. I did not writeabout them. Only once had I made an attempt. It was published as the last story in my first collection, the one book that Ha Gye-suk had not yet read.
    But even if she had read it, she would not think it was about us from back in those days. I was not honest. I was trying as hard as I could to feign innocence. About my youth, about my own being. An omission committed by vivid pain, which was all that prevailed in the absence of the self. This is fiction, I told myself, but all the while my heart ached enough to kill me. In order to appease this aching heart, I concluded with a rushed ending, fast-forwarding to what happened ten years later. Unsure that I could confront it face to face, I quickly closed the lid and that was when I realized the truth. That those years had not completely passed for me. That I was carrying those years on my back like a camel’s hump. That for a long time, perhaps for as long as I was here, those years would be part of my present.

    Six more years have passed now, and during that time, whenever those years tried to leap out through my sentences, I took a breath, pushed them back down, and closed the lid. It was not because I was now living a life different from the people I knew then. I had not even known what kind of life they were living. It was that, even if the years were pulled out somehow, I had no idea where I should stand amidst them. Whatever you do, once you lose your confidence, it is difficult to recover.
    When closing the lid no longer worked, I fled home, but Ha Gye-suk’s voice persistently followed me here, dropping icy water on my forehead—drip, drip, drip—and whispering, Whatever excuse you might come up with, the truth is that you are ashamed, you are ashamed of us. Even now, trying to lift the closed lid as I gaze out at the fishing boats on the night sea, my confidence does not return. I cannot tell what shape this writing will take when I am done. Here I am, sitting faceto face, but even as I write I have a feeling that I might continue to run. I have a feeling that every chance I get, I might try to cross