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Before my wife turned vegetarian, I’d always thought of her as completely unremarkable in every way.
Color me intrigued lol
I want to swallow you, have you melt into me and flow through my veins.
Time was a wave, almost cruel in its relentlessness as it whisked her life downstream, a life she had to constantly strain to keep from breaking apart.
He seems worn out, trying to conceal the anger he feels toward those patients who fail to live up to his expectations.
She’d been unable to forgive her for soaring alone over a boundary she herself could never bring herself to cross, unable to forgive that magnificent irresponsibility that had enabled Yeong-hye to shuck off social constraints and leave her behind, still a prisoner. And before Yeong-hye had broken those bars, she’d never even known they were there.
“I need to water my body. I don’t need this kind of food, sister. I need water.”
“I don’t need to eat, not now. I can live without it. All I need is sunlight.”
“Why, is it such a bad thing to die?”
Now, with the benefit of hindsight, In-hye could see that the role that she had adopted back then of the hard-working, self-sacrificing eldest daughter had been a sign not of maturity but of cowardice. It had been a survival tactic.
The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.
There was nothing the matter. It was a fact. Everything would be fine as long as she just kept going, just carried on with her life as she always had done. In any case, there was no other way.
Her life was no more than a ghostly pageant of exhausted endurance, no more real than a television drama. Death, who now stood by her side, was as familiar to her as a family member, missing for a long time but now returned.
During the past insomniac months, In-hye had sometimes felt as though she were living in a state of total chaos. If it hadn’t been for Ji-woo—if it hadn’t been for the sense of responsibility she felt toward him—perhaps she too might have relinquished her grip on that thread.
It’s your body, you can treat it however you please. The only area where you’re free to do just as you like. And even that doesn’t turn out how you wanted.
Hee-joo reaches out to take Yeong-hye’s wasted hand in her own rough palm, and In-hye turns her head so that she won’t have to watch.
The writhing movements of those bodies made it seem as though they were trying to shuck off the human.
“I have dreams too, you know. Dreams…and I could let myself dissolve into them, let them take me over…but surely the dream isn’t all there is? We have to wake up at some point, don’t we? Because…because then…”
