Seokjin: 3 August Year 22

I opened the door of the storage classroom and went inside. It was a summer night. The smell of mold and dust was mixed into the warm air. A number of scenes crossed through my head at that moment. The sparkling shoes of the principal, Namjoon’s expression as he stood behind the door, and the last day when I turned away from Hoseok and went back alone. Suddenly my head hurt and I got chills. A feeling that I would call a mixture of irritation and fear painfully flooded my body. The signal that I felt through my heart and body was clear. I need to get out of here.      

 

Taehyung must’ve noticed my expression and grabbed my arm. “Just try a little more. Remember what happened here.” I turned to get his hand off of me. I had already spent hours in the heat wave. I was as exhausted as can be. My friends looked at me like they didn’t know what to say. Memories. The memories Taehyung was talking about were meaningless to me. Whatever I did, whatever happened to me, whatever we did together. It could’ve been like that. It seemed like that was the case. But I didn’t understand or accept these memories. Experiencing these things didn’t mean I comprehended them. They needed to be deeply rooted in my heart, mind, and soul. However, the memories in this place were all only bad ones. Memories that hurt me and made me want to run away.  

 

I had to leave and Taehyung was blocking me, so a fight broke out. But the two of us were so tired. Our attacking, avoiding, and blocking was slow and heavy as if we were fighting inside a thick liquid. Taehyung’s leg and mine were tangled for an instant. I’m not sure, but I want to say my shoulders hit the surface of the wall, and in the next moment I lost my balance and stumbled. 

 

At first, I didn’t understand what had just happened. I couldn’t open my eyes or breathe because of the thick dust. I started coughing. “Are you okay?” someone asked and I realized that I had fallen to the ground. As I got up, I saw that what I thought was a wall had collapsed. There was a large space beyond the wall. No one moved for a moment. “What in the world? Even though we spent so much time in here,” someone said. None of us could have possibly imagined that this kind of place was behind the wall. “But what’s that?” I noticed a single cabinet in the center of the empty space covered in dust.  

 

Namjoon opened the cabinet. I approached one step. There was a notebook inside of it. Namjoon picked it up and turned to the first page. My breath stopped in an instant. There was a name I couldn’t have possibly guessed written on the first page of the old notebook. It was my father’s. I snatched it away from him as if stealing his attempt to turn to the next page. He looked at me surprised, but I didn’t care. I turned the page. It felt like the old notebook was going to fall apart in my fingers. 

 

The notebook written in my father’s handwriting was a diary of the experiences he had with his friends in his high school days. There wasn’t an entry for every day. It would skip a month at a time and there was something like bloodstains burned into some of the pages so you couldn’t read them. Even so, I could see. I could see that my dad had experienced the same things as me. That, like me, he committed mistakes and wrongdoings and ran and ran again to fix them.

 

What was written by my dad in the notebook was a record of his failures. Eventually my dad gave up and failed. He betrayed his friends. The last page he had written was covered in ink stains that made the page jet black. The stains permeated the next empty page and the next one, all the way until the last page. The stain was a declaration of my father’s failure. 

 

My sense of how much time had passed became fuzzy. I felt the cool air come in through the window. To me, it was the darkest time of day, the moment right before the sun rises. Starting from Namjoon, the others fell asleep here and there. I raised my head and looked up at the surface of the wall. I had seen my father’s name covered up somewhere here. There was this kind of sentence covered up under it. Everything started here.      

 

I got a tingling feeling in the ends of my fingers and suddenly tried to fold up the notebook. I saw some blurry letters on top of the ink stains. A foggy energy came in through the window. It looks like the sun is about to come up. But the night isn’t over yet. This was a time when it isn't night or dawn. Lines and lines of words appeared from the black stains under the light of the gray fog and darkness entangling with each other. 

 

There was more inside the notebook. Above the words, the things my father had forgotten and tried to forget remained between the margin and empty space. Even though the color was volatile and fluttered away, the scorched stains swirled the times my father experienced, his fear, the despair he couldn’t overcome, and his weak hopes under my fingers. A bent map of my father’s soul remained on top of the notebook.

 

I teared up as I closed the notebook. I sat for a while and then raised my head to see that my friends were still sleeping. I looked at each one of them. I don’t know if we were supposed to return to this place. We started here. I then understood the meaning of what we did together and the happiness of our laughter together. The first wrongdoing I committed, the first mistake that I couldn’t acknowledge laid there like an open wound.      

 

All of this isn’t a coincidence, I thought. I was eventually going to arrive here. That way I could find the meaning of the pain and anguish I experienced from all the mistakes and wrongdoings I committed. At last, I could take the first step to finding the map of my soul.

 

@shootinghearts_