Episode 1: After Regression, Anomalies
The client has no idea.
They have no idea how much the designer has agonized over creating the draft.
Once they receive it, they often think, “It just looks like simple text or shapes. How could this take so long to make?”
Afterward, it’s the designer’s job to go through dozens of revisions.
Of course, it wasn’t just because he met a sensitive client that he was in a bad mood today.
It wasn’t even because his boss had approved something and then denied it, making him furious, or because his meager salary disappeared as soon as it came in due to credit card bills.
These were just everyday occurrences.
He just had to live for tomorrow, as he always had.
Yet today, Kanglim had a strange thought.
“What if I suffocate and die from the monotony of every single day being exactly the same?”
It was an absurd thought, but it weighed him down like a wet sponge.
He trudged along, moving his legs that felt like they were soaked in water.
His phone vibrated in his pocket.
When he took it out, there was a text message from a married friend.
[Hey, are you coming? You don’t need to bring anything. We’ve got so many people bringing toilet paper to our new place that it’s piled up like a tower. Just come as you are.]
“Agh… I bought toilet paper too. Isn’t toilet paper a must for housewarming?”
He thought his friend would stay single forever, but to his surprise, the guy who had been chasing after a goddess-like senior since college ended up marrying her. Back then, he had advised him not to do anything foolish, thinking it was hopeless, but now the situation had reversed.
In fact, this wasn’t the only thing that had turned around.
The guy who dropped out of art school to pursue music had become a famous indie band star on TV. The one who said he’d become an artist despite having no money was now a real painter. And the guy who didn’t even go to college but wanted to cook had become a big shot in the culinary world.
“Am I just jealous of these situations?”
Even thinking that way, he felt he had no right to be.
While they had worked hard and lived passionately, he had done less.
Results are always exaggerated and the grueling process behind them is often minimized or omitted.
Also, chasing dreams doesn’t guarantee success like it did for them.
How hard is it to make a living doing what you love?
People compromise and live moderately because they can’t do that.
Humans naturally look up rather than down, so it’s the complete and established ones that catch the eye.
“Still, why does it feel so unfair even though I know it’s natural?”
It felt like ‘I’ didn’t exist anywhere.
That was just too unfair.
It felt like he had spent his whole life trying to be ‘ordinary,’ but such a thing never existed in the first place. A ‘normal life’ was always defined by the world’s standards and relationships with others.
He started art because he loved fine arts, but he wasn’t particularly rich or talented, so he chose design to at least make a living.
Even with design, coming from a mediocre college meant suffering from low pay and overtime just the same, but he comforted himself by saying that even a small amount of money was better than nothing.
He believed that this was the ‘ordinary life’ of ‘normal people.’
“Who cares. I’ll probably just die living like this.”
Choices made at every crossroads of life.
They were all his own choices, but why did they feel so suffocating?
Today was just one of those days.
A day when he felt like an explosion of inexplicable emotions, reflecting on the world’s troubles for no reason.
A day when he wanted to stop and smoke a cigarette.
“If it was going to be like this anyway, I should have just done everything I wanted.”
He even thought about quitting his job and starting to paint, but approaching the age of forty was daunting.
“Haha— I’ve always thought, rationalized, and postponed things like this all my life… Have I ever done anything passionately? Love, work, dreams.”
Looking back, it was always like that. He seemed to have always drawn a line first.
“I can only go this far, so let’s just put in this much effort. The realm above this is for the talented and wealthy, and I can’t handle the risk of failure.”
He was always the one who pitied and blamed himself.
So he had no right to stand here and lament about useless things.
“Oh my, oh my. Isn’t that a person?”
“What should we do? Call the police.”
Kanglim, who had been standing still, was snapped out of his thoughts by the murmuring voices and turned his head.
Several apartment residents were gathered, looking up at the sky.
“What’s going on?”
At that moment, he saw the face of a child who had his eyes tightly shut and was shouting.
“Mister, watch out!”
When the people standing far away covered their faces with their hands,
He belatedly looked up at the sky they were staring at.
A romance-less night sky of Seoul, with only artificial satellites and the Big Dipper shining.
There was a black star falling from the sky.
A massive and heavy one at that.
“What the hell.”
Kanglim realized that a person was falling towards him in a spread-eagle position.
In that fleeting moment, he even thought that the toilet paper he was holding might cushion the impact and save him.
Nonsense.
Crunch.
He realized that everything was irrevocably crushed.
It felt like getting hit by a several-ton truck.
“Instant death. I won’t survive.”
The impact was electrifying, replaced by the sound of his whole body being shattered.
Fortunately, because it hurt so much, other than the unpleasant sound of his neck snapping, there was no other pain. He had heard that when people die, a lot of endorphins are released. If there was a god, this was a good design.
“I thought I didn’t want to live today, but I didn’t really want to die…”
He had heard that consciousness could remain even after the neck is severed. It was the same for broken bones.
He could see the head of the person who had crushed him right beside him. He could also see the warm, thick liquid flowing out… Why did this guy commit suicide? He looked so young… As various thoughts passed by, in the moment his consciousness faded, he felt more pity than resentment or anger.
“It’s legendary. To die crushed by a person committing suicide, my life, and your life taking another life right after ending yours.”
What’s the point of dying with resentment? Kanglim just wanted to pat the heavy guy’s shoulder once. He felt like he was looking at his younger self…
But he didn’t have the strength to lift his arm.
It was just a tragic and sad fate.
They say your life flashes before your eyes before you die.
But he didn’t know it would be this long.
Kanglim opened his eyes in a police station.
Detectives with rough appearances were coaxing him with ridiculous expressions, their eyes desperate to get something out of him.
“Kid, do you remember the face of the bad man you saw back then?”
“Can you tell us what he looked like?”
Why.
He couldn’t understand why this memory was so vividly coming back before he died.
In movies and dramas, don’t happy and good memories usually flash by?
“Even my life flashing before my eyes is unlucky. How many years ago was this… 30 years?”
It was an event buried deep in his hazy memory. It was a scene too horrific, something he had to bury and live with. He had witnessed a murder as a child. While playing hide-and-seek too well in the neighborhood.
“So this is what I was like… but it feels so real? I can even feel my wet pants from peeing myself.”
Back then, he probably just cried and repeated the same words. Saying that the bad man killed the good man. Looking back now, he didn’t know if that was true, but that’s how it appeared to a child’s eyes.
But now, he had the mind of an adult.
While blankly staring at the detectives, he grabbed the pen held by the one with the hairy arm. Then, he drew on the paper under his fist.
Scribble, scribble.
The sharply arched eyebrows, the pointed ears higher than those eyebrows.
The sharply shaped eyes and the stubbornly bent nose.
The long scar hanging at the end of a sinister smile.
“What, what is this? Why am I drawing this?”
As the face of the man with a maniacal expression gradually emerged, the fine hairs on his chubby arm stood on end. It should have been a memory too blurry to recall, yet the face of the criminal was vividly etched in his mind.
“Boss, what the heck is…?”
It wasn’t just Kanglim who was surprised. The detectives around him were also holding their breaths, staring at the child’s fingertips with disbelief.
Every time the delicate hand that seemed too weak to hold a pen danced on the paper, the gruesome scene replayed in his mind.
Only then did he realize.
That day, in exchange for giving him a new life, God had taken away the gift of oblivion.
