It hurts to realize the version of myself that has lived for so long in other people’s minds. And I know a first impression can’t be undone. I don’t know whether I’m sinking or floating—whether I’m standing still, being pressed down, or quietly held in place. It feels like a vibration without a source, loud enough to rise to my face. That expression is my way of saying that shadows are, by nature, transparent. Perhaps they’ve mistaken sunset for sunrise. The shameless, grim feeling of falling rests somewhere between what is and what isn’t, quietly feeling sympathy for both. 


The hope that collapsed so noisily was, to some extent, a hope I had already anticipated, one that existed within a kind of plan. But the hope that was lost later, the one that appeared only after I had steadied myself and found some peace, feels far sadder. It is like being handed a source-less, abandoned candle while your body is trembling, as if you are being asked to recover too much, too quickly. The former kind of hope is usually visible. When a situation already carries a measure of sorrow, even losing hope does not feel especially regrettable. The latter hope, however, is an emotion I never expected, one that came only after the first hope had been lost and calm had returned. 


Perhaps it would have been better to spend the day utterly exhausted, heartbroken from the very start. At least a day like that is lived exactly as intended. Within the space I created, inside the frame I shaped for myself, standing alone, paradoxically, I felt a little freer. But the part of me I deliberately erased was not fooled by that freedom. So I gather those absences one by one, and only when they happen to overlap do I allow myself, pretending indifference, to linger briefly outside the frame. I think I can do that. After all, the walls of that frame are not very high. 


There’s no way around it. Fear is simply the feeling of being afraid. The fear that a sneeze might escape in public. The fear that a nightmare will begin the moment your eyes close on their own. The effort to keep your eyes wide open in that instant— that effort itself is fear. I cried in a dream and woke for a moment. Next to me was a hand in a white glove, holding a Kleenex. In that moment, it wasn’t fear. It was warmth. But when I reached to take it, it was gone. And then fear returned. I thought, maybe I might as well cry now. Half-asleep, I pretended to cry for what I had wanted to cry about yesterday. That, for me, was a great fear. Like a fear no great love could ever fill. 


It keeps shifting. From the scent of Marrakesh oud and hinoki, wrapped in a soft blanket, to asphalt that smells like metal. Back and forth. But every year, at the end of the year, I think of a techno festival held on Korean roads in the 1990s. Neapolitan pasta on a round wooden table. Warm sake. A letter someone taped to a bathroom door. Kimchi. I want to live a life like a puppy that feels warm, as if holding a hand warmer, even when standing still outside on a cold day. 


Spring rolls arrived on our table like uninvited guests, even though spring hasn’t come yet. No one was ready for it. But they caught my eye more than the Neapolitan pasta I was supposed to meet. But the feeling of choosing the uninvited guest was the same as waking up in the morning, face swollen, clutching a wisdom tooth, and drinking sleep tea just to fall back into a deep sleep without nightmares. 


This year’s countless nightmare research isn’t about who made me like this, but about what put me in this state. I’ll carry it into next year, bind it as Part Three, print it out, and burn it until it turns to ash. The memory of my body slowly rising, and sinking as if into a manhole, is more exhausting than the emptiness of having failed at everything, or of calling something a challenge when I never even started. It feels more grating than that emptiness, like being compressed into a super ball—light, yet thrown back with weight. 


Even if my lovely moving stories, capable of moving others, stay only around me and never spread outward, the attitude I still want is to hold the possibility of finally becoming free, to add a soft yet firm strength to my heart, like adding mustard to natto, and then to move toward widern understanding and love without possession. 


I often think about how to treat people who carry unfamiliar and uncomfortable feelings, as if it were an assignment I must solve—even though I can’t manage the real assignments with actual deadlines. The detailed thoughts and questions that surface in between sometimes turn violent, and my face hardens. So I decided on this instead. Rather than rubbing the sharp tip of a cone-shaped emotion during conversation, it’s better to sit down and look at the cone from the bottom. I will become someone who no longer accepts dirty or petty things, and who doesn’t repeat these feelings. My leave letter to 2025, which began lively, flowed slowly, mixed misery with sweetness, and ultimately ended with a happy ending.