Taejung’s apartment is a ten-minute drive away from his office. It’s nothing too fancy, just a simple one-bedroom unit set on the 12th floor of a tower in upscale Songdo. The apartment unit used to be owned by a young couple, his landlord once told him, who decided to move out after three months of tenure. Taejung was able to buy it for a negotiable price over a month ago. While it is far from the bright and lively house he used to live in when he was still in Bucheon, it is large enough to house a 27-year old man like him who’s trying to live independently for a change.
On a Friday night, Taejung heads straight to his apartment after work, like usual. As he opens his door, his phone buzzes with several message notifications — some from his high school friends while the rest are from Dooyoung. Either way, they’re all the same: an invitation for him to go out and drink for the rest of the night. And like usual, he declines all of them with only a ‘Thank you, but I’m not feeling well tonight’ as a curt response.
He doesn’t like the taste of alcohol but he’s never been one to decline night-outs with friends, if he can help it. He used to love hanging out with his friends in nightclubs and bars, but things are different now, for him at least. So much has changed, he muses, as he places his things on the couch and proceeds to the bathroom. If his friends have noticed that he suddenly falls ill every time they invite him on a Friday, they haven’t called him out on it yet.
‘Not feeling ‘himself’ is the simplest way to put it. Perhaps, it is the only description he could find for this thing he’s been feeling that he refuses to label. He could pretend, he could smile, he could try to infuse happiness in his life but at the end of the day, it always comes back to him.
It’s not the excruciating sadness he used to deal with back in his teenage years. There is no hair-pulling, no cussing, no violent throwing of things within his grasp. In his age, there is only the silent self-loathing that resides within the deepest recesses of his mind.
It’s the subtle loneliness that seeps through his bones the most. For it is everywhere and he doesn’t know how to prevent it from crawling under his skin. It is in the silent cacophony of the traffic as he drives home, on the quiet chatter of the crowd everywhere he looks in Seoul. It is on the emptiness of his apartment during the lull of the night. It is on the warm water that hits his skin as he tries to wash away his thoughts. It is on the cold, vacant space on his bed as he ducks under the covers, willing himself to sleep as he makes do with what semblance of warmth he could make for himself.
