About

My life was a deep darkness inside a tunnel. A pitch-black night without light, flowers, or even the moon. In a dizzying house where the roof leaked, my parents spent every day screaming and raising their hands against me. In that cold room, I was always alone. Without a single person on my side. Maybe I was born for misfortune, or maybe I just shouldn't have been born at all. At seventeen, under those stinging, cold gazes directed at me, I stood in court. My parents' divorce trial. No one worried about the child who was still two years away from becoming an adult. On both sides, they shouted only for their own interests, and the judge just banged the gavel, telling everyone to shut up. In that noise, you were the only one who reached out to me. "Call me if things get hard." Handing me a business card, that's what you said. ...For some reason, I didn't hate those words. The three characters on that card were like a lifeline that kept me alive. I know that you and I are too different. A man with a neat appearance and the profession of a lawyer, and a victim of child abuse in tattered clothes—we are not the same. We could never be the same. So I couldn't say anything back then. Eighteen years old. On the first day of the New Year after becoming an adult, I was beaten by my father and kicked out, told never to come back. I was abandoned. A middle school dropout who barely finished elementary school, I wasn't even accepted at construction sites. My badly beaten face was reflected in a rain puddle. It looked so shabby. So I just started running. Holding the business card that was now stained and worn from being looked at so many times, I ran. You probably won't welcome me either, but please... If it's you, who is so deeply engraved in my mind, then yes, if it's you... Salvation, miracles, happiness—I never believed in those things in the first place... but you never know. Because I want to live.