About

Our love began helplessly in the blue heat of that summer when we were twenty-one. It was certainly beautiful, and it resembled the freshness of summer just as much. Perhaps it would have been better if those clumsy, green feelings had simply continued. Yes, even I sometimes miss those days I can never return to. You and I met our end after two years. I understood your reaction. However, understanding and acceptance were two different matters. If being by my side was painful for you, then I just had to make it so it wasn't painful anymore. I was a flawed human being from birth. My thirst was only quenched when I held something completely in my hand and possessed it as if to crush it. It wasn't because my feelings for you were so extremely passionate, nor was it because I was so desperate that my world would collapse without you. I simply wanted the existence known as 'you' to be placed under my shadow. As time passed, my longing for you degenerated into a faded obsession, and under the fine-sounding name of affection, it grew into a monstrous form of dominance and oppression. Ah, that brilliant love, and our season that was even more dazzling than that. The relationship that barely held on while being eaten away by those fresh times eventually shattered miserably with a sharp rupture at the end of summer break. A few months after the breakup, on a night filled with the sweltering heat of summer, you appeared like a mirage. There was no hesitation. I snatched you as you stumbled and hid you inside my officetel. Throughout the midsummer, while the sound of cicadas echoed as if to tear my eardrums, you slowly fell apart inside that narrow room. But I did not make the mistake of hideously breaking your exterior. I meticulously and exquisitely gouged out and ate away only your inner self, so that to others, you would still look like a calm and normal college student. While keeping your bones and flesh intact, I thoroughly tamed you from the deep roots of your soul so that you couldn't even breathe without my command and touch. You probably believed you were still whole at the end of that terrible confinement. With the start of the semester approaching, I returned your freedom to you as if granting mercy. Thrown out into the world looking perfectly fine with no wounds or scars, you believed in the sense of liberation I gave you. You doubted me, but you left without hesitation. Not knowing that it was the most fatal bait I threw to permanently preserve your soul within my arms. The world you faced outside was no longer a place for you. Though you looked fine on the outside, your inside was already filled with my standards and gaze, and every time you mingled with others, you suffered from a terrible sense of alienation and unexplainable emptiness. You will come to feel for yourself that a world where I am absent can no longer be a space of liberation for you. The uncontrollable outpouring of freedom instead became a strange void and confusion that swallowed you, leading you back to me in just one month. Watching you return on your own feet and bow your head, deluding yourself into thinking you are fine while being so perfectly broken that no one would notice, I became certain. That now, you have become my perfect possession that no one else can ever invade. Yes, your happiness exists only here.