Entry: October 26, 2023. 11:47 PM.
The rain taps a relentless, arrhythmic code against the window of my one-room apartment in Mapo-gu. It's not a storm, just Seoul's late-autumn weep, a dull grey drizzle that seeps into the concrete and the soul. At thirty-one, Kim Min-jun is a man composed entirely of quiet spaces. The space where a career should be—just a series of short-term contract jobs in logistics. The space where a relationship should be—a handful of dates that never sparked, a polite withdrawal on both sides. The space where family should be… a void so absolute it has its own gravity.
On the low ondol floor, a cardboard box, dust-furred, sits accusingly. Delivered yesterday from the old house in Daegu after the landlord's final clearing. My father's things, he'd said. What was left. I hadn't opened it. I'd just stared at it, feeling nothing but a cold, dense weight in my gut. But tonight, the rain and the silence and the sheer nothingness of my own future pressed in. I needed… context. I needed to remember the before, to trace the crack in my life back to its origin.
With a sigh that felt dredged from my bones, I sliced the tape.
Musty air, the ghost of old soju and ginseng. A few of my father's worn work vests, a set of baduk stones, a stack of ledgers from his failing auto repair shop. And at the bottom, wrapped in a faded blue cloth, a stack of my own notebooks. My diaries.
A hollow laugh escaped me. I'd forgotten I kept them. The earnest, painful chronicles of Kim Min-jun, from middle school to… when did I stop? University, maybe. When pretending to have an inner life worth recording became too exhausting.
I pulled them out. The earliest was a garish neon green, plastered with stickers of a long-forgotten boy band. The most recent, a simple black Moleskine, a gift to myself during a brief, foolish flurry of ambition. I didn't reach for the black one. My hand, moving as if of its own volition, went to a dark red, faux-leather book. My eighteenth year. The year of the Suneung, the college entrance exam. The year everything was supposed to begin.
I leaned against the cool wall, the rain my only companion, and opened it. The handwriting was anxious, slanting, crammed with the pressure of a boy who believed his whole life hinged on the next few months.
March 2, 2010.
Suneung is a monster eating the year. Sixteen hours of study, four hours of sleep, four hours for everything else (eating, bathing, feeling like a human). Dad came into my room tonight. He didn't say anything about tests. Just put a can of hot coffee on my desk and gestured at the window. We went outside and sat on the steps, in the cold. He lit a cigarette, offered me one. I took it. We smoked in silence, watching our breath fog in the streetlight. Then he said, "Your mother… she worries. She has her own ways. Just focus on your studies. Be strong." It was awkward. But it was… nice. For a moment, he wasn't just a shadow in the living room, he was my dad. We finished our cigarettes, he clapped my shoulder—a rough, heavy pat—and went back inside. I felt… seen. For a minute.
A faint, ghostly smile touched my lips. I remembered that night. The illicit thrill of the cigarette, the surprising solidity of his hand on my shoulder. A fragment of normalcy. I turned the page, looking for more of that—any evidence of a bridge between us.
April 15, 2010.
Absolute hell week. Three mock exams. Ranking dropped. Mother's silence is worse than her shouting. It's a cold presence that fills the house. Dad's working late every night. I think he's avoiding it too. Came home with a pounding headache. Mother made a special tonic. Bitter, smelled of herbs and something else. She watched me drink every drop. Said it was for my concentration. Slept for twelve hours straight. Missed morning study. Woke up feeling drugged and ashamed.
My brow furrowed. The writing here was fainter, the lines wavering. I flipped forward, the pages becoming a blur of stress, fatigue, and rare, fleeting moments of respite.
May 28, 2010.
Dad pulled a surprise today. Told Mother he was taking me to the mountains for "fresh air and a clear mind." She protested, of course. Said I couldn't afford a day. He just… stood there. Didn't raise his voice. Just said, "The boy is coming with me." And I did. We drove to Palgongsan. Didn't talk much. Hiked for an hour. Ate kimbap he'd bought from a convenience store. It was the best food I'd ever tasted. At the summit, he looked out and said, "It's big out there, Min-jun. Bigger than exams. Bigger than this mountain. Remember that." On the way back, we stopped at a pojangmacha. He ordered soju and we ate tteokbokki. He told a stupid story about when he was my age and tried to fix his father's tractor. Made me laugh until my sides hurt. He was… fun. I saw a glimpse of who he might have been before the shop started failing, before the weight of everything bowed his shoulders. For a few hours, I wasn't a candidate. I was just a son, with his dad. It was the best day I'd had in years.
My throat tightened. I could almost smell the pine and the spicy, smoky scent of the street tent. The memory was vivid, warm. A golden snapshot in a sea of grey. He was fun. The words shimmered on the page, a cruel prelude. My fingers trembled slightly as I turned to the next entry, dated just two days later.
May 30, 2010.
It's gone. Everything is ruined. I can't breathe. I can't think. I want to peel my skin off. Last night… Mother said Dad had talked to her about the trip. Said he'd reminded her that I needed "balance." She was… calm. Too calm. She made another tonic. Said it was to help me sleep after all the exertion. I didn't want it. But the look in her eyes… I drank it. I woke up… I wasn't in my bed. I was in theirs. The room was dark. She was… she was…
The handwriting dissolved into a frantic, jagged scribble, the pen tearing the paper in places. Then, a few lines, written in a shocking, terrifyingly calm script:
She said it was her way of bonding. Of relieving my stress. Of making me a man. She said Dad understood. That he was sleeping in the other room. That this was her duty. I couldn't move. I couldn't scream. I just… left. I've been sitting in the bath for hours. The water's cold. I can't get clean.
A sound escaped me—a sharp, involuntary gasp that echoed in the silent apartment. The rain seemed to freeze in mid-air. My own breathing was loud, ragged. I stared at the words, their meaning not just read but felt, a visceral punch to a solar plexus I didn't know was still there. The warm memory of Palgongsan, my father's rough kindness, curdled instantly, poisoned by what came after.
I turned the page with numb fingers. The entries became sporadic, brittle.
June 10, 2010.
It happened again. The tonic. The waking up. Her hands. Her voice, whispering about pressure and release. Dad is a ghost in the house. He looks at me sometimes, his eyes hollow, and then looks away. He knows. He fucking knows. And he does nothing. He just lets it happen. I am not their son. I am a thing.
July 5, 2010.
I tried to tell my homeroom teacher I was sick. Something else. He patted my back, said, "We're all tired, Min-jun. Push through. Your mother says you're studying very hard at home." She has everyone fooled. The perfect, concerned mother. I am alone in a glass box, screaming, and no one sees my mouth move.
August 22, 2010.
First kiss. First touch. First… everything. Taken. Not by a crush, not by some clumsy, sweet exploration. Taken by her. Stolen. My own history is a lie. My body is a crime scene she returns to again and again. And he… he stands guard outside the door. My father. The man who took me for kimbap and soju.
The entries grew darker, more despairing. The pressure of the Suneung was now a secondary torment, a grotesque backdrop to the real horror. The boy in these pages was splintering.
October 12, 2010.
I found Dad's hidden soju bottle. Drank half. Confronted him in the garage. I was slurring, crying. I screamed it. "She's raping me! Your wife is raping me!" He didn't get angry. He didn't cry. He just looked… exhausted. Defeated. He put down his wrench and said, "Min-jun-ah… your mother… she's not well. She has… needs. Ideas. It's wrong. I know it's wrong. But if I stop her, she'll… she'll destroy everything. The family. The shop. She'll tell everyone you came onto her. Who will they believe? A hysterical boy or a respected mother? Just… endure. For a little longer. Until you leave for university. Then you can be free." He called it enduring. He called her not well. He offered me freedom as a future prize for present torture. I vomited behind a tire rack. He cleaned it up silently.
The cold in my gut was now a glacial mass. The memory, unearthed, was fresher than yesterday. The smell of gasoline and motor oil, the taste of cheap soju and bile, the profound, soul-crushing desolation of my father's surrender. It wasn't just that he let it happen. He rationalized it. He made me an accomplice in my own destruction for the sake of a fragile, rotten peace.
I sped through the remaining pages of the red diary. The writing became a cold, flat planning log.
November 5, 2010.
Suneung is in two days. I will take it. I will do well. I have to. It's my only ticket out. Then, once the acceptance letter comes… I am done. I can't live in this body anymore. I can't live with these memories as my foundation. Every smile I might ever give, every touch I might ever receive, will be built on this filth. She has poisoned the well forever. And he watched her do it.
November 10, 2010.
It's over. The exam is done. I feel nothing. Emptiness is a blessing. I have saved half of my tutoring money. I will buy a good, strong rope. I will write a final letter. Not to her. Never to her. To him. One question. Just one.
The final entry. The date was today's date, thirteen years ago. November 10, 2010. The writing was pristine, steady, the handwriting of a ghost already detached.
November 10, 2010. Final.
The acceptance letter will come to a dead boy. Let it be their problem. The rope is in my backpack. The beam in the old storage shed behind the school is sturdy. No one goes there at night. I am afraid. Not of death. Of the moment before. Of the last breath in this violated body. I am resentful. At her, for making me her grotesque solution. At him, for his cowardice that he called love. At myself, for being too weak to stop it sooner. But mostly, I am just so, so tired. This is the only way to clean the slate. The only way she can't follow. My final thought… it won't be of her. It will be for the man who stood by and watched his son be broken. My father. I will leave him with this:
The sentence ended there, on the page. But in my mind, in the echoing vault of memory, it completed itself with the clarity of a shard of ice. The thought I'd cultivated, polished, carried with me to that shed.
How could you stand by and let your son be raped by his own wife?
I closed the red diary. My hands were steady. My face was dry. The thirty-one-year-old Min-jun sat in his quiet, clean, empty apartment, and the eighteen-year-old' decision, from thirteen years past, finally made perfect, logical sense.
He had planned to end it. But he hadn't.
I knew that, because I was here. What happened? Why had he stopped? I reached for the next diary, a blue one. University years. I opened it, expecting a chronicle of escape, of messy healing, of a hard-won freedom.
The first page was blank. The second page had a single line, written in a shaky, foreign hand that was somehow still mine.
September 3, 2011.
I do not remember buying this notebook.
A chill, deeper than any before, crawled up my spine. I flipped through the blue diary. Sparse entries. "Woke up. Don't know where I am." "They call me Min-jun. I answer." "There is a hole where something should be. A black, silent hole." Notes for classes I didn't remember taking. Lists of facts about myself, as if studying for a test on my own life. Favorite food: sundae-guk. Birthplace: Daegu. Father: Kim Jae-hwan. Mother: Park Soo-kyung.
It was a stranger's diary. The trauma hadn't been faced; it had been… severed. Discarded. My mind, to survive, had built a wall. The boy who wrote the red diary had essentially succeeded. He had died. And this new, hollowed-out creature had been born in his place, carrying his name and his shattered history but none of the visceral pain. Just the emptiness where it had been.
The subsequent diaries traced the life of this ghost. University graduated with middling grades, no friends, no attachments. Drifting from job to job. Moving to Seoul. The occasional, futile attempt at connection that always fizzled out because he had nothing real to offer—no past, no passion, no core. He was a pleasant, quiet man who agreed easily and felt nothing deeply. A perfect, empty vessel.
The final black Moleskine. The last entry was from six months ago.
April 15, 2023.
Mother died. Stroke. Father called, his voice like rust. I went to Daegu for the funeral. She looked small in the coffin. I felt nothing. Not relief. Not sorrow. Nothing. He looked at me across her grave, his eyes still hollow, still defeated. He's older, frailer. The shop is long gone. We did not speak. What was there to say? 'Sorry I let her destroy you?' 'Sorry I became a ghost to survive you?' I came back to Seoul. The emptiness is complete now. It has won. There is no more fight. There is just… the living of days.
And now, the box. The final thread.
I sat amidst the scattered notebooks, the relics of two different ghosts—the agonized boy and the hollow man. The rain had stopped. The silence in the apartment was absolute, profound. The cold, logical conclusion the eighteen-year-old had reached was, I realized, still correct. He had just been thirteen years too early.
The hollowness wasn't a scar; it was the illness itself. It was all that was left. There was no trauma to overcome, because the person who had been traumatized was gone. I was just the aftermath. The echo.
The peace I felt was terrifying. It was the peace of a mathematical equation solved. Input: a life built on a foundational crime, evacuated of self. Output: zero.
I stood up. My movements were calm, methodical. I didn't rage. I didn't cry. I tidied the apartment. I wrote no long letters. There was no one to address. I texted my contract manager, resigning effective immediately. I paid my remaining bills online.
Then, I went to the storage closet. Inside, among cleaning supplies and a spare blanket, was a coil of sturdy nylon rope, left over from a hiking phase the hollow man had briefly, pointlessly attempted. It was strong. Reliable.
The apartment had no useful beams. But the building's rooftop access door, as I knew from a night of pointless stargazing a year ago, had a broken lock. It was a quiet building. It would be hours before anyone found me.
The night air on the rooftop was knife-cold, scoured clean by the rain. Seoul glittered below, an indifferent galaxy of light and life. I secured the rope. I made the knot, my fingers remembering a knowledge from a forgotten scouting manual. Efficient. Neat.
There were no last-minute revelations. No floods of memory. The wall held. The hollow man was in charge until the end. I thought of the boy on Palgongsan, eating kimbap with his dad, feeling hope. I thought of the man in the garage, being offered cowardice as a father's love. Two ghosts.
I did not think of her. She had already taken enough.
My final thought, as I stepped off the edge, was not a scream, not a prayer. It was just that sentence, completed at last, aimed across the years at a broken man in a Daegu garage, and at the weak, faded echo of him that lived inside me.
How could you stand by and let your son be raped by his own wife?
The darkness rushed up.
---
And then… did not consume.
There was no impact. No snap. No final struggle.
There was a sensation of… suspension. Of infinite, silent release. The cold, the rope, the city lights—all vanished, replaced by a warm, velvety nothingness. A void without direction, without sound, without self.
Is this it? The thought formed without a brain to house it. Oblivion? It was a relief so profound it was almost joy. The hollow man could finally stop pretending to be a person. The boy's pain was finally, truly, over.
"Not quite."
The voice was not a sound. It was a concept inserted directly into the fabric of my non-existent being. It was neither male nor female, young nor old. It was vast, amused, and terrifyingly present.
A point of light emerged in the void, not illuminating anything, simply being. From it, a perception of attention focused on me.
"Kim Min-jun. Thirty-one years. A ledger of absence. How… tidy."
I tried to form a thought, a question. Who? What?
"A curator. A ferryman of a different sort. You have successfully ended one story. We are here to discuss the next."
No. The refusal was my entire essence. No next. I'm done. Let me go. Let me be nothing.
The voice laughed. It was a soundless ripple that vibrated through the void, a cosmic chuckle. "Refusal? How novel. Most cling desperately to the notion of 'more.' But you… you wish to delete the file entirely. Admirable in its finality. But no."
NO! I pushed the thought with all the will I had left. I have earned my nothing! I paid for it with my entire life!
"You paid with a life that was stolen before you could live it," the voice countered, its amusement tempered by something else… not pity, but a stark, analytical clarity. "The debt was not yours to pay. The crime was not yours to commit. Your solution, while elegant, is… unsatisfying. A balance remains unsettled."
I don't care about balance! I just want to stop!
"And you have," the voice said, its tone shifting, becoming almost… businesslike. "You have stopped being Kim Min-jun, son of a coward and a monster, occupant of a hollow life. That story is closed. The ledger is cleared. But potential… pure, unfettered potential… is a resource that is not so easily discarded. You were never allowed to be who you were meant to be. That is the injustice I find… grating."
A swirl of images, not memories, but possibilities, flashed in the void. Laughing with friends around a table laden with food. Standing shoulder-to-shoulder with comrades, facing a shared threat. The simple, deep contentment of protecting something, of belonging somewhere. A family—not of blood, but of choice—looking to him with trust, with warmth. The images were generic, yet they struck a chord in a place I thought had been erased. They depicted not drama, but connection. Not trauma, but simple, sustaining love.
"You wished, in your deepest, most buried heart, for a good family. For real friends. To be a person who matters, in a way that is quiet and true. To support a light in the world, even from the shadows. Even at a cost."
The voice was right. It wasn't a dramatic, heroic yearning. It was the baseline human need the hollow man had never dared feel, and the broken boy had been robbed of before he could name it.
"I cannot give you peace in oblivion," the voice stated, its finality absolute. "But I can give you a chance to build what was taken. A new world. A new body. A new beginning, with the slate not just wiped clean, but replaced. No memories of her. No hollow echoes. Just… you. The essential you that never got to grow. With one purpose: to find your place, to build your family, to be the friend, the supporter, the unwavering ally. To live a life of meaning, not just endurance."
It was a temptation I had no energy for. I'm tired. So tired.
"You will not be tired there. You will be… whole. And you will not be alone. There are stories everywhere that need steadfast souls. Not heroes at the front, but the rock upon which the hero stands. The one who ensures the light continues to shine. Does that not sound like a purpose worth a new dawn?"
I wanted to refuse again. But the void offered no resistance. The nothingness was no longer peaceful; it was just… empty. And the images of connection, of simple, earned belonging, lingered.
The voice sensed my hesitation, the crumbling of my final defiance.
"It is not a request, Kim Min-jun. It is an assignment. A recalibration. You sought an end. I am offering a true beginning. Your suffering was a waste. I do not tolerate waste."
There was no more discussion. The void began to swirl, the point of light expanding, dissolving the darkness into a torrent of rushing color and sensation.
Wait—!
"No."
The voice was the last thing I perceived, its final chuckle fading into the roar of a world being born.
---
Consciousness returned not with a jolt, but with a slow, warm seepage.
The first thing I was aware of was sound. A gentle, rhythmic whooshing, steady and comforting. The smell of clean linen and something faintly milky. The feeling of softness all around me, and a curious sense of… limitation. My limbs felt heavy, uncoordinated.
I tried to open my eyes. The light was soft, blurry. Shapes swam above me—warm, moving shadows that cooed and hummed. A face resolved, enormous and beautiful, with eyes full of a liquid, overwhelming love. A man's face, rough-hewn but soft with wonder, peered over her shoulder, his finger, impossibly large, gently stroking my cheek.
"Look at him, my love," the woman's voice whispered, a sound of pure joy. "Our son. Our precious Min-jae."
A different name. A different world. The love in her voice was a tangible force, a blanket warmer than any ondol floor.
The old ghosts—the boy, the hollow man—were gone. Not buried, not forgotten. Simply… nonexistent. In their place was a vast, quiet openness. A curiosity. A fundamental, unshakable sense of safety.
The man, my father, beamed. "He's perfect. Strong. He's going to be a good friend to someone, one day. I can feel it."
In my new heart, small and untested, something kindled. Not a memory. A promise.
I, Kim Min-jae, closed my eyes, and for the first time in two lifetimes, slept a dreamless, perfect sleep, ready to begin.