A widower groping his way

What is so special about one festive day that distinguishes it from other mundane days? Nothing. They are just human inventions. In the vast universe, there is no Sunday and no Christmas day. They are just silly convention made up by inhabitants of this tiny mole hill called the earth.  But such so-called special days make me feel more depressed and lost and lonelier than other days. That is just the way it goes for me.  That is why I resumed smoking after staying away from cigarettes for three days and why I am going to a karaoke to appease my emptiness. 

I smoke. I drink. I try to get a woman. But nothing quenches my restless soul.  Three years have passed since my wife died. However, I am still caught in the past. I do not take care of my health properly. I live like a man with no future. Maybe I am exactly that. A man without future and hope.  I am always hungry for the touch of another human being. More correctly, a presence of a woman in my life who loves me like my wife did. And that is something that cannot happen,  I am lost in this messed-up lifestyle. I need to do something to change myself. I need to find ways to have the peace of mind. I just need to change the direction of my life. If I go on like this, it is matter of time when I will collapse and make my kids orphans.  Life fucked me. I should accept it. If I keep living like this, it will me and life that fuck me. I need to change everything in my life. I need to reinvent myself as a wholesome widower. 

I have been buried in my despair and disorganized life for too long. My health and morale is at the lowest level ever. I was not like this even during the months after my wife died.  I smoked for more than two years now after successfully quitting for one year. I am chronically tired and my mind is not clear. A few days ago, I made a stupid and shameless advance to a woman that I hardly know. It can be explained as a symptom of desperate loneliness but it also reflects the status of my mental balance verging on the lack of common sense.  I was gloomy and sad in the winter of 2012 and spring of 2013. But at that time, I still had a dignity and a good level of self-restraint. However, now, all I see when I look in the mirror is a loser with no self-respect who walks deeper and deeper into a mud of self-hatred and self-contempt every single day.  I cannot live like this forever. Sooner or later, I will have a lung cancer or make more stupid mistakes than asking a stranger to go to be

Got a terrible cold. And as always, I still smoke. It is like I totally give up the instinct of self preservation. This life is crazy.  While I was half asleep during the lunch hour, I remembered the time when I was making love to my wife. Her soft body. Her words. Her hands touching me. Things like that cannot come back.  I feel so separate from her. So distant and so lonely. I feel myself as a man with no hope. 

In the past it was 750 words. I typed the words and that would make me feel calm. I stopped the subscription for the online software long time ago. Now I have no outlet for expressing my despair, frustration and loneliness. I tried dating apps, several of them, but all of them were filled with fake profiles. I was stupid to believe that I could find a real person in those apps. You don't meet people there. It is simply impossible to find a woman who will love me like my wife used to. Everything that was good happened to me by coincidence or by chance. I did not choose her to be my wife. She simply showed up in my life and our lives were intertwined in a manner that we could not resist.  Now that she is out of my life at least on this plane of existence, I don't think I can reproduce what happened between her and me again.  For the last one year, I gave up my determination to quit smoking and lived aimlessly. Ironically, my motivation level was the highest when my wif

One year after my wife died, I quit smoking because it was simply impossible to breathe normally. After quitting, I got better fast. I gained more weight, my legs and arms got thicker. My face looked better. I must have looked handsome too because women told me I looked great and even one woman hit on me. But I felt lonely during all the time. I felt miserable.  Here is an irony. When I felt the most miserable inside, I looked my best on the outside. After one year from quitting smoking, I resumed smoking. It was when I met my high school friends. Listening to their stories about their normal life made me realize what I lost and without a second thought, I found myself smoking again.  And it was like that since that time. I am still smoking though I lost more than 5 kilograms and look terrible everyday. I always decide not to smoke and any trigger - an image of a happy couple, a memory of my wife and me together, even a passing thought about my lonely death in the future - can m

I sit alone in my room. I type this on my notebook computer. I had a glass of wine. Brahms' symphony no. 1 is coming out of the speaker.  I am alone in my room. My remaining life will be like this. I will be sitting in room alone, listening to classical music, thinking or writing things that do not make my life enjoyable.  I feel lonely. I do not know which one is true. Can I try to become happy and will I be happy in the future? Or is my life supposed to be shitty like this? I do not know. 

I stopped doing things. I don't write for my several blogs anymore. I don't make plans for making money and getting out of debts so that I can be free from the work life.  I don't look at my wife's photos as often as before. I still visit my wife's grave at least once a month.  She does not come to me in my dreams. As a matter of fact, I rarely dream these days.  I broke my left ribs. I got my right ankle hurt. All because of a stupid mistake I made one month ago.  My life is empty. No future. No past. No woman in my life. No one to touch and kiss. No one to kiss me and touch me. I am more of a tactile person than I thought. I need warm skin and caress. I need a woman's face smiling at me. A sweet smile and voice.  I need things like that and I doubt they will come into my life again. 

Nothing serious to be done. Still smoking cigarettets in spite of slightly aching lungs and back. No plan for the future. No woman who will give me a sweet talk and a warm hug. Days, months, and years go by. And I get older. The only consolation I have is I do not live forever. This boring, meaningless, and stupid existence as a widower will be over sooner or later. I will forget about everything about this world and the world will forget about me. Every memory about me will be erased just like my wife was forgotten by people except me. The blessing of getting wiped from the surface of this stupid and tiring planet. Going into a big sleep from which I will never wake up again.

I thought my wife would be with me forever. Or at least beside me until I die. She just died. I am sitting in this office, looking at this monitor. I am bored. Am I supposed to spend the rest of my life in this stupid job? What is my life for? Does it have any climax, any epiphany? So stupid and why is my life so long when my wife's was that short. This is just unfair. I want to get out of this life. Stupid. Meaningless. Disgusting.

이제 남은 건 무엇인가? 나이는 오십. 이룬 것은 없고, 하루하루 진부한 생활을 반복하고 있다. 무얼 하면 되는가? 무엇을 해야 하는가?

Everyday, I fall and hate myself for not being strong. I don't know where I am headed to in this life of a lonely widower.  I have no plan, no purpose, no objective. Time passes and I have days or years to live before I meet my wife again.  I try to lie to myself that things will be OK but I know I have no real answer. Everything was for real and suddenly my life became something I don't find any logic or reasons behind it.  Now I don't even know if I want to keep going or just hang myself. If only there is a sign that she is watching over me and wanting me to change my life for the better.  I lost my way. I lost my life. I lost myself. 

희선의 옛날 사진, 동영상 하나를 보는 것으로 충분하다. 죽고 싶은 생각이 들기 위해서는. 삶의 허무함을 바로 느끼게 된다. 내가 하고 있는 모든 일의 헛됨을 느끼는 데에도 충분하다.  둘 중에 하나다. 지금 바로 죽어버리거나, 죽을 때까지 기다리거나. 나에게는 이 둘 밖에는 선택권이 없다. 

When my wife died, I lost all the hope about the world.  For people outside, I may look like leading a normal life. But I am not. My world that I had before my wife got cancer and died has been erased beyond recognition. I am not living in the same world anymore.  I smoke repeatedly though I know my body is not in a proper condition. I have difficulty in breathing every morning when I wake up. Back in the spring of 2013, I had a similar problem and I quit at that time for about one year. This time, I seem to not able to draw the same determination as I did back then. What has changed since the last time I quit? I don’t know for sure. Maybe, I really have no desire to live anymore. Maybe I am really sick and tired of this thing called living.  I feel lonely all the time. I feel I am alienated from the normal world. My world is so empty. I want to have someone in my bed at night. I want to hug and be hugged by someone. I want to kiss someone. The problem is that someone is not anybo

이 지겨운 인생도 언젠가는 끝난다. 나는 영원히 살지는 않는다. 이 세상에서. 이 육체도 언젠가는 작동을 중단하고 쓰러질 것이다. 버려진 차처럼. 나는 이 세상에서 빠져나갈 것이다. 언젠가는. 모든 것이 끝날 것이다. 나의 육체가 무너지는 순간, 이 세상도 사라질 것이다. 나에게는. 나의 의식을, 존재를 지우개로 지워버릴 수 있다면 좋겠다. 모든 것을 잊어버릴 수 있게. 내가 존재했다는 사실 조차 지워버릴 수 있다면 좋겠다. 세상을 지워버리고 싶다. 모든 것을. 모든 것을.

I was healthy in the summer of 2013.  I almost died in the summer of 2012 after my wife died in May of the same year. I lost weight down to 52 kilograms. I had difficultly in breathing due to excessive smoking. I had to stop smoking. So, I stopped. After a couple of months, I got better. I gained weight. I weighed more than 64 kilograms. My thighs and chests got bigger. I felt good physically, though inside I felt miserable all the same.  I met no people. I came from work and stayed home everyday doing the household chores. I was like a housewife and a husband in one body. I was lonely and thought about death all the time. My wife's death and my own death.  Ironically, I was in a better shape when my thoughts were the darkest one and now I have more social life than in 2013 but my condition is the worst ever.  Maybe, a lifestyle of a hermit is the best one for my health. Maybe I should shut down the door to the outside world and stick to my own self like I did two years ago.

Life goes on though I am left alone here. I wake up every morning, go to work, stay in the office, waste my life there, drive home, eat dinner, play video games, and sleep and I wake up and I go to work and. The only consolation I have is this stupid cycle will eventually come to an end though I don’t know when. Then, I won’t have to be here in this world and will see my wife. I will not come back. At least I think so at this moment, in this life.

I meet people and drink. I smoke cigarettes. If I dump them, I borrow them from people. I get weaker and sick everyday. I know I am going into a wrong and hopeless direction. The end of this road will be my death and my sons as orphans.  These unreasonable actions are coming from my lack of purpose in life and my abhorrence of living. I cannot change the reality that sucks. Because I cannot change the outer world, my only option is to change my inner world. The world I am living through my brain. I can change that though I would have to work really hard to do that.  What is so natural but I have been missing for the last one year since I resumed smoking is that my physical condition is closely related to, or even responsible for, my mental health. When I was smoke free, I thought and felt more confident than now, although I did not notice it at that time. A simple act of not smoking made me a better person both in terms of physical and mental health. Even the world I was living in

If I give more thoughts to my life, what happened to my life that changed it beyond recognition, I can't live anymore. But the routine of daily life is stronger than my misery. Heesun left me for good but I still live.  I had a loving wife and my sons had a good mother. We lost her but we still live. Death is something ultimate that ends everything for a world that was familiar to us. But we still live as if something means anything to us.  If I focus on what really happened, I have no reason to strive for. I should just close my eyes and wait for the moment that the death also comes to me.  I am tired and sad. I see no reason for keep doing stuffs but I still stay here. I am lazy and blind. 

Maybe I touched an angel's hand.  Your heart makes me brighter and clear everyday like a glass.  When your hands touch my heart of a little boy, I feel that I thank you and I love you.  I pray that my wishes for you will come true.  My first wish.  Don't get ill when I am not there. I will always protect you.  Be well. My Love.  I wonder if you know I always feel sorry even if I can give my everything to you.  I thank you and l love you.  I pray that my wishes for you will come true.  My second wish.  Even if we have hard times, let's not lie to each other. If we had to, let them just be good lies.  And my last wish.  I will not let go of your hands that I am holding now.  I wish when we close our eyes forever in the future, it will be the same day and the same time. 

I tried to meet women because I missed intimacy, both physical and emotional. And I failed. Miserably.  I am messing up my life physically, mentally and financially. I am not self-sufficient as much as I thought about myself in the past.  I lost the sense of direction in my life. Where am I going with this disoriented life style? What is waiting for me ahead in the future? What kind of person will I change into? What kind of old man will I become? Will I even survive until I turn 60s or 70s? Do I even want to live that long as a loner? What is this world around me? Why did my life change into this barren desert?  What is the meaning of living like this? Can I just die and forget about everything? But even if I die, I won't feel better if I still remember everything. 

This is my world. I live in it. There is nobody in the world. I do have parents and children. But they don't share my inner world. They don't know what is happening inside this world.  I look for intimacy in places where I cannot find it. I look for understanding and love in people who don't have the remotest idea of what I experienced and am still going through.  The only person who can hug me and comfort me is my wife and she is not here anymore. In the course of looking for the impossible from places and people, my life and my body became messed up.  I should stop for a week, a month or even a year to fully understand what I have become. I need to think and think deeply. I need to find an answer. I need to stay calm and forget about my desires, dreams and frustration. I need to be silent. 

I am just travelling through this world. I am not stuck in this world. All the things that have happened to me are nothing but illusion. When I leave this dimension and go into another one, I will find a whole new world, where there is no death or separation from the one I love. Life is a long and boring joke that eventually ends.  Nothing is serious enough to deserve agonizing over it. Everything will be wiped away sooner or later. Just like my wife's body was erased, my body will be broken and dumped away. I don't have to think and live as if I will stay here forever. What remains is my consciousness and everything else will be gone. I am just a traveler here.  I should not go back in memory to the time when all I had was despair and fear watching my wife slowly dying for more than one year. I should not think about the past or the future. I should not think at all. I should just forget everything. I should be like a stone that feels nothing. I should stay away from peopl

to overcome the death of your spouse is not about analyzing where you were, it's about deciding where you want to go, and beyond. 

My world is crumbling down. Just like my body and my mind. I see no clear way ahead of me. I don't know what to do with my life. I live as if I have no tomorrow. I waste my life over futile things. I am trapped in my own idea of what my life is like. And the idea is dark and gloomy. I need to stay away from my thoughts and feelings. They are toxic. I am sick of playing the role of a pathetic and lonely widower. I am sick of hearing myself think and feel. I need to run away from me. I need to go someplace where even I cannot find myself. These petty miseries of mine. This stupid and useless thoughts and feelings of me. I need to forget about myself. I need to ignore myself. Close my eyes and try to listen to the sound of the world outside other than noise in my head. 

Just like my wife during her days with cancer, I know nothing about my future. I may die tomorrow. Maybe after one year, or even after decades. I do not live in the same world that people are living in. I have nothing to hope for. I have nothing to wait for. I just live day by day just wanting this boring and empty life to end. I cannot put an end to this life with my hands because of my sons. I want to go to a remote place where I know nobody and vice versa. Nothing means anything to me. I become indifferent to my life everyday.  I become empty everyday.

I still remember my wife everyday. And I still smoke everyday. My life is still the same. It's quiet and lonely. I hope that I will see my wife again when I die.

I am losing it. Health. Hope. Sanity. Will to live. Everything. I wonder if I can come back to my sane self. To my senses. I need to stay calm and quiet. Far from the crowd. Far from the people. Far from my disoriented and lost self.

Smoking all the time. Drinking alcohols. Staying awake until 2 AM in my bed alone. I can't remember the last time I felt good and everything was OK. The memory of Heesun is getting dimmer and dimmer everyday though I cling to her memory.

여보. 2월 4일에 내가 당신 묘지에 갔지. 어제는 밥먹는데 지호가 갑자기 물어봤다. 말을 잘 안하는 녀석인데. 2월 4일에 뭐했냐고. 그래서 묘지에 갔다 왔다고 했지. 나는 당신 잊지 않았고, 애들도 당신을 잊지는 않았다. 3년이 다 되어 가지만. 나한테 신호를 좀 보내라고 해도 들은 척도 안하는 당신이지만, 난 아직도 매일 생각하고 기억한다.

이제는 내가 해줄 수 있는게 하나도 없네.

Why am I here when my wife is already dead? Why can't I just kill myself and escape this empty world? Only because I have two sons who cannot take care of themselves as yet. Will I kill myself when they don't need me anymore? Maybe. Do I want to die? Maybe. As far as I remember, I always had a kind of lethargy about this thing called living. I always felt as if I made a wrong step into a room where I was not supposed to enter. It was maybe an ominous feeling. I expected that life would suck and it really did as I expected. I don't care if I continue to exist after death. I am sure that at least I will get out of this life where all I had was disillusionment and disappointment.

Almost every people I meet say that their marriage life sucks. Sometimes, I think the reason I miss my wife so much is that what we had as a couple was something very rare. I will find no woman like my wife even if I live 100 years from now. She was something so rare and something that was supposed to last only for a short time.

Still smoking. Not working out. Reading books that are not related to each other from time to time. Always feeling tired and hazy. Visited wife's cemetery. Smoking again. Trying to do some work but stopping soon. Smoking again. Can't get myself to something meaningful, something worth striving for. Tired of existing. Tired of living. Wishing that everything were a nightmare from which I can wake up in a snap. Gotta do something to change things. But what is that thing? What is it? How can I change my life? How can I end my life?

감기로 침대에 계속 누워있던 며칠. 현실과 꿈의 경계가 희미해진다. 현실은 또 하나의 길고 지루한 꿈. 꿈에서 깨어나는 방법은 죽음 뿐이다. 꿈을 너무 진지하게 생각하면 꿈 속에서 미친 놈이 된다. 현실을 너무 진지하게 생각하면 역시 미치게 된다. 현실은 상대적인 개념이다. 이것이 나의 유일한 현실이라고 자신있게 말하는 인간은 미친 놈이다. 그리고 그런 미친 놈들이 세상을 주무른다. 미친 세상이다.

단 하나의 죽음이 나의 인생을 이렇게 무너뜨릴 수 있다는 것. 단 한 사람의 죽음이 생존 자체를 무의미하게 만들 수 있다는 것. 내가 이렇게 연약하다는 것. 하나의 부정은 모든 것에 대한 부정이 되어버렸다는 것. 여기서 이렇게 시간을 낭비하고 있다는 것. 나의 인생. 나의 존재. 나의 환경. 나의 가족. 나라는 존재. 시간 속에 갇혀버린 존재가 되었다는 것. 모든 것을 부정하고 싶은 욕망을 잠재우기 어렵다는 것. 벌을 받고 있는 것 같다는 느낌. 이 생에 던져진 것이 형벌이라는 느낌. 자신을 잊어야만 이 인생을 견뎌낼 수 있을 것 같다는 느낌. 나라는 존재를 지워야만, 잊어야만 하루하루를 보낼 수 있을 거 같다는 느낌. 이 장소가, 이 자리가 갈수록 지겨워지는 느낌. 따뜻한 곳, 밥벌이를 위해 사무실에 갇혀 있지 않아도 먹고 살 걱정을 하지 않아도 되는 먼 곳으로 탈출하고 싶은 느낌. 겁장이로 살다가 결국 정말로 사는 것이 아니라 돈버는, 일하는 기계로 살다가 죽어버릴 것이라는 두려움. 삶의 의미, 삶의 가치에 대한 회의.

인간들과 어울려보려던 2014년의 시도는 만신창이가 된 건강으로 끝났다. 무너지지 않은 세계속에 아직도 살고 있는 인간들을 보는 것 자체가 나의 인생을 더 비참하게 만든다. 골방에 틀어박혀 세상을 멀리하는 것 보다 더 현명한 선택은 없다. 인간들을 만나고 나면 더 깊은 절망과 고독속으로 떨어진다. 인간들과도 멀리하고, 나 자신으로부터, 나의 욕망, 절망, 비참함, 한심한 환경, 그 모든 것들로부터 멀어져야 한다. 인간들이 지긋지긋하고, 나 자신이 지겹다. 나의 하찮은 존재, 한심한 생활이 지겹다. 나를 잊어버릴 수 있다면, 모든 것을 잊어버리고, 지워버릴 수 있다면, 그러면 견딜만해질 것인가. 죽음을 생각한다. 자주. 태어난 날을 저주한다는 욥의 구절이 생각난다. 성경에서 제일 인간적인 부분이 인간이 자신의 존재를 저주하는 독백이라는 것은 아이러니다. 살아있는 모든 것의 탄식. 존재에 대한 역겨움. 지겨움.

So, this is me. Smoking until the last day of 2014. Dumping the cigarettes with a renewed determination. Sipping a cup of wine. Listening to Chopin’s Piano Concerto on a bluetooth speaker. Being surrounded by three monitors. Two Mac computers and one Windows notebook. Typing this at 1:50 AM in the first day of 2015. My life is totally void of a female touch. Not a trace of my wife’s presence in this room, in this house. As nerdy as a widower can be. It is just amazing how different my life has become from the life I had with my wife. It is not the same world anymore. There is just movie on my monitor and classical music on my car stereo or speakers. No voice of a woman in the house. I must have really made a big mistake when I stepped into this world. If I had any say in the process of coming into this world, I must have hated it and must have been very reluctant to come here. Then, why did I do that? To meet my wife? And to lose her so fast? Sartre wrote that the hell is the others. I