participant analysis. 

 

 

i. you long ago came to terms with the person you are. when your father walked out on your once family of three one rainy day, leaving your tear soaked mother and yourself sitting lonely at the dining table, you took possession of yourself, and recognized yourself for who you were. you understand yourself, out of necessity where the rest of the world cannot, and when you fail, it is with the acceptance of one day's failure not meaning the failure of a whole. you know yourself, you know who you are, and in the rare moments you find yourself stumbling, you will look back on those times, with realization that that's just another part of who you are.

 

ii. you don’t like confrontation and you’re so eager to please. always willing to bend over backwards and break your own bones to see to the smiles on the faces of your friends. this paints you as an easy target. a rose amongst the thorns that beg so much to bleed you dry. you can’t help it however. you’ve always been so afraid of the dark. afraid of that abyss that loneliness is and so you do your best to fill the spaces with people who never seem to stick around. they’re around enough however, to leave tread marks and trampled petals; leaving behind only the buds that never got to bloom. wondering why they weren’t enough, why you weren’t enough to make them stay. 

 

iv. you never realize that selflessness is not enough to carry yourself through until it is far too late. after pouring piece after piece of yourself into others, so that all you have left of yourself is the remaining scraps of brutalized fragility when all is said and done, you do not realize what too much is until they've taken everything from you. all you have left are the ugliest parts of your soul, and the unwanted pieces trampled in the wake of take, take, take. it scares you, how little you have to possess to your name, how little you care. pouring so much of yourself into others, there's barely anything left there for you, and yet, when they ask, when they take, you still give what you can. you do what they need. but beneath all the tender kindness, the sweet smiles and the soft hands, what are you but e m p t y?

 

v. a puppet with the strings long cut, no hands to guide and no straws to grasp for. you are a girl, and yet you are so much less than that. you are half of a human, a shell of a being. you live, but you live not for the moment and not for the things to come. what do you live for, sweet girl? en ending, you think. you live for a means to conclude what little existence you have found for yourself. a girl, and not yet a person. liked by all but never cherished enough to love. not intriguing enough, not important enough. they know you, but they do not bother to understand you. you've always known love, but you will never have love. 

 

 

participant background. 

 

 

you live with anger held between your teeth, stuck between the rows like overripe fruit, and it isn't until your father leaves that you bite down hard. it b u r s t s, and your mouth fills with blood. a stain of ugly crimson, and the taste of copper on your tongue. you do not understand what it is to hate, but you know more than anything, that beneath missing him, beneath the wish for him to come home, you know that if he were to walk through the doors he had once walked out of, it would not be to open arms there to greet him. instead, the straight of your shoulders, the steel in your eyes. you do not forgive betrayal where there called for none—and how could you? you wonder, when your feet still sting from the cuts left behind from the shattered glass on the kitchen floor.

 

 

 

medical history. 

undiagnosed depression. with her father walking out on her at such a young age, soyeon took especially hard to his absence. with the first eight years of her life spent as "daddy's little princess", his leaving took its toll on her and the way she viewed the world. she never realized that it wasn't normal for her to feel the way she did until she met soohyun. that people usually didn't feel so half heartedly about life as she did, that it wasn't okay for her to live without any interests or wants like she did. she never professionaly sought help for her depression, but meeting soohyun helped her realize that there was more in life, and she's on a steady (enough) path to recovery. there are still moments where she feels as if she could lie down and never be bothered to get up again, but then she thinks of soohyun, and she remembers there are things for worth living, people worth fighting to be with.

 

relationships. 

jung soohyun. eighteen, student

a classmate who transfered into soyeon's grade during her second last year of high school, she never bothered to spare him the time of day at first. soohyun however, went out of his way and did his best to catch soyeon's eye. from volunteering to aid her in her student responsibilities to staying after school to help her clean the classroom, over sharing lunches at lunch to studying together on the weekends (though it was more soyeon studying and soohyun whining for attention), soyeon found that he had become what was clearly one of the most important person in her life. 

 

soohyun to her means discovering not only him, but herself, and a rediscovery of the world where she had once believed there to be nothing. he helped her open her eyes, but also her heart, nad it is because of him that she finds the effort to rise some mornings, that she finds more reasons to love about herself in the reflection. he's quite simply her entire world, regardless of how simple minded or stupid it is to give so much of herself to a boy, nevertheless one she met in highschool, but soohyun had once promised her forever, and she believes him.

how did you end up detained in the mall? 

tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, she did her best to ease the stranger's nerves, to smile politely. smiles always helped lighten the mood, to brighten a solemn situation. you couldn't go wrong with a smile. "ah, i mean. we're not really detained, right? i mean, i'm sure if we ask we'll be let out... it's probably just a misunderstanding, i'm sure." she wasn't. she isn't. but she still smiled. playing with the end of her sleeve, she folded the length over her wrist before unfolding it once again. pause, refold, unfold. a poor attempt to focus her attentions elsewhere. on anything besides the weight of the tension in the room. "if not, i mean. the police will be here soon, i'm sure." she wasn't, she wasn't sure. "they'll get us out. it'll be okay, so please don't worry. we're all going to be okay." she wasn't certain, how could she be? but she did her best to believe. to hope. after all, as soohyun would always say, what is life without hope, without believing that things would get better. what was the point.

 

 

before the first death occurred, did you believe your predicament? share your thoughts and reactions throughout the game.

her head hurt, her chest felt heavy—compressed. she couldn't believe what was happening. this could NOT have been happening. it wasn't. it couldn't. it was a dream, a nightmare. an awful creation within her head that she would soon enough awaken from. she would be able to escape. "i don't—this doesn't make any sense." she couldn't wrap her head around what was happening. "h-he,—he killed her. that g-guy killed her. d-does that even make sense? h-how could he kill her." her cheeks felt damp, and her hands were shaking, and yet she didn't bother to wipe at the pooling tears in her eyes. instead, she stayed frozen in her spot, fingers tightly entagled together on her lap as she tried to still the tremors in her body. her knees almost bounced from the force of the shakes, her eyes wide as she recalled the announcement, the quick glance she had gotten of the man—of the killer, before she ran off in fear of becoming his next target. "he killed her..." her words dropped, quietly, fearfully, as she finally looked up and into the eyes of the questioner. "didn't he love her?"

 

her neck hurt from the quick snap of her head, blood pounding from between her ears as she forced herself to shake her head. no, never, she could never. "h-how could you even—" but she stopped. of course they would ask. why wouldn't they? death was child's play to them, was nothing to them. she should have known by now. with so many dead—killed, as her mind supplied. with so many killed, why would they not presume? but they were wrong. they were wrong, she would never, she could never. "i w-won't kill." and she stuttered her words, stumbled. but she was driven, certain. "i won't kill anyone. i would never. i—... i'm not that kind of person. i would never." but was anyone? were any of them? before they were taken, made hostage of this sick, sick game. were any of them acclaimed killers? known criminals? they weren't, and yet she had seen the felled, she had seen the bodies of those slain, murdered, and she still couldn't match them to the images of those she had seen prior. to the faces she had seen while scanning the corridors of the mall. none of them looked like killers, and as she clutched at the scissors within her grasp, shaking beneath the tremors of her hands, eyes narrowed in on the glint of the blade, the sharpness, that was what scared her the most. 

 

"ryu haneul sshi oppa—" she cuts herself, remembering the lazy glare, the bright coloured mint of his hair, the narrowing of his eyes as he spoke don't call me oppa, kid "ahjusshi, i mean. ryu haneul ahjusshi." but he didn't look nearly old enough to be her ahjusshi, nevertheless anyone's ahjusshi. she wasn't like the bus driver ahjusshi she thanked everyday, with his greying moustache and slightly protruding belly, his kind smile and shaking laughter as he accepted the milk carton she offered him. no, this ryu haneul was nothing like the ahjusshi that drove her bus, neither the ones who worked with her mother, sitting in their stuffy suits, the ones that leered at her mother every chance they got, eyes following the round of her bottom in her skirt as her mother leaned over her desk to give her a hug when she dropped by her work on the weekends, making sure her mother ate and took her breaks. she had never met an ahjusshi like ryu haneul before, had never met a person like ryu haneul before, and yet, she couldn't be more thankful that she had. 

 

pale skin, paler than her own, with a top of mint hair and a lazy glare that still managed to freeze her in place. the manliness of his hands and the way he kept them tucked into the pockets of his sleeves, how he scanned the mall like it was his to own, to take apart and figure out, and discover. he was stuck in the game, same as she was, and yet when he had found her, tucked into the back room of a clothing store, hidden between the layers of coats in storage, the first thing he had done was check her over, looking almost distained as he made sure she was alright. he didn't need her, not nearly as much as she found herself needing him, and yet he had stayed, he had brought her along and sworn her a way to escape, to leave free, alive. 

 

she didn't know how a man, a stranger, could make her believe just as much as soohyun did in so little time, but when he took her hand and looked into her eyes, she did. she did believe, and more than anything, she trusted him. "there's a man, another man in the game. he says he'll get me out, and i believe him. i trust him, and he is going to get me out. get us both out."

 

 

she could still feel the knife in her hand, the slick of the blood as it ran down her fingers, the quiet exhale of pain as it was punched out from the other's body. "d-did you know, it's, um. it's harder. i-it's a lot harder t-then the movies make it o-out to be." so much harder. she took a pause, trying to calm the racing of her heart as she recalled the death of a person she had killed. tried to still the shaking of her hands as she remembered the last of their breaths leave their body. "i-i mean, i—" another pause, a shaky breath. "i don't w-watch a lot of m-movies like that b-but, um. i-it looks a lot easier there. a-alot..." tipping her head forward to fall into the cradle of her knees, she couldn't stop the tears from falling, doing her best to hide them behind the curtain of her hair. there was a few strands still stained red from the blood where she had fallen beside them, the apologies slipping like prayers from her lips where she knelt beside them, hunching over where she held their hand, where she cried her tears.

 

 

"s-specialties?" she didn't. she couldn't. not when she wasn't trying to win the game. she didn't want to play. "n-no, um. i don't have anything l-like that." besides the brightness of her eyes? the slight of her frame? the pleading innocence she conveyed in every waking moment. she had everything she never realized as something. the way people would mistake her shyness for stupidity, her hesitence for fear. she was the easy pickings, the nobody's worry as somebody would get to her eventually. nobody worried about what nobody could see, and as she lived, unnoticed, invisible, looked over, they would not bother to see her now. not in her soft hands, in her smooth skin, small and unblemished and so pure that the devil himself would never bother to tarnish. not when the world would do that itself, would pick her apart and leave her broken beyond words simply for being who she was. innocent, untouched, unexplicably naive beyond words.

 

she remembers the disbelief she had felt at the start of it all, the way she had refused to believe just what kind of situation she had been thrown into. a game she had to kill for in order to survive? the idea that people actually would. it didn't make sense, it hadn't, and she had believed it was only a matter of time before the police would show, before she was saved. 

 

now, she thinks of soohyun. she thinks of his bright smile, his large hands and the callouses that line them, of the scars that line his body like a roadmap home—her home. she thinks of soohyun, and she thinks that she should have told him i love you one last time, had told him thank you, for teaching her to love, and for loving her in return. there are so many things she had needed to say, and she wished she had been given the time to, but instead of those things, instead of thinking of saying them they next time they meet, she thinks of goodbye.

 

 

every time she closes her eyes, she sees crimson in the corners, pooling towards her like the blood of her first victim. when she covers her ears, she hears the struggling of her second, the way they had drowned with their head pushed under a pool of fluoride, the way the third had begged, the fourth had pleaded. the fifth had screamed. she hears the victims, some hers, some not, and she begs for her own peace, for the quiet that she imagined them to feel only in death. she remembers them, each and every one of them, the images of their faces in death seared into her mind where she had forced herself to sit before them and memorize, where she had forced herself to remember, because even in all their horrors, she would. she would remember them, because they deserved that much, at least that much, after dying in the ways they had, for the cause they had. they had died, playing a game as contestents they had never chosen to be, and she would remember them, every last one of them. 

 

OBSERVATIONS.

this is Ugly and Long and i am Sorry