Hyukjae

It was the first time I had seen one. A dead body that is.

                Its eyes were cold and gray and its body felt like leather to the touch, that is, if I had dared to press even the tips of my fingers to the surface of its skin.

                It was interesting though, and I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it. There were so many thoughts going in circles inside of me and my breathing increased.

                The body was so pale and lifeless. There was nothing inside of it anymore, and I wondered if it could even be classified as a person any longer. It was just a corpse after all.

                The one thing that makes humans truly human and so magnificent is there mind. Not just there brain because most animals, certainly every mammal, had to have a brain. No, it was our thoughts, our capability to think and form ideas and create from those ideas was what made us truly human and set us apart from everything else.

                But when you die that’s gone. It’s as if that one defining characteristic seeps out from your body along with your last breath. It’s almost poetic.

                Then that poses a new question. What does that make our body? Is it merely a vessel that guides us through life until our predestined time is up? Dead bodies are meaningless then. Why do we even have funerals and big ceremonies where the body is the centre of attention? That corpse isn’t a good representation of what a person used to be.

                You can’t tell much from a face, except the basic generalizations of age and gender and other genetics like that. The thing that defined this person was in their mind, perhaps only they knew who they really where, never revealing it to anyone else. This corpse in front of me could have been a person who had only ever thought of and pleasure but in reality they were the president of an abstinence club. Who knows what’s going on inside somebody’s head except for the person themselves? Perhaps not even they can tell it for themselves.

                Then we come back to the body. The first dead body I had ever seen, and it was making me go off on some philosophical bull. It was just so sudden. So shocking. So in the moment and tantalizing and it was just there in front of me. Close enough for me to touch, should I have desired that.

                But I didn’t. I didn’t want to touch it. I didn’t want to be near it any longer. It was beginning to strike in me the terror and agonizing fear that there was nothing inside that body anymore. There was nothing.

                I wanted to get away. I wanted to run. I wanted to leave and never look back. I wanted this to be done and over with so I could forget about it as soon as possible.

                Oh, I should point out, that this wasn’t just the first time I had seen a dead body.

                It was the first time I had done it. Killed a person, that is.