01

mutable

It began with nothing.

And by nothing, I mean absolutely, extraordinarily nothing. The big fat number 0. A large, vast, barren expanse that was my mind.

But I wasn’t startled. Something told me I should have panicked. That I should have been searching for reasons behind why I was so suddenly clueless – no recollection of my own name, where I was, where I came from, why I was wearing a leather jacket – but instead, I only felt incredibly apathetic. Perhaps there was a tinge of curiosity somewhere there. But such was mostly shadowed by apathy.

The feeling of not caring enough to feel at all.

Despite not knowing the most basic of things I ought to, I could surprisingly place the feeling right away. Which was what occurred within approximately ten seconds. Every day, I noted, this was the routine. I would come to and this was almost the standard procedure to my day, similarly to that of waking up to a blank room. Surrounded by four white walls with neither trace of windows nor a door.

Hoseok.

If there was one thing that never failed to occur to me during these bouts of floating; of watching the world around me as if I were on a pedestal high above the ground; it was this name. Was it mine? I couldn’t tell. But it was there. Like a bright neon sign in my mind amidst the hazy darkness of a desert. Hoseok.

I couldn’t keep a good track of time, but so far, there had been a lot of new days in the empty white room.

The sound of laughter slowly eased in, seeping into my ears like a faint spray of water over a sponge on a hot day. It was very soft at first, but then the giggles escalated, and I looked up to realize the pair of little humans running directly towards me. Startled by the fact that they were most likely going to slam straight into me considering how engrossed they looked in their game of catch, my entire body jerked to life as if someone sparked a live wire against my skin. I leapt back a few steps, however the only thing that happened was the back of my knee jerking against something solid.

The children – thank goodness – had taken a sharp turn to the right before causing potential damage, and a wave of relief; save for the brief irritation; swept over me.

‘Yah, watch it, you punks!’

I called after them with the click of a tongue and a look most disapproving, however my reaction was only met with more giggles and the sound of sand crunching beneath plastic shoes.

Recalling the fact that I wasn’t able to recoil earlier, I looked beneath me. A pair of blue, ripped-up, denim-clad thighs greeted me and further down the shins, a pair of very dusty boots. They looked like the byproduct of having either simply been worn too much, or trudging through a desert. I began worrying if there was sand in them at the thought of it, yet before I could actually zip my foot out of one to check, I heard a voice. A voice that was so shrill and so screechy that I swore there was sand in the person’s throat rather than in my shoes.

‘Ahjussi…! You’re here again!’

It was a girl. And not just any girl. A girl who gave rise to the vicious urge within me to wipe a Kleenex straight across her face because her nose was constantly clogged with unsightly fluids and there were more often than not food particles littering her chubby face. I swear she was like this every day. Snot and crumbs. Snot and saucy remains. Snot and… snot.

I most likely cringed visibly at the sight of her. I could almost feel a sense of dread that came with her appearance, and quickly chose to ignore her, reaching for my shoes.

‘Ahjussi.’

The zips on the boots were small and chipped metal, which pinched my fingers and made them grow uncomfortably hot as I proceeded to remove the shoes.

‘Ahjussi.’

I successfully managed to pry out a single boot and flipped it over, shaking it about by the toe. Not a grain of sand fell out of it and somehow I felt a sense of disappointment.

‘Ahjussi!’

I was now forced to look at her. And the moment I did, it didn’t take long to see the cringe-worthy gleams of sweat and snot on her face, and equally shimmering dark eyes the girl had.

‘What?’ I clicked my tongue, slipping the boot on again. ‘Geez, you’d better stop calling me ahjussi. You think I’m old? Please. As if this face could belong to a middle-aged man.’

The girl’s bottom lip stuck out suddenly and I could immediately tell where she was going with this. The kid had solid antics, alright. And one of them was manipulating her shimmering eyes, snotty nose, thick dark eyebrows, and ratty brown hair that was twisted into pigtails far too high on her head to perform a stunt she didn’t quite call anything, but I knew would soon have a title.

‘Ahjussi, you like this place? Is this bench special? Did you get fired? Do you have a girlfriend?’

A gasp suddenly escaped the girl, and I could almost instantly see the new, however most familiar, finale thought that occurred to her. ‘Do you… go to my school?’

I stared at her for a long moment, feeling a vein somewhere at the back of my skull tick with tangible vexation. As many times as I had often awoken to obliviousness – a mind almost like a gravid vacuum of vacancy – the little girl’s questions remained with the likeness of an immortal mosquito. One that escaped the jaws of death in the form of clapped hands; a papery insect floating about with no fear of or intention of a splattered death. And such likeness was frightening at first. How I could not remember my name, age, the city I was in, or the language I was speaking, but could recall the small, stout, fleshy girl with shiny brown hair and snot-crusted nostrils who always asked the same (or similar) questions was rather dismal. Depressing, even, if that’s what I could call it.

‘No. I’m a young adult,’ I answered sharply, putting on my boot again. ‘And you’re a kid. There’s a difference between adults and—geez, just leave me alone, will you?’

It had often occurred to me that I may had been lying about my age. Judging by