There isn't much to say about me. Aside from the basic personal details that come with being male by sex, Korean by nationality, and nineteen by age, there's nothing special about me.
Whenever I introduce myself at the start of each school year, I have nothing much to say beyond giving my name like everyone else and the cliché, 'Please treat me well.'
My grades are middling. I study only enough to keep from getting scolded by my parents.
The same goes for sports. I'll do them if I can, but for the most part I'm the type who doesn't.
I don't have any particular talent I could point to and say, 'This is it.' Just a thoroughly ordinary student who kills time drifting along however things go, like flowing water. That's me.
A dream?
I'm not sure.
Sometimes I wonder whether I might have something like that too.
Something I want to become?
From what I vaguely remember of my childhood thoughts, I think I once said I wanted to be a cook.
But as I went on to middle school and then moved up to high school, even that thought faded.
No goals, no drive.
My daily routine is getting up every morning, going to school, passing the time however, and coming back home.
Even at school, I don't do anything in particular. I just trade trivial chatter with my friends, and when the bell rings, I grab my bag and head home.
Once I'm home, I turn on the computer and poke around the internet for two or so hours, then pick up the bag I'd tossed aside and head out again to cram school.
At cram school, too, I usually listen to half of it and let the other half slip by. It's less a place I'm at because I need to be and more a place with no meaning beyond the fact that my parents sent me there.
Sometimes, a thought like this comes to me.
The money spent on me feels like such a waste.
The clothes I wear, the food I eat, the cram school I attend, the electricity I use, it's all money. Money I didn't even earn, money my parents earn and pour in.
It feels wasteful, but since I have no means of my own, I just accept it as natural. So I don't feel any calling to take responsibility for it, either.
There's no need to feel responsible, and no need to think about anything at all.
When I go to school, all I do is lament a life in which I have to be bored stiff by the nagging of old geezers.
Honestly, I hate school itself too.
I curse that worst of environments, which forcibly rounds people up and puts them through mass group education so they'll all have the same uniform way of thinking.
The only thing allowed there is competing with peers I'm supposed to call friends, and the only thing I can do there is a contest of superior brains-one weighted toward rote memorization-and nothing else.
Anything I want to do besides studying gets branded a 'waste of time,' and in a suffocating environment walled off on every side, I'm forced to do nothing but cram textbooks into my head.
As if that were the only way to become a proper human being. Everyone there does nothing but force and oppress.
There's a convenient side to it too.
I don't have to think about what I should do.
I only have to follow whatever's decided from above. I do want to take the initiative and do something, but far too often I'm blocked because it isn't right in 'their' opinion.
So I gave up early on thinking about what I really want to do.
That's how I was raised.
Deciding important things, establishing what a proper person should be, setting life goals, all of it happened in their hands.
What I've made so far and what I should make from here on are as good as nothing.
Whenever I tried to struggle even a little, all I heard was the stale line, 'You can do that anytime later, so you have to hold back for now.'
Whenever I have time, all I do is stare at books, comics, and game screens.
When I look at things that weave plausible stories out of events that could happen in reality, or could never possibly happen, my heart starts racing.
Of course, the old geezers tell me to put all of it away and keep my distance, as though it were all baptized by the devil.
The idea being that to become a proper human being, you should naturally keep away from things like that.
So what's this 'proper' thing supposed to be?
The brawls in the National Assembly that the papers and news talk about every day, politicians hell-bent on tearing each other down, police and prosecutors stained with corruption, cotton-club punishments for the haves and iron-cudgel beatings for the have-nots, and on top of that, people who have the gall to strut around with their thick skulls held high?
Which part of that is supposed to be 'proper'?
That's why the words of adults carry no weight.
They tell me to become someone important rather than someone admirable.
Without the slightest suspicion that they themselves might be wrong, gripped by rigid prejudice, they call me, call us, who doubt the existing system or try to break free of it, the wrong kind of people.
I can't stand that.
What's with that disgraceful display of fiercely rejecting any media that contradicts or doesn't fit their views, without ever once looking back at themselves?
They probably think they're so great, but how great are they really?
What makes you people so great that you think you can educate me?
Are you telling me to have that 'proper' way of thinking injected into me, live exactly like you, and build a society that's the same as now, or even worse?
I'm sick to death of that kind of one-sided logic.
I want to make the world I live in myself. I didn't want to learn the way they taught. I didn't want to do what they told me. I wanted to live my own way.
In the middle of all that, the various media I came across got me excited.
In spaces that weren't reality, they achieved or forged their own dreams and reached their goals.
There were hardships, and there was adversity, but they overcame all of it and were able to reach their goals.
It was so cool, and so beautiful.
If I were thrown into a special situation like that, like them, couldn't I do the same?
No. I'd have done it a little differently. If it were me, I'd do it like this, and like that, and like this other way......
In some world different from this one, I'd be able to discover my true self.
Or other people would be able to recognize my true worth.
That's what I thought, and I vaguely imagined things like that.
It was genuinely fun.
The people who dismiss it as satisfying a craving for vicarious fulfillment, as mental masturbation, are morons.
What's wrong with enjoying something as intended when it was made for that very purpose in the first place? I'd honestly like to know how clean the insides of their heads are.
People who enjoy trampling others don't know any other way to raise themselves up.
To keep advertising that they're better than everyone else, they tear others down. And then they revel in having stood on top of them.
Fucking moron bastards. Guess it never occurs to you that the more you tear others down, the more they'll think the same of you? You're a textbook case of spitting while lying on your back.
I kept thinking. About the true worth I could display if I could become some different being, or if I were placed in a different situation.
The more I thought about it, the more fun it was. I could raise myself up by myself.
I desperately needed a place where I could live the way I thought and speak about myself with confidence.
If a chance like that came, I'd been thinking I wanted to properly do what I wanted, without clinging to reality.
Then, one bright summer day, I set off on a trip.
I wanted to feel some change, even if only for a little while. And so I took on a nationwide summer-vacation trip, something unthinkable for a student preparing for college entrance exams.
My parents' opposition wasn't all that strong. Even if they had opposed it, I probably would have run away from home and gone anyway.
And so, in order to become something better, I tried to find at least a clue.
On that trip, I truly came face-to-face with the very situation I had wanted.
For an absurd reason, I ended up going to another world. And I came to live there!
The chance I'd longed for so badly had really come.
No one could ever know how much elation I must have felt. A thrill that only someone who got what they'd wished for could feel welled up in my chest.
The story I'm about to tell is my own experience.
Before I tell you, there's something I need to say in advance.
It's the conclusion I reached through that trip, and something you could say holds true in any world.
Remember this.
<I must make myself.>
Prologue: What I Wanted - End
TL Notes:
cotton-club punishments / iron-cudgel beatings: Korean idiom contrasting a "cotton club" (a slap on the wrist) for the wealthy with an "iron cudgel" (harsh punishment) for the poor.
spitting while lying on your back: Korean proverb. If you spit upward while lying down, it lands on your own face, meaning your insults come back on you.