Everything Doesn't Turn Out Right

One. If you pay attention, you'll notice that sometimes an unknown, piercing melancholy weighs down your heart and soul like stone. It feels as if someone has set fire inside your chest, burning you to ashes from within. You're laughing, working, eating, sleeping—doing everything you should—but deep inside, a fierce sadness is wreaking havoc.

This storm rages within you, yet no one outside can sense a thing. You can't even go to someone and explain what kind of sadness, what kind of pain you're enduring. There's no specific reason for it.

You'll never find a cause for this causeless melancholy.

Why does this happen?

If you think deeply enough, perhaps you'll understand that some old wound has left its mark on your heart—a scar that flares up from time to time, even after it has seemingly healed. You've forgotten, but your mind cannot forget.

Some old betrayal from a beloved, a cherished person lost forever, the broken fragments of some tender, carefully nurtured dream—perhaps these have left your heart cut and torn to pieces. Like putting bandages on a cracked eggshell, you patch together old sorrows and somehow manage to keep going, or at least pretend to keep things together, day after day.

No matter how much you pretend to forget, no matter how many times you slap on the label "everything's fine now," sometimes—in broad daylight, in the dead of night, or during some fading twilight—the bandage you've patched over your sorrow wants to come loose. The dried wound awakens, and in that awakened old injury, the familiar pain starts to throb again.

You're pretending that "everything's fine now," but in truth, nothing much has really healed yet. Everything doesn't actually get fixed. Some stains, like marks on pristine white cloth, never come out. Some scars, like the pockmarks of smallpox, never fade away. The lingering effect of certain pains never diminishes—not until death.

That's why, I suppose, sadness sometimes rises for no reason, and even on nights bathed in moonlight, the world seems pitch black. Apart from gastric pain or arthritis, sometimes in the middle of the night your chest erupts in agony, your breath catches and you feel like you're suffocating—just like that old flower in the garden that tried to bloom but couldn't, withered and fell before anyone ever saw it, before anyone even knew it existed. Just like that, no one can ever see your punctured heart from the outside.

When there's time to elaborate or opportunity presents itself, would anyone ever say: I'm doing well!


Two. "Time heals everything." . . . So much time passes with this hope, but nothing ever gets fixed.

Some wounds never heal, they remain raw forever.

Some scars never fade, they cling like chicken pox marks on forehead and cheek.

Actually, time doesn't fix anything—the turning of time only teaches us to adapt to circumstances.

What's done is done! There's no undo in life, but there are plenty of redo options!

In the end, people prefer to taste the options.