The other day I told someone who I was for 90 percent of high school.

I used to only deck out in plaid shirts, an Oakland Athletics hat with the bill flipped up which was labeled “StellA,” I only wore pants (the skinniest), and my piercings mattered a lot to me. My hair was always cut really short and it bleached blonde or some unnatural color. 

I never wore make-up, girly clothes and shoes made no sense to me and headphones were attached to my head outside of classes.

That was a normal day.

He said it was hard to believe and that it was a far cry from tights and miniskirts. 

Bumping into people you don’t normally see from high school creates a dense air of nostalgia. That brief few minutes of conversation, you get the gist of their lives since the last time you saw each other. You remember what they used to look like, and you compare their past selves to what you’re looking at now.

“Wow, she really let herself go. She used to be in better shape and I thought she was really pretty,” I thought. 

Then you reflect upon yourself. It’s so easy to sum up your past in your head and while it’s not instantaneous, everything still pieces together pretty quickly. Past events and choices were either good and bad - you smile or wince at the thought of them.

Next, you think about why… Why did you change everything you were used to? I did to try to win back someone. I must admit. Did it work? For a short while.

It jumped out at me. I realized I liked looking feminine once awhile. That it’s nice to not have your sexuality constantly questioned because of your everyday attire. That it felt pretty damn good for dressing nice on occasions that didn’t just include parties and holidays.

However, I felt good before. 

I liked being straight-edge. It wasn’t self-proclaimed, but I had a morality that wasn’t interested in smoking, drinking and promiscuity. 

I liked playing games into the morning daylight and staying home without worry of hanging out with friends or dating. 

At least not everything was lost. If you have a good sense of yourself you learn to keep things and qualities that are important to you. That changes are going to happen and that’s perfectly fine.

Everything goes through phases.

Just remembering all of the times you have let me down brings tears to my eyes, and a putrid taste forms in my mouth. My heart murmurs — it doesn’t beat, it quietly cries for help because it drowns when I think about it.

Your mistakes and the times you threw me out the door for bullshit reasons I overlooked them because I want the bigger picture. I still do.

Your actions are contradictory to what you’ve said, but I don’t care. I just hope for better things to happen.

I spent massive amounts of money on you and it’s been forever since I personally didn’t have to pay for one single thing. I don’t care. Foolish, I know, but money doesn’t matter to me — especially when I use it to have a good time or spend it on you.

All the essays I wrote, the pictures I drew, the favors I’ve done, money I let you borrow… It’s ok, I don’t need payment for them. I never did, I did them because you asked for my help and I would do anything for you. I do them because I love you.

I get mad, sad and irritated a lot of the time, that is true. Most of the time it’s never really your fault. Actually it’s a lot of other things, and sometimes you annoy me but that’s not it. I don’t mean to channel it that way, but its that or eating. You know that. Even when you do, I just inhale the insensitivity you’re emitting. If it’s on purpose or you’re honestly unaware, I don’t know. Either way, it scours my lungs and boils my blood to where I react unwillingly coy and rude. I’m in disbelief because it’s almost instinctive — It’s a protective reflex when my feelings are hurt.

Never once did I deny it, but to call it a “routine” isn’t fair.

In transitive property then this whole thing we’re in is a fucking “routine.” If so, what’s the goddamn point?

There isn’t even a real issue, at all, but at least talk to me. Make me feel that I can come to you with anything and you’ll do your damn hardest to comfort me.

I think that’s all I ever really wanted.

I don’t need absolute reciprocality because that’s shallow and materialistic. I’m one of those people that believe love is more important than a pair of new shoes. I just want to be loved without feeling like I’m asking for it.

I can’t even say this without getting a response that isn’t “I don’t feel like talking right now.” The omission of having this particular conversation pains me, but I leave the topic and you alone. At that point, I just lie in my bed, and I am faced in the direction where the window is. There isn’t much to look at but dry grass and a road of cars that go faster than the speed limit.

The only voice I have is a digital one, and knowing that I still won’t be listened to.

I woke up to the occasional stomach ache and the lingering heat my house has. My brother signals that the new day has arrived because he was rustling around preparing for summer school. I checked the time, and it was only 5:58 am. 

While groggy and sort of annoyed just remembering bits and pieces that’s has happened in the last few days, it soon became over looked as my brother asked yet again to turn on a film he was watching on Netflix. I concurred with the idea and he then put “I Saw the Devil” on.

I’m actually pretty happy he did.

—

“I Saw the Devil” is a South Korean movie that was released in 2010, has been shown at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, that only had limited release in the United States. 

The film followed the direction of Kim Ji-woon, and starred Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik.

It is a shame that so many few theaters played this movie because it was immensely good. The thriller keeps you on a ride of surprise, fear and disgust until the ending credits where you see Lee Byung-hun’s character, Soo-hyun, break down in tears from what had happened.

The plot of the movie has seeped through the cracks of a thriller/horror film most of us are used to.

The psychotic Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) kidnaps and brutally kills a woman within the first five minutes of the film. He cuts her into pieces and scatters her body. There was a search for her, they find her decapitated head in a marsh.

Soon-hyun is some sort of secret agent, and his late fiance was the daughter of one of Soeul’s Police squad chiefs where he got files on men capable of murdering a young woman. He proceeds to find each of one of them. Violently punishing them, before moving onto the next scumbag.

It doesn’t take the agent long to figure out that Choi’s character is the murderer of his wife, after he stumble upon the man’s torture room. He picks up his wife’s wedding ring in a gutter that is covered with blood. 

Angry, Soon-hyun desires for revenge for his fiancee, and he makes it his mission to make it happen. Kyung-chul had the job of a taxi driver and he was asked to bring a bunch of school girls home. How terrible does that sound? It made me cringe at the idea of what could happen next. The police started to catch on that something was going on when all these pervert/murders are being brutally beat upon that Kyung was next.

The setting within the film soon becomes dusk as the creepy taxi driver ties the girl up and prepares to get ready to rape her in a greenhouse. He is then paused by hearing a male voice call out his name. Soon-hyun appears and they begin fighting. Kyung-chul goes at the man with a sickle and kitchen knife but it proves no good when Soon-hyun incapitates him with plastic from the greenhouse. In act of anger he begins to start smashing his head into a rock and almost picks up a rock to end his life.

Yet, he reasserted himself thinking about his plan, and inserts a tracking device, the shape of pill for him to swallow. The killer wakes up laying in a pit with an envelope of cash lying on his chest.

It would seem that this guy can’t go anywhere without making disaster come, or running into other psychotic men. The scene soon after he is picked up by two other psychopaths pretending to be a taxi driver and a mere passenger. Kyung-chul realizes that these guys are not innocent at all and on instinct takes a knife out and stabs the driver in the neck before proceeding to start knifing the guy in the back who also has a weapon. Blood spews all over the car and after it crashes he throws all three bodies, including the one in the trunk — the real taxi driver near a river.

Pleads from the late fiancee’s family doesn’t even seem to matter to him as he got out of his car to stop Kyung-chul and his demented cannibal buddy that offered him shelter.

It’s a real dark game of cat and mouse — Soon-hyun encounters the killer and severely hurts him each time, letting him go to continue on the nightmare the man has brought upon himself for killing his lover. However, while watching this, we can see that Soon-hyun is becoming a monster himself by continuing on his plans. 

The movie is sick, bloody and the theme of revenge is pungent and clear. It easily would be a cult classic. The direction of the film takes a course that most of us don’t see, a cop goes bad because as he described, “There feels like a heavy stone pressing down on my chest, and I want him to feel the same.” ((Or something like that, don’t quote me))

Kyung-chul tells the man, as he’s tied up in his house that nothing he has done to him means little. He tells him that he has won, after just before pleading for his life. Soon-hyun leaves a new transmitter next to him as he’s tied up and is forced to hold a rope with his mouth to stop him from being killed from his own guillotine. 

Kyung-chul’s mom, dad and son comes to his house poking around it to find him. He hears them and tries to call out to them to not open the door, as he holds onto a rope with his mouth to keep it shut. His family doesn’t hear him trying to resist, and they kept persisting to yank it open, and once it does, the blade falls and his head rolls into the doorway. The family start screaming in the site of the freshly decapitated body and Soon-hyun heard the commotion on headphones as the transmitter recorded everything. 

The director did a good job depicting this. This movie pretty much sums up the anger someone can harbor after something so sinister can happen. Or, it’s just a really good movie. The story, while it’s linear in it’s timeline, if we were only looking at that. What could of happened is that it took Soon-hyun the whole movie to find the killer, but it only took him 20 minutes to. Instead, what has happened here is that viewers are on a journey with both characters and seeing the chaos that the both of them creates in each scene.

We cannot deny it, there are some people that would really want to inflict this much revenge on someone, but rationality, the law, and humanity has stopped many of us to do so. 

“Revenge is for the movies.” 

My jacket pocket resonates from vibration. The indication of a text message that soon sent my body in a shiver after reading it. Ignoring it doesn’t seem to help because messages like that have been made me cold in a sort of fear. Although, that might not be the right word to describe it.

I’m still shivering because of it. The back of my neck feels haunted, and thoughts of regret pops into my head instantaneously. 

Why does my chest hurts? It’s probably guilt, the kind that just sinks into your soul because you know you said something or do something and never went through with it. 

“Liar liar pants on fire Liar liar pants on fire,” is what the text reads, and maybe I was lying about it. 

What I said at that the time, I don’t know if it was out of inexperience or I actually meant it when I ended it…  ”I would like it if we would be still friends.” 

Severing ties seems so much easier and pain-free, but I thought even with that said it wouldn’t make much difference. You know, I was never good at the relationship thing to begin with. The only thing I do know, is that most of the time, everything felt wrong.

Other than feeling kind of spooked, I get passive aggressive, especially thinking about what happened. If I’m a liar then you’re a jerk-off. During the time, it wasn’t abnormal for me to get the feeling of being talked down to and I retained it all the times I felt that way. Thinking about all makes me want to yell at him for  being a fucking asshole. 

Overall, those two months is almost like a blur to me now. There wasn’t anything I remembered as being loving or happy from it, he gave me this bullshit that being happy together all the time isn’t love, and that we could of helped each other creatively. That he didn’t want whatever we had to be blanketed from the securities of typical relationships. 

None of that makes any sense to me, no one can be happy all the time. People are not robots. A security blanket? All right you got me there, relationships do that, but each person and their respective partners deal with that — so how would know what’s really “typical” or not? In this modern age, we’re still learning what’s normal and what not. 

To me, it was typical. The short, brief fuzzy connection between two people that just did not work out. End of story.

I wish it was that easy.

I feel as if I was ripped apart by some mad man. There isn’t a doubt in my mind, that who ever he is did a sloppy job at stitching me back together. Yeah, yeah, but I realize… I know… It’s my fault for even allowing that to happen, right?

There is so much that I have to do. However, at this moment, I cannot process anything but how drained I feel. My body hurts and I’m dehydrated. It sucks that I feel so damn shitty. It’s especially terrible that I felt like this while hanging out with someone. I have to… catch up, catch up, catch up. With the times, with the work, with the people. However, never did I think being introverted was a problem. However, yesterday I soon understand how it can be. I think I am too quiet around people I shouldn’t have to be. I think it makes me harder to keep as company, and it sucks because I’m tired of chasing people away.

So, is that why you pursued me, you bad guy? No… That’s not it, is it? An antagonist doesn’t care about what his victim is thinking or feeling unless it fully applies to him. You’re just a sick bastard, right? RIGHT?!

…

… . .

…

This library contains strangers. I see some of their nearly expressionless faces look at me. I cannot possibly know what they’re thinking because I do not have the ability to read minds. Best bet is, is that they cannot read my mind either. I know that they don’t have x-ray vision either. None of them will be able to look through my black pea-coat, and what’s under it. They don’t know that my body has been mauled by a medical incision knife. My fellow peers can’t see the white tee-shirts I used to wrap my wounds that will probably will become open again from frantic movement. They just don’t know.

Hey mad man, did you find what you were looking for? Did my insides tell you the story that you hoped for? Or, were you disappointed that all you found was ugly looking liver and a noisy, acidic stomach? You’re pretty disappointed, right? There’s nothing spectacular about me.

I am just a human and you are just one too.

Shame on you for doing such a disgusting deed. Shame on me for not telling anyone about it.

It’s getting colder — it is the indication that winter is almost here. Good thing this frosty weather will help me warm up to you. Although, the goosebumps won’t ever stop. The skin will change in texture whenever it feels your touch, or the idea of it. The sensation is warm and inviting; it keeps me awake and I feel more alive and active than I ever felt in a long time. I shut down and come back to a more conscious state when I feel the most comfortable.

Your ability to make me feel warm is more than the heavy breathing we share during the moment. Sharing such privacy and intimacy covers my body with a tingling feeling of self-worth. It just feels so… so… instinctive and natural. Am I wrong to admit that?

I have been living in a transparent, encased world; I felt a good amount of safety in this solitude that I accepted. Seeing my reflection in the glass was a satiable amount of company for me. There’s no room for egotistical thoughts when you’re fine with yourself, alone. You came into this glass box on your own account; I want to know for certain you are willing to adventure this place and that you will not turn away so abruptly. Maybe even after awhile, the both us will break this case and find one we can both share complete contentment in.

I carry immense doubt though. This dark, lonely place shelters me, and I can share my feelings openly in its confined space. I know with utmost confidence that it won’t make me feel unintelligent or pass a judgment that will make me feel weak. I’m getting better… It will take some more time for me to obtain that level of confidence with you. Even with the desire to feel your warmth sending me in an euphoria, the thought of getting hurt negates the positives sometimes. It’s not your fault. I don’t want to seem so skeptical and quiet; I realize it is very off-putting. However, it is a defensive trait that I have that I feel is necessary for my survival —for my heart.

Quiet, quiet, quiet. Shh.

Hush now, you’re beginning to sound cold-blooded. The reptilian description is more than some metaphorical way of speaking.

That’s what you are, minus the scales and lucid amber eyes.