The Girl Who Wrote Loneliness Read Online Free

into my nose, cool and fresh. The woman brought me the paper from another table. She probably remembered me reading the newspaper after eating each day. The spot on the paper where her hand had touched carried the smell of her lotion. Her hospitality made me feel embarrassed for not answering her question and I quickly said, “I’m a writer.” Right at that moment, the woman’s face, on which had age spots settled across her cheeks like a map, brightened up.
    “Oh my, really? What an honor!”
    Honor? Overcome with shyness, I let out a quiet laugh.
    It was the first time that I had referred to myself as a writer to a stranger, to someone in an unfamiliar place . . .

    Mom.
    Mom’s dark eyes, like a cow’s. I had this thought for the first time that night. And it remains unchanged, then or now. How, even now, after raising us, her six children, Mom can still have such clear eyes. . . . There are times when Mom’s eyes push me deep into thought.
    It is early summer in my sixteenth year and on the night train, Mom’s dark eyes well up with tears. This is Mom’s second time riding the train to Seoul. A while back, Oldest Brother needed some papers for his college registration but for some reason hisletter arrived only a day before the papers were due. It would be too late if they were sent by mail, so Mom took on the role of courier. She got on the night train with the papers.
    The only thing on Mom’s mind was that she must deliver that night these papers, which her son needed the following day. And the only thing Mom knew about Seoul was that her son worked at the Yongmun-dong Community Service Center.
    Whenever she tells the story of her first visit to Seoul, Mom always says that there are plenty of good people in the world. There sitting next to me was this young man, about your brother’s age, see, so I took out the big envelope from my bag and said, the thing is, my son needs this tomorrow if he’s to start university, but I don’t know where to go. What am I to do? This young man, he got off with me at the station and although it was late at night, he took me all the way to the Yongmun-dong Community Center.
    Not even the taxi driver knew the way, but the young man asked around, here and there, and got me there. The building was dark, but the young man said, “This is it,” so I banged and banged on the locked door and your brother came out, and that young man, he went to such trouble bringing me there, but turned around just like that, before I could give him a proper thank-you, and was gone.
    Mom had handled her first trip to Seoul with such courage, but now, en route to take me to Brother, her eyes are filled with tears. Looking away from Mom’s teary eyes, I stare out at the dark outside the window, orange with the reflection of the hanbok . I stare at Cousin, sitting there like a single transplanted blossom of rose moss. Mom reaches out her arm and caresses my hair. Having already bid farewell to Aunt at the station, Cousin looks away from Mom and me.
    “You want some?” Mom takes out boiled eggs from her bag. I shake my head. As she accepts the peeled egg from Mom, Cousin takes out a book from her bag and hands it over to me to take a look.
    “What kind of book is it?”
    “It’s a book of photographs.”
    With bits of the hard-boiled egg on her lips, Cousin speaks to me in a low voice.
    “I want to be a photographer.”
    A photographer? I repeat her word. It occurs to me that the photographers I’ve seen in photo studios were all men. I turn to Cousin and say that the all the photographers I’ve seen are men.
    Cousin lets out a laugh and says, “Not someone who takes those kinds of photographs but these kinds of photographs,” as she turns the pages of the book she has placed on my lap, one after another. Each page Cousin turns to carries beautiful scenery. The desert, trees, the sky, the sea. When she arrives at a page, Cousin stops and whispers to me, Look at this. It is night, inside a