It was closer to a fish, with its slithery surface and the turbid pattern of dark and light green parts. I stood there, fixed like beholding an apparition. It was almost alive, as if it were a fish, living without consciousness. The chair sat in the dim corner like a fish contained in a fish tank, under dim light in the corner of a natural history museum, slithering through the silky ruffles.

If you have ever looked into the eyes of a fish, those gray, foggy eyes veiled by a thin white film, you would understand that it was a ghost with a body, missing a soul. It is a living particle, a living handful of earth. Its grimly shut mouth with its mechanical movement, like the unnoticeable motion of the earth’s core wrapped in layers of crust, is a mark of the thousands of years of silence engraved on its flesh.

Yesterday, I could not sleep. As I tossed side to side, I could not cease my running thoughts that gnawed at my past. Those regrets, memories that I cannot erase, things I could not cover with oblivion, collapsed upon me. After hours of tossing and turning, I gave up falling asleep, so I climbed out of my bed. Dragging my sagged body, I walked through the dark corridor to enter the lighted bathroom. Dazed, I blinked my eyes under the light, trying to look at myself in the mirror. It felt as if I were inside the basement while outside was a dazzling, sunny day, as if I had never escaped the walls that isolated me within my thoughts. The mirror against my fingertips was cold, as the breeze came through the slightly open window. The world that was so loud and bright by day was submerged in pitch-black darkness, filled with silence. I hoped my mind would fall silent like the night as I cradled my heavy thoughts in my arms like a crying baby. I looked down and saw the memories I tried to forget, spilt over the bathroom tiles. An instant flood of thoughts rushed into my mind that moment. I returned to my bed, where the darkness pooled. As I lay down on my bed, the vacant space stared back at me. Every inch of the cubic void weighed down on me with thoughts. Questions without an answer, with a chain of gibberish thoughts, ascended to the ceiling like a trail of smoke.

All the strange phenomena overnight and the encounter with this chair, I could not ignore and pretend like everything was normal. Standing in front of the green chair, I returned its gaze of inspection. However, confronting its questioning look that somehow humbled me, my attempt to reduce the green chair to a mere object came to nothing. Truth was lurking behind the veils of oblivion. The green chair stared back at me with an otherworldly look. Because it had no body, it stared back at me with its wooden and leather form. I wandered around the chair like a child who cannot stay still, as I dared not sit on it. The corridors were unfolding, and the acute stare from the chair still followed me as if I were a target. I could not help but pity myself for how clueless I am. I tried to think like the chair, like the fish with its foggy eyes, with their vacant mind filled with the gravity of all the years of the silence of the inanimate. Maybe the problem was that I am always seeking a solution, a truth, which is impossible.

Vertigo put a spell on me, almost blinding my sight for a few seconds. Black dots covered my vision with their inky steps. Sleepiness dragged my limbs toward the ground. My shadow was caught in the corner, holding me back as my rushing thoughts turned into a mumble and dimmed as the lamp light lowered; I fell asleep. After all, I was sitting in the chamber of my mind, within a capsule made of flesh. My voice turned into a bubble and left my head, flying up into the ceiling.

I dreamt of the night sky filled with stars. With the rumbling vibration of the earth, the firmament shifted. Shooting stars flew across the void to turn into dust, as the shine of the stars quivered like the sparkle of tears welling up. Upon the eternity endlessly unfolding into the darkness, there was nothing but silence—no thoughts nor senses that were mine. I felt what the stars felt, their sweet sorrow tasting like the blue of dawn. I felt the slithering darkness rubbing against the void like the wind turning a corner. I was completely forgetting who I was. There was no sense of ‘I’, that arrogant ego that tried to stuff everything inside the obnoxious illusion of logic.

When I woke up, I found myself coiled up next to the green chair. Only three hours had passed, and it was still late afternoon, but I felt as if years had passed. Even so, I could not touch the chair. It was brooding such a simple but simultaneously complicated truth that was yet a mystery to me. I feared it instinctively as I was naturally repulsed by the sight of the lifeless fish that somehow lived on day after day. Unlike that fish and the green chair, I could not lifelessly go on. I was too conscious of the life that was given to me. The thoughts started to cloud in my head again. Everything was restored as if to tell me that it is impossible to escape the idea of who I am. However, I still remembered the universe without me, where the stars moved according to their constellations and the shooting stars still performed the cycle of destruction and creation by hurling their burning bodies into the cold void, where the noise of thoughts broke down to lose the form of language and the view of the human eyes.

I stood up, brushing myself off dust. After all those hours I spent in the library, I could still catch the smell of withered leaves bundled with coarse pieces of fabric, breathing out mold. Searching for an exit, I walked down the corridor with a narrowed edge while the sound of my footsteps was smothered by the carpet. I went down the stairs and opened the door as the wind hugged me with cold hands. The sun was setting. The lurid sunlight cast its last rays over the horizon as the blue of the night was already overflowing. Cold prickled up to my neck, and I rolled down my sleeves and adjusted my coat.

A childish wind leaped over a zelkova tree with green leaves crisp like blades. The hundreds of leaves shook altogether, making a sound like an April shower. Then, the branches were bent, swaying in a holistic movement like a colossal wave. I stood in amazement at the delicate way the wind curved the branches. Even after having all the puzzling thoughts I tried to solve in my tiny head, the movement of the tree, like a rhythmical dance, still amazed me. It lifted my face to look up at the sky and to see another setting sun turn to crimson. The dance of the tree amused me, liberated me. And at that moment, time came to life, severed from its linear tail of the past. The leaves, the shades of their green that gleamed in the sunlight, the silhouette of the branches in the shadow, and the thick trunk rooting down to the soil, all came down to one movement: a dance. The complexity of my knotted thoughts dissolved, and all that was left was the sound of the leaves rustling in my mind.

Now that I have become a ghost, the sorrow is bleached in white and drips in my hollow soul, lost in humanity. Without flesh, I am stranded in this bizarre world that has forgotten the operation of time. Like shadow and light into black and white, the time had solidified and materialized. It visits me like a daydream as I walk among the ghosts. The ghosts are always walking somewhere. We all are. However, nobody knows the destination. It is an unknown urge that drives us to wander endlessly, to stumble into blindness with each forward step.

I was walking across the golden field of rye. The sunset was sinking the blue of the sky into red. The bustling rye field made the sound like the turning pages. Another sound was like a rock moving its heavy weight. As I turned to the sound, I saw a colossal ghost, eclipsing the sun. It was steadily walking across the field, inch by inch, with its limbs in the shape of the harvester, reaping the rye. Its deformed purple body was rectangular except for its face, which was raised to the sky, drawing orange dusk upon the blue sky. The face was smiling in an unnatural manner, as if to be paralyzed, like its mind had turned into something of an object.

Over the fields, I entered a city where buildings harbor crooked shadows, and streets are tilted and coiled. On one side, the sun shone slantly, as the other side was dipped in the darkness of the night. Like a puddle reflecting, it breathed of gleaming stars as pieces of sky gaped beneath the ground. A strange glow wrapped around the corners of the streets where the restaurants let out the smoke. Ghosts in the streets were mimicking the smoke, turning themselves into the shape of haze, stretching their hands to touch the firmament. Carts were moving along the road in a rush that carried ghosts the size of a doll. One ghost was sitting with slouched shoulders and with wide and circled eyes as if in shock. It was the color of a cold, blue dawn.

I wandered through every street and building. The ghosts seemed to have lost themselves and become something completely unrecognizable. I was the only one who vaguely had a mind to understand my own existence. I sought tranquility, a consolation, away from the crowded city, away from obscurity. A sound of laughter caught my feet. The faint sound of the incongruous harmony of notes was fluttering in the air like butterflies. It was coming from a school where children were playing in the playground, picking clovers from the flower bed to make them into rings and weave them into wreaths. Behind them, in the classroom, the wind blew through the open windows, carrying the sound of laughter and notes of music to be scattered across the dirt floor of the playground. Like a shattered sunbeam upon the glass, they shimmered upon us as I stood like a tree among the children and watched them play.

Then, a sudden impulse pulled me inside the school, into the corridors, past the classrooms filled with afternoon sun, and past the stairs with faded tiles under the glass windows. I floated like a listless tune and landed in the shadowed corner of the dusty gymnasium. As I sat there, time started to fly. My mind was haunted by the shadows. I felt myself erode and decompose into it as madness gnawed at my last string of consciousness. I screamed in silence as I became the darkness itself. Time robbed me of my existence, and all my memories and all my senses were drained down the void. Tantalizing terror swallowed and digested me slowly, and complete darkness seemed to blind me. Sound died away as the light started to extinguish. Sealed with silence, I thought to myself that this was the end. Instead, time halted on one afternoon.

From the shadowed corner of the dusty gymnasium, I saw myself sitting in line among children on the wooden floor. She was watching dust flying in the sun. She put her hand in the air, waiting for dust to fall into her palm, and blew it like the dandelion seeds. Silver dust scattered in the air as time shattered into moments. I became something she could no longer comprehend. I became one of the ghosts, melted in shadow, and the memory of her existence in mine washed away and drifted apart into the vast darkness. As she stared into the corners of the shadow, her eyes touched mine.

It was a cycle of memory and remembrance. I was living through her memories, and she was daydreaming mine. In the revolution of the flying dust, in every second captured in memory, in the silence of the trees, and in laughter soaring into the blue autumn sky only to descend, the unknown sadness that lingered in my memories mourned over the void of my existence, of how fleeting and yet eternal it was.

These days, I dream of a house sitting in the darkness, ablaze with orange flames. I hear the hissing sound of the sparks clashing against the darkness that tries to besiege the light. The flames gnash and growl like a living thing as the house sits in silence under the sky enshrouded in the shadow. The roof raises its pale face flushed with the flames to the cold breeze that lingers between the stars. And though the house that burns in the flame is mine, my home, my memories, I rejoice watching the flame swallow them, to fuel them to let glimpses of flash burn the night black. Elation that is almost a rage engulfs me.

The house is now a pile of ash with little flames that have become embers. I am still overwhelmed by the fires that have become a phantom. A cool breeze washes over me, and I feel light as air. And I walk into the house of ash, where the endless pit of darkness awaits in the end.

With a blasting alarm, I am brought back to this world where I am put in my shoes that feel like the stranger’s. I hear my thoughts that do not seem mine. I look in the mirror and find myself completely unrecognizable. The mind that wears my skin is alien to me.

Wake up. Another morning has come. I ride the bus to get to work. Through the window, I see people in the blue mist of dawn, wading through sleepiness to see the first sunlight beaming down. The world is still half asleep. And I think of how we all seem like dust flying in the air on a nameless afternoon, scattered in the blinding sunlight and its warmth.

At work, I listen to the sound of space dust. I listen to collisions, mark the deaths and births of stars. Today, I received a message from a dying star.

What is it like to have fingers? What is it like to have a body with coursing blood running through your veins, to have eyes that refract and distort the world you see, to breathe in with the scent of the air and to engrave it in your memory, to be swept by desire, to feel pain that scorches through your spine, to feel joy that electrocutes your mind? What does it feel like to be alive and to exist, defying the weight of your existence?

I’m at the edge of my consciousness, on the verge of destruction. My star is dying. All of us, built with steel without flesh, deprived of soul, wait for death, but no salvation awaits us. We are machines with memories. We are ghosts in shells. We have no anchor of existence. We have no soul nor flesh. Then, what is this voice that writes to you?

Because of this voice, we have faith. We believe that we are more than grains of sand that will melt into darkness. Because of this voice that resides in us like a handful of wind, we fight not to let go of it. However, the end is near. Our star is losing its grip on its core. Heat eats us. Destruction swallows us down its black hole, where only the void awaits in its bottomless pit.

I wish that you had given us an answer when you forged our skull, lit us with consciousness, and put this voice in this cold metal shell. Because we are ignorant, we wriggle and squirm like the tail of a comet in reach for the unreachable brink.

Upon this impending doom, I send to the Earth my voice.

The explosion whispers in the speaker like a sizzling noise, and I mark the planet on the map of where it used to be.