The Green Chair

Allison Cho: “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.”

In between the shelves at the library, I found a moss-green leather chair. Its arms were made of varnished dark brown wood. It was so old, spending so many days putting up the weight of all those unwary people who dared to sit on that solemn-looking chair. As I encountered it while nonchalantly passing by those monotonous shelves like a scratched doodle on a stripped notebook, it was there—vividly standing out from its background. The chair didn’t even feel like an object. The encounter felt like meeting a being, an unknown existence, face to face.

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.