Another woman's story(illusion of fate)

Another woman's story(illusion of fate)1

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Chapter 1: The Swamp of Agony

The 3:00 AM air wrapped around her body like a damp shroud. The mountain roads of Jeju, blanketed by thick, heavy dark clouds, looked bleak and dismal, as if a torrential downpour would unleash at any moment. On a road completely devoid of streetlights, Hyeon-seo’s battered compact car staggered forward like a solitary shooting star.

Jeju’s signature low stone walls and gnarled windbreak trees cast grotesque silhouettes along the sharp S-curve road. The densely packed trees lining the edges of the fields seemed poised to swallow the path whole, completely cutting off any visibility beyond the winding bends. It was at that precise moment. A massive mass of light ripped through the pitch-black darkness, pouring directly toward her. It was a gargantuan heavy truck.

“Blare————!”

The deafening roar of the horn filled the car's interior. Instinctively, Hyeon-seo wrenched the steering wheel. With the violent screech of tearing tires, the car veered off the road. The rugged stone wall loomed right before her eyes. The distance between life and death was a matter of mere centimeters. Just an instant before kissing the stone wall, the car gasped to a sudden halt.

‘Death… If I were to die just like this, would this hollow sentiment vanish too? Would this meaningless life finally disappear? Living this futile existence is just so exhausting and draining…’

The moment a fleeting glimpse of death brushed past, a tidal wave of delayed tension paralyzed her entire body. The taut sensory threads of life snapped loose all at once, and Hyeon-seo slumped her head onto the steering wheel, powerless like a broken flower.

Unable to bear her dead weight, the blaring horn pierced through the desolate dawn air. It was less of a warning and more of a long, low howl of an ownerless beast stabbing the heart of the heavy night. The bitter, metallic sound scattering through the parched air mirrored the drifting, directionless nature of her isolation.

‘If only that incident five years ago hadn't happened...’

Fragmented memories flashed countlessly through her mind. They flickered past, over and over again.

‘Would my life now... have been normal...?’

With her forehead resting against the wheel, she remained frozen, as if she had become a taxidermied exhibit of herself. In this ambiguous space where the transient and the eternal blurred together, her senses retained only a few seconds of absolute silence.

‘Even so, I do not regret it. The emotions back then… Those feelings were never a lie…’

Yet the indifferent wheels of time kept turning, and soon, a faint dawn—like timid, crimson lips—began to bleed across the eastern sky. The horn that had shrieked so sharply through the night finally grew weary, its sound bending thinly over the mist and fading into the distant sea. Like someone’s final breath, only her sighs remained, sorrowful and transparent.

‘But it is an undeniable truth that the more time passes, the more confused I become about the emotions and choices I once believed were right.’

Silent tears streamed down around her tightly closed eyes.

‘I ponder the shackles placed upon us as human beings. The primal spark ignited when two separate worlds—a man and a woman—collide. Love… I was simply faithful to the animalistic senses and instincts that were the most honest voice within me. I merely surrendered to an irresistible pull and took a single step in the direction my heart pointed, yet the world brands it a sin.’

Even that burning passion she had believed to be the ultimate answer, and that fierce judgment of hers, were nothing more than a precarious tremor in the face of accumulating years. The deeper the love she once thought right became, the more this paradoxically suffocating confusion spread. Now, she stood thoroughly lost amidst the ruins of the convictions she had built.

‘If submitting to true emotions is a sin, is this suffocating isolation I endure now my penance? This pain and loneliness, seeping into my very bones, constricts me more sharply than if I had already crossed the threshold of death. Back then, I never realized that the withering of the soul is a far more brutal punishment than the decaying of the flesh.’

Just as a pale crimson line traced the edge of the eastern sky, a sudden tapping sound echoed against her window. Only then did she slowly open her eyes to look outside. Along with the knocking, a man’s urgent voice broke through.

“Excuse me… Excuse me. Are you alright?” “Honey, isn’t this dangerous? Shouldn’t we call 119?”

Startled by the unfamiliar presence knocking on the glass, Hyeon-seo sluggishly lifted her head. Through the moisture-streaked window, the anxious faces of a middle-aged couple flickered.

As she rolled down the stiff, jammed window, the humid dawn air rushed in alongside their pouring concern. The couple anxiously asked multiple times if it was a serious accident and if they should call emergency services immediately. But Hyeon-seo lacked the emotional capacity to even accept their goodwill. She merely uttered a brief, dry, and flat reassurance that she was fine.

‘Destined love… I had never even entertained the thought that such a thing actually existed. I believed humans were simply creatures driven by instinct, and so, 23 years ago, I married the first man I met right upon graduating from university.’

Did the kindness of strangers feel like an abrasive thorn instead? Met with Hyeon-seo’s unyielding refusal, the couple finally turned back with lingering reluctance and boarded their small truck.

When the roaring engine of the retreating truck completely dissolved back into the silence of the dawn, Hyeon-seo finally realized. She realized just how cold and empty the space left behind by a stranger's passing warmth could truly be.

‘And yet, five years ago, that very destined love—the kind I never thought possible—found its way to me.’

The warmth the couple left behind failed to thaw her frozen window. Instead, a denser fog of loneliness rolled over the road they had traveled, leaving Hyeon-seo completely marooned like an island in that bleak landscape. Once all the noise of the world receded like the low tide, nothing but her ragged breathing and the ghost-like ticking of the old car clock floated within the interior.

‘Twenty-three years ago, my only dream was to escape and gain independence from my home as quickly as possible. I didn’t know anything about love; I just wanted to flee a house ruled by an alcoholic father, so it didn’t matter who the man was. That was how much I hated my alcoholic father.’

She stared blankly down at her own hands resting on the steering wheel. It felt as though the fragments of her life, which she could neither grasp nor let go of, were slipping through her fingers like grains of sand. She was the one who had rejected rescue, yet now that she was entirely alone, a bitter wind seemed to howl through the hollow void in her chest.

This was not merely the aftermath of a near-accident. It was the massive cavity she had carved out within herself over long years of self-imposed exile, finally opening its mouth wide. Gazing into the bottomless abyss of that emptiness, Hyeon-seo endured the unfillable void of her heart, entirely devoid of tears.