To call someone’s name is strange.
Suddenly, a vague image of that person comes up in an empty space.
I can’t clearly see it or hear its voice.
However, the memories come and go one after another, like an evolving lamp.
These fragments continue endlessly without any connection.
A glimpse of the back, a smile on the face full of trust when it looks back,
The smooth movement of fingertips.
The gentle voice and long eyelashes.
Those memories awaken like falling dominoes, all scattered randomly in time and place.
Deviating from countless other memories, those vague images come together and gradually and consistently into clear focus.
Then they completely dominate my brain,
As if other memories had never existed.
Other memories are blocked from exit.
I become obsessed with the memory of the one person, forgetting time and place.
It takes over my brain and erases my sense of self.
I’m lost and become the other.
Losing my substance, I feel like a wrecked ship abandoned on rough seas, and my soul drifts among the waves of the unknown.
Like the soul of a dreaming person leaving their body and wandering through a dark wilderness.
At times my soul crawls like a snake, smelling the fragrant violets blooming quietly in the dark, damp, overgrown grass, crosses winding cold streams flowing with faint sounds,
Through a valley floor filled with decaying animal carcasses in a vast, dry and rough desert.
Then, suddenly, it soars into the sky like an eagle with keen eyes searching for prey from high above, and then plummetes down, discovering the majestic flow of a waterfall cascading down the golden-hued mountain slope at sunset, raising a mist of water.
Not even knowing where I am, I remain silent, half dozing.
But the person in the dream plays God with me.
It invades and reviels the hidden darkness of my memories that were deeply supressed and forgotten years.
Feeling embarrassed, I cannot do anything but watch.
But there’s a part of me that peeking it in anticipation.
As if knowing it, the person opens small doors here and there.
One after another, it pull out also my secret drawers.
The drawers are filled with tiny memories like dark pebbles and shells.
Suddenly they shine forth like vibrantly colorful jewelry packed closely together.
And from there they spill out one after another on my threshold, filling the entire floor.
Each of these sparkles is connected to individuals and places.
But the memories revealed by this person are detached from them and it disposes as it will.
Confined memories were freed from a dungeon, forming a new structure.
It correlates the past and the future, which creates a new meaning.
The person changes the meaning of my memories.
And I accept what it does.
Calling someone’s name enchants me and I’m mesmerized.
How is it possible?
How could I myself yield so easily to someone?
However, it is exactly what the other is.
It is not a gust of fresh spring wind, blowing through one moment,
Or neither a hideous storm which we wait for it to pass couching down.
The other is neither my phantasy, nor a creature we can manipulate as we want.
It is life-sized me and I myself is the other.
The other exists like I exist.
If we deny it, the whole world would immedietly vanish like forgotten dreams.
But not every other can govern me like that.
Most people slip through my existence and tiptoe away from me.
They are not others, but just strangers.
However, the other is always there, right in front of me, no matter where I am.
I exist like the other exists.
If we have nobody to call, I will be unsubstantial.
The world would fade out, the ground starts to sink with a roar, the sky breaks into pieces in the dark.
There would be amorphous pitch-dark space I cannot find any piece of dream I indulge in.
To encounter someone is a mystery.
Nobody knows how we come upon someone, who can be my other.
Something between both keeps flowing like groundwater, penetrating through the bedrock.
The explosively powerful stream cannot be held back.
The torrent is just my life.
Even after the person goes away, the water continues to flow deep within.
We live by the vein. We are made of others.
I say the name and the person arises indubitably inside me.
It is more than real, while the reality fades sometime out.
It’s mine, not someone else’s.
The fortuitous bodily encounter among countless people is certainly only one-time,
and a miracle revelation.
but is not reliable enough to rely on.
The body transforms and ceases to exist.
That’s the way of the world.
Calling someone’s name is beyond them.
It evokes eternity.