A book can hold more than one story.
A cigarette can carry more than one mood.
And a person can bring back more memories than we are ready to face.
Sometimes a book turns up by accident. A pack of cigarettes is bought without much thought. A person enters your life as if it had already been arranged somewhere beyond your control.
The book is still the same book. The stories inside it have not changed.
The cigarette is still the same cigarette. Its taste has not changed either.
The person is still the same person.
Only the feelings are no longer what they used to be.
There are times when even a good book sits unopened.
There are times when even a familiar cigarette is no longer something you want to smoke.
And even the closest people will one day have to part.
It is not that the book is no longer worth reading. It is that I do not want to be pulled once again into the emotions hidden in its pages.
It is not that I have quit smoking entirely. I just do not want to let the nicotine numb me again.
It is not that I do not think of that person. It is only that, even if you can return to the past, you can never return to the way things once were.
The book turned up the night before yesterday while I was sorting through my things. I remembered buying it when I was in the fourth grade of elementary school: Daewoo Mystery Horror Series: The Mystery of the Severed Hand. Back then I bought four books from the same series all at once. The one I remember most clearly was The Sound of the Piano at Midnight. That book scared me, even though I read it in broad daylight, in the middle of summer. After finishing it, I was terrified—but the more frightened I was, the more I wanted to keep reading. So I went back and read it again. This time, though, that old heart-pounding fear was gone.
Another book I found was Personal Manager. I read it in the second half of last year. But now I do not have the state of mind to open it again. To turn its pages would be to turn over old memories, and a person cannot keep living inside memory forever. A book is still only a book. In the end, it cannot take the place of a person.
Then there is the cigarette.
Hongyun used to be the brand I smoked regularly last year. There was happiness in it. There were moments of joy in it too. But all of that disappeared with the last cigarette, vanishing like smoke.
I had not planned to buy that brand again. But one day the brand I had only just gotten used to was not available, and without thinking I said the old name out loud. It was only after I walked out of the shop and opened the pack that I realized what I had done.
Habits really are hard to change.
Once you get used to one brand, trying to adjust to another feels strange. I had worked hard to get used to something new, but in the end it was only a way of deceiving myself. None of those things had ever really gone away. They had only been wrapped up for a while, hidden from sight.
If all of this were only a dream, then why does it still hurt after waking?
In a blur, I still remember the warmth beneath a cold moon, and the rainbow I once waited for through mist and rain. But what is gone is gone. You may be able to go back to where it happened, yet never back to what it was. Trying too hard to hold on only tangles your own steps. I could not keep hold of it, just as I could not keep hold of that snowy season last year.
I do not know how many more days it will take before I have gathered enough to trade for what I have lost.
People, after all… what can they do?