“We Talk With Our Eyes.”


Apathetic eyes extinguish a cigarette and the hope of this bleeding heap lying on the floor. With a “pshhhhhh”, the half-burnt cigarette is rubbed in the wound on his back. The cut, covered with magenta blood mixes with the hoary fragments of asphalt. From his eyes to his chin and down the length of his short, muscular body, tears, the so-called most abstract form of human emotions, roll down. His screaming deafens my ears and gives me empathy. The three high school smokers are giggling like insane homicidal maniacs. They are drawing a constellation on the bleeding guy’s back with the ash of the cigarettes. Their swift breathing betrays their excitement. Their screaming, high-pitched voices make me feel nauseous. Their pompous eyes look down at mine revealing their superiority over my inferiority. Manipulated by the rancor, my mind plays a hundred scenes of me killing them. I imagine holding a sharp stone and striking their heads until my eyesight blurs because of their blood on my face. Until their eyes lose their focal points, I hit as hard as I can. I put a cigarette on their bleeding scars to stop the bleeding. Like a plastic bag flying, then getting caught under a car on the street, I want to assure them of their futile existences in this world. However, this only happens in my fantasy world. The reality is harsh. I am so threatened by their cruelty that I lose my nerve to stand up for my friend who is bleeding on the floor. My friend is no more than a red carpet for them to step on in their glory. My consciousness gives me a sense of guilt, “I need to help him.” At the same time, the feeling of betrayal loosens my fist. He is a villain, the cause of unfortunate incident in my life. He took advantage of me using my innocence in buying cigarettes. He drags me down to the road of disobedience, which will leave me only regrets in the end. Confusion abruptly dominates my mind.
“Is he necessary or beneficial in my life? Should I follow rationality or sensitivity? Am I rationally making decision if I help him since he eventually helped me in the end? Am I too callous if I ignore his need of my help. He had caused me a world of troubles before he finally lent me a hand.”
Fearing his need of my help, I feel everything around me come alive. Confusions render my mind unstable and make me more emotional. I feel the penetrating stare from my bleeding friend lying on the heartless floor.
I look at him. He looks back at me. I am disappointed at him. He knows it. I had believed in our friendship. He had wanted to share his view of resisting authority. I walk toward him. He waits for me. I stand in front of him, undecided. He lies on the floor. I shade him. He now feels comforts, yet I feel guilty. He believes in me, but I am a distorted hero. I make a somewhat desolate grimace. He smiles. His smile reminds me of my guiltiness. I now admit the guiltiness and stare those three seemingly homicidal guys straight. In an awkwardly confident voice, I clench my fist and shout at them, “This is enough!”

Looking straight at the back of the head in front of me, my eyes do not move. The long cynical stares stop my breath for a second. Unlike my stationary eyes, my fingers resist immobility and scratch my right thigh slowly. As the second finger reaches lower to scratch my knee, “Whoop!” The gigantic man pulls his hat, on which “Marine” is written, low to look serious and gives me a cavalier glare. That gorilla pounding its chest threatens me. He reveals his thoughts, “Stop moving!” My eyes shrink, and one drop of sweat creeps down my back under my shirt. This spiritual education uniform shirt gets wet so easily, showing everyone that I am wincing under my teacher’s threatening gaze. However, the dominating silence of the classroom chokes me. I can’t open my eyes properly. This run-down room looks like an archaic gas chamber where smog suffocates me. The ignorant Minister of Education has a delusion that through this mandatory spiritual education retreat for local public school students in Korea, he can make us all like Gandhi. Not knowing what their intentions are, I am just following the militaristic teachers’ commands: standing in a straight line, not even moving my eyes, and not making any sound. I feel kidnapped; my hand and mouth are manacled; I am dragged to an unknown destination. As no one among the 300 students is standing up for his or her freedom of expression, movement, or communication, I am a puppet of the decision made by the majority of my peers. However, my curiosity is not oppressed by the fear; I look behind me to see what the teachers are doing. I feel temporary euphoria from my disobedience, like a middle school smoker. I am proud of my bold deed because I now know their ransacking our possessions, our bags behind us. Their whipping hands look for restricted goods. Unlike my temporary pleasure of defiance, my heart is beating hard, making me so deaf that not only my auditory sense but also other visionary, taste, olfactory, and tactile sensations are numb. Like a terrorist passing an airport check point, my nerves are stretched. My mind feels like it has collapsed. My whole body shakes with such extreme apprehension that I look like I am having a major epileptic fit. I try to alleviate my stress by picturing the possibility of not getting caught. I am worried about the unfortunate outcome. There are two cartons of cigarettes wrapped in foil to look like snack packages in my bag. I initially followed the rule innocently, not possessing any dangerous items; however, teenagers believe mostly in friends’ words. Park Gi-won, my hometown friend, dark skinned and short but muscular, persuaded me to buy cigarettes like a devil whispering to me, promising me a fleeting euphoria of disobedience. He stimulated my curiosity and finally convinced me to buy four cartons of “Black Devil Hazel Taste.” Having a fantasy of smoking US cigarettes, I paid more to get the imported goods which had traveled across the Pacific. As I have never smoked before, I wanted to deviate from the social norm. A desire for deviation comes from curiosity, and the desire trapped me.
The gloating teacher holding my bag calls me, “Hey, the third one in line number 4.”
My panicked mind is now trying to find an excuse; “I honestly was going to smoke only one time. That was all. You probably understand that everyone once has a time when he or she is curious about the feeling of smoking. I actually did not buy them. My friend bought them and forced me to keep them in my bag. He is now pretending that he does not know me. I am innocent. This is all because of him.”
However, he does not give me a chance to tell him an excuse. He just points at the stage where the students sentenced to be punished are gathered. I do not make a sound but blame my fate.
As punishment for owning the cigarettes, I am forced to stand with other condemned students in the middle of a field, under the hot sun of July, forcibly participating in a physical activity. We are sentenced to pass a right-angled triangle obstacle and climb a three-foot wall. Both are made of wood, so the rough surfaces scratch us mercilessly. Their geometric shape depresses us even more. This course is called “The Rollercoaster.” We crawl up the hypotenuse line of the triangle, and using inertia, we run down as fast as we can to catch a loop on the top of the wall.
“Life is a rollercoaster. As much as you go down, you can go up. There is one day when even guys like you could reach the top,” the supervising teacher scolds at us. These sentences are supposed to sound like encouragement. However, our frustrated grimaces clearly show our lack of motivation.
He encourages us strongly; “If there is any rollercoaster which deviates from the route, he will hold a rabbit-jumping-in-a-squatting position for two hours.” Now, competition is added as a rule in this game. Strong ones survive. I hear the teacher’s whistle.
I run. I climb. I roll over. I jump. I sprint. I fall. I fall…I fall. I am screwed. I look behind. There are only three guys left. I am stuck in front of the wall because I am not used to using this kind of loop to climb up. I am an onlooker in any physical activity, so I know that I will be a failure in this challenge. However, I have an ally, whose short, muscular body is much more accustomed to physical challenge than mine.
“Ya! Put your foot in the gap between the trees and step on it.”
“Why?”
“Just do as what I say.”
“I still can’t reach the loop.”
“Then hold my hand now.”
“You really think that you can lift me up with your one arm?”
“Jump! Then I will lift you up until you can reach the loop.”
The watching teacher shouts at the boys now trailing behind me, “You other three! You guys are the rabbits!”
“Let go of my hand now.” I follow my friend’s advice, but words of appreciation for his help stick in my throat.
“I won’t say thank you to you. You know why.”
“Come on. I was not pretending that I don’t know you. I just did not know that you got caught. You are making no sense now because you knew that we don’t believe in friendship. We are not like 15-year-old buddies. We are coworkers. We feel excitement of disobedience together.”
“Whatever, you fraud!”
“Watch out for the three losers behind you. They will beat us senseless if they ever catch up us, No one wants to be last. No one wants to suffer from humiliation of the rabbit position.”
He cares for, helps, and advises me, yet the teacher scares, orders, and punishes me. This is why I listen to him a lot. He has no pretense in his words or his deeds. He has taught me more than those pretentious teachers about real maturity. The process of maturity is through the realization of the pretension of society. Do all these teachers, former soldiers, care about us significantly? They really believe in cultivating morality in us. They are teaching us that violence on peers is an uneducated deed which violates the rights of humans while they are using violence on us. They consider violence acceptable in terms of educational uses since pain is the most dramatic and effective way to teach a human a lesson. The fact that they are older than us does not conceal the ignorance in their words. If becoming like those teachers is what youths mature into, I want to stay immature rather than become pretentious. My friend and I are not disobeying social conventions but resisting them. Disobedience is deviation. When one cannot survive or win in the face of an obstacle, he deviates. In contrast, resistance is striving for assertion of an idea. The idea might be like a diary that he reads and laughs at when he becomes grown up, thinking that he was immature at that time. I might also later have those kinds of cavalier eyes and speak words of irrational concepts; however, I will not shade the shadow of my hat on my face to conceal my emotion. I am a teenager in whom adolescent, stubborn ideas are normal. I want to stay immature if that is innocent. While I was reason like a 16 year old Descartes, three pairs of grudging eyes stare the two of us.
The three rabbits, puffing their chests out, move their heads toward the dimly-lit parking lot as a sign of provocation in their pursuit of revenge. When I arrive there, I feel chilly under the murky sky. On the side, there are stinking garbage cans where the black street cats are living. A small opaque pond next to the garbage cans darkly reflects the bright stars in the sky. All over the filthy ground, used cigarettes are trashed and stamped. The leader-looking guy, with his pierced ears, exhales the smog of the cigarette, which he holds between his yellow teeth. He flicks the spent cigarette, which spins on the dark air. It falls straight in to the grimy pond. Oily water extinguishes the last fire of the cigarette. Without the light of the cigarette, the parking lot is even darker. With his upside down Nike-logo-looking eyebrows, he glares straight at me. His silent, hate-filled gaze suffocates me. Like the fire, my confidence is extinguished, and I back up like a puppy putting its tail down. Staring at my feet, I feel more fear than humiliation. I only expected swearing like a brawl. Now, this is out of the boundary of my expectation. Jiwon makes the situation worse; he looks straight back at them. I cannot know what they might do to us or how strong they are. Logically, there is no possibility that we will escape them. Revenging their humiliation at our hands, they siege Jiwon. I freeze.
“Should I endanger myself?”
After all, this is all caused by my fault that I bought cigarettes. I blaming Jiwon for making me buy cigarettes am not different than these fearful three guys blaming on us to relieve their anger. I feel harsh guilty; however, my eyes are too frightened to stare them back.

I hear the yawning of cats, feel these dim street lights reflected by the pond, swallow my apprehension, and stare at my shivering friend on the floor. The beaters are gone, and our awkward friendship makes both of us smile bitterly.