Twins
— Kil Sang-ho
They looked alike, the way pain and sorrow do,
and many people could not tell them apart.
A waxing crescent and a waning crescent face darkness from opposite sides,
yet Mother bought the same outfit twice, every time.
If that's how it is, I'll go around wearing my shadow instead.
From then on, growing different from each other became our earthly goal.
When my younger brother took pleasure in binging,
I took pleasure in starving.
When my brother set a fire in his heart,
I packed ice into my navel.
Mother, at the end of her patience, took us to a photo studio
and seated us side by side inside a single frame.
While the flash went off and the light bound the two of us together,
I secretly closed one eye.
You simply never listen to me —
and as Mother scraped my closed eye out with a knife,
between identical pain and identical sorrow
one more crippled brother was born.
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Pain has its point of tenderness in the body, sorrow in the mind. Between pain and sorrow, anger and resignation take up residence at a remove from each other. I, too, know a certain pair of identical twins. When they go out into the wider world, people ask them: Did you come from the country of pain? From the country of sorrow? You look exactly the same however long we look — so why do you insist on becoming different? I know twins who share five thousand years of blood and yet lean one way as a waxing crescent, the other as a waning crescent. There is a rumor that once every point of tenderness has vanished, a descendant called numbness will be born.
