Return and Devotion
At first, I was just numb.
“The tumor visible on the scan is larger than expected.”
Maybe it was his detached manner, maybe the flatness of his voice, but it didn’t feel real at all.
“It’s deep in the right temporal lobe, and it’s already fused with a significant amount of the surrounding tissue. It’s a glioblastoma, the most malignant kind.”
It didn’t sound like a diagnosis delivered to me. It sounded like news about some stranger who had nothing to do with me.
The neatly organized sentences drifted past my ears like background noise.
“Even if we operate, we’ll only be able to remove part of it. With radiation and chemotherapy, we’re looking at six months, maybe a year at most.”
The doctor kept explaining something, but I couldn’t keep up with a single word.
“You should assume a cure is impossible.”
It was strange.
Too strange.
I’m going to die?
Could death really be so light a word?
There was no way such a quiet, low-voiced sentence could truly be how one person’s end was announced.
Then came anger.
I’d never drunk or smoked in my life.
I’d exercised regularly all my life and taken every health tonic and vitamin under the sun.
Something had to be wrong.
Why me?
Was he a quack?
Even when I screamed the words at the top of my lungs, the doctor only sat there in silence.
“You should discuss this with your family.”
Even at the very end, his tone never changed.
I couldn’t stand that silence, so I bolted.
After that, I can barely remember a thing.
Like someone being chased by something—perhaps by death itself—I hurried my legs forward and cut across the streets.
Right. If I was going to die anyway, I might as well make myself a little happier in the time I had left.
Happier? How?
When I knew I was going to die no matter what.
When I knew nothing I did would let me survive.
I just wanted to live.
It was too unfair to die like this.
That thought came back every morning when I opened my eyes and every night when I closed them, seeping into my body like cold air.
Just live day to day. Don’t think about anything else.
If I spent my days exactly as I always had, maybe the doctor’s words would turn out to be a lie.
So I repeated the same day over and over.
Anyone looking at me would have thought I was perfectly fine.
I was someone who hadn’t fallen ill with any strange disease at all.
I laughed, I talked, I worked—it was almost absurd to think I was even sick.
I prayed desperately that it was all a lie.
I prayed, and yet.
Why.
I couldn’t remember the breakfast I’d eaten yesterday.
My knee was scraped, and I had no idea where I’d fallen.
For some reason, words wouldn’t come to me the way they used to.
I even forgot which direction I was going while crossing a street.
No matter how many times I repeated the same sentence, its meaning wouldn’t stay put.
I thought my body would be the first to stop, but my mind was the one drifting away first.
I could feel something in my body slowly stiffening.
It felt like something inside me was going out, little by little.
“Hahh…….”
I couldn’t breathe.
My vision blurred.
There was a ringing in my ears.
And then—
So this is how I die? Quietly, pointlessly?
There was nothing.
Everything was quiet.
It should have been quiet.
“Do you dream of immortality?”
It was unmistakably a voice, but not anyone’s voice.
It wasn’t male, female, beast, or machine.
But the voice itself didn’t matter.
Of course.
Of course I wanted to live.
I wanted to live as long as possible, longer than anyone else.
“Then become devoted.”
With that strange voice, I felt nothing more.
I couldn’t feel my heart stopping, or air seeping into my lungs, or even the blinking of my eyelids.
Before long, the electrical signals running through my body vanished, and consciousness melted away into blackness.
Strangely enough, there was no pain.
At the very last, when the final end drew near, everything came to a complete halt without fear, without regret, without even lingering attachment.
It was not a return to void, to the nothingness that had never existed in the first place, but a return to emptiness, to the hollowing-out of what had once been.
That was what it meant to understand death.
So this is what it means to become nothing at all.
That was what I thought before my eyes opened again.
And yet, for some reason, this was what had happened.
I opened my eyes once more.
In a place with neither light nor sound, no less.
Am I underwater?
As my emptied consciousness returned, I realized everything around me was water.
Deep, cold, and silent.
I lifted my head.
No—at least, I thought I lifted my head, but there was no head to lift.
There was a fin.
My entire body curved in a supple line, and my movements came not from flesh but from instinct.
And then.
“K, kwoaang?”
Something strange came out instead of words.
It wasn’t speech, and it wasn’t a cry—just something that surged up from the deepest part of my body and burst out.
In that instant, I understood.
I was a shark.
I was a shark.