Drowning Practice

For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to believe the words “Blessed be this birth.” They have circulated as the first thing we are supposed to say at the start of someone’s life, yet to me they always seemed to arrive at their conclusion too quickly. Blessing tends to come before the question and to take its seat before hesitation can. But some beginnings are too complicated for such tidy words—too dark, and sometimes carrying too much silence—when they are set down in front of us. Faced with them, I was always late. I wanted to tell myself, at least, that this lateness might not be coldness or lack but a kind of honesty: a way of holding back hasty praise. So instead of going straight to the words of blessing, I decided to start by doubting the structure of belief that makes those words possible.

This story began with a handful of images. Faces under white light, trying to read the traces of someone who has not yet arrived. Watermarks left on a riverbank after the monsoon. A little pile of stones placed on an open palm and collapsing almost at once. And two names in an old dictionary of myth: Lethe and Mnemosyne—the water that makes us forget and the water that makes us remember. The longer I looked at those names, the more I came to think that birth might be closer to a kind of bewilderment, something that begins between memory and forgetting before anyone can explain it. Some call it a blessing, some call it fate, and some never manage to name it at all. It was that last case that held me. A feeling that has no name yet; the inner life of someone who, in a room where everyone is speaking of joy, hears alone a tremor of a different kind. That unexplained echo became the oldest seed of this book.

It gradually became clear that what I wanted to write was not an event but a mood. Not the fact that something happened, but the current that lingers long after. The warmth left on the roof of the mouth by words that never made it out. The small, stubborn dissonance that the grammar of blessing can never absorb. I wanted these things to live not at the center of the plot but in the breathing of the sentences. So this book wears the clothes of a novel while borrowing much of the rhythm of a memoir. A memoir is always a form that arrives a little late. It cannot be proclaimed in the middle of things; it can begin only once everything is over. I wanted to trust in the ethics of that lateness—in the grain of feeling that shows only on the far side of what has passed, the edges visible only along the slant of hindsight. This book began as an attempt to feel those edges with my fingertips.

While I was writing, I held on for a long time to the direction of a verb. Between “to be born” and “to be brought into being” there is a crack that looks slight in grammar but is anything but slight in being. The first sounds like a plain statement of fact; the second hints at a force acting on us, a compulsion. “I was born” and “I was made to be born” look almost the same at first glance, but between them the tilt of the world shifts. Responsibility moves to a different place, and our whole sense of how existence begins takes on a slightly different light. I turned that thin difference over and over. The thought that a single verb ending could change the ethics of a sentence, that the slant of a single particle could change the texture of an experience, kept me close to these pages. I know language cannot save the world. But I have not quite given up believing that language can change the way we bear it.

I don’t want to ask readers to take a side. I only want to ask for time. Time, as you turn a page, to look at the fact of your own birth as something strange. Time to doubt, just once, the direction of the verb that has been applied to your life. Time to set aside for a while the things we have accepted as self-evident for far too long—the belief that a beginning must always be a blessing, the habit of praising life before anything else. This book was written for that pause. Not to banish the words of blessing, but out of a wish to trace, slowly, the outline of the shadow that blessing never reached. I want to call these small leftovers a record. A record is always closer to the traces of hesitation than to a finished conclusion.

Looking back, the starting point of this book was less an idea or an ideology than a stance: a way of looking at the world a little longer—with hesitation rather than rapture, by holding on rather than declaring, with a kind of stammer, you might say. My refusal to bless birth unconditionally did not come from any wish to belittle anyone’s life. Quite the opposite. I was afraid that praising life too easily might erase its complexity and the depth of its pain, and that fear is what brought me here. All praise involves some degree of deletion. I wanted to record what had been deleted—the patterns of unexplained sorrow left behind the face of welcome. So this preface is closer to a hesitation than a declaration. But some sentences can only begin at the end of hesitating. This book is a thin thread that happened to catch on my hand as I groped my way toward such a sentence.

You may pull on that thread, or let it go halfway. I only hope you will listen, for a moment, to the faint friction it makes as you wind it around your hand. As on the night I was first caught by this sentence, there are words that make a very small grinding sound in the dark. In Korean, the words for birth and lament—탄생 and 탄식—differ by a single letter, and sometimes a whole book begins in order to rewrite that one letter. This book did that for me. It did not set out from conviction; not knowing how to bless, it hesitated for a long time before it found its first sentence. And so it is a record of the moment when a question put off for too long finally began to take the shape of a sentence.

In the beginning, everything was water.

Light and dark, form and meaning lay asleep in the water, not yet spoken. The water did not move, and yet it held the possibility of every movement. It was still, but not dead. It was boundless, but it never overflowed.

It lay outside every beginning, and at the same time it already held every beginning within it.
That water had a pulse before there were hearts, a tremor before there was language, sensations before there were faces.

Before there were bodies, before there were eyes, before anything was given a name, beings waited in that water. Even “waited” is not quite right.

In the water, not even waiting passed.
They simply were.
They needed nothing, they were not divided, and so they were at peace.

Then, at some moment, a very small and very deep tremor ran through the water. It was neither destruction nor birth. Only a single, minute difference. That difference gave the water a grain; the grain became a current; and the current, at last, became a boundary.

The boundary divided inside from outside, and the divided things began to notice one another. I became not-I. You came into being by being not-me.

The first self rose above the water.
In that instant the water was no longer whole,
for what had been inside it had begun to imagine what lay outside.

And so the first being came out of the water.
His body was wet, his eyes were closed, and his skin shook with the terror of meeting the world for the first time.

Breath was the first command he was given.
To have to breathe on his own meant he had to live on his own, and to be alive was the curse of being, in the end, separate.

Even so, he drew breath. In pain.

The water quietly closed over the place he had left.
As if nothing had happened, it was calm again, and he forgot.
But on certain nights, in the sweat of sleep, in the memory of pain,
he would sometimes remember the water.
The one who asked nothing and held everything,
the very first mother—the mother who was water.

Later, he comes to understand.

That each time he breathes, the water may remember that breath. That the proof he is alive is also the proof that the water is gone.

And so, now and then, he longs for stillness.
In the instant his breath stops, he wants to go back into the water’s arms.

But the water is never granted again. He has already come out, and having come out cannot be undone.

So for as long as he lives, he repeats it, over and over.

Breathing in, breathing out.
Being alive and wanting, at the same time, to disappear.
Swaying between the two.

All that trembling proves that he is still inside the water’s trace.

And so it has been passed down:

In the beginning there was water,
and even now, inside us, the memory of that water
lingers as the faintest tremor.

Min filled the tub to the brim. Lukewarm water—so close to body temperature that the boundary blurred. He undressed, got in and slowly sank. The water rose past his chin, covered his lips, brushed the tip of his nose and finally closed over the top of his head.

His ears gave up first. As the pressure pushed on his eardrums, sound began to come apart. The second hand of the clock outside the bathroom, the faint shiver in the pipes, footsteps upstairs—everything mashed together into a dull drone. And through all that dullness, one sound stayed sharp: his heartbeat. Thud, thud. Thud, thud. Like a mother’s heart heard by a fetus in the womb—except this was his own heart, and it was the womb, and for now it was also a kind of grave.

He closed his eyes. The red behind his eyelids deepened. He had read somewhere that the color darkens as oxygen runs low, something to do with the blood vessels in the retina widening. Watching that red, he wondered: was this the color he had seen for nine months before he was born? Floating in amniotic fluid, back when he didn’t need to breathe, when the umbilical cord breathed for him.

The first spasm came. His diaphragm gave a small shudder. It was still bearable. He ignored it and sank deeper—into the deeper reaches of consciousness, into the farther reaches of memory. He thought about the day he was born. A memory he couldn’t possibly have, but one he could imagine: the violence of being thrown from somewhere warm and dark into somewhere bright and cold. The lungs forced open, air entering like a blade, the first cry tearing out. Had it been a blessing, or a curse?

The second spasm. Stronger this time. His whole chest tried to cave inward. His body gave the order: breathe. Now. Right now. But he refused. It was the only freedom he had. He hadn’t been able to choose to be born, but this moment he could choose. Not to breathe. To refuse life’s most basic command.

His vision began to narrow, darkness creeping in from the edges. At the same time a strange calm came over him. Was it endorphins? Or just the sweetness of giving in? His fingertips tingled, his toes went numb, his heart beat faster and faster, and yet his mind grew slower and slower. Time stretched. A second lasted an hour; an hour lasted a lifetime.

When the third spasm came, he knew. This was the limit. His body wasn’t betraying him; it was trying to protect him. Regardless of his will, quite apart from his mind, billions of years of evolution had carved one command into every cell he had. Live. Survive. Whatever happens, live.

He wavered between resisting and giving in. What did this brief rebellion underwater, this small refusal, prove? Was he free? Was he his own master? Or was even this part of a script written long ago? His lungs felt as though they would burst. No—they were already bursting. From the inside, slowly, surely.

The surface began to call him.

No—his body began to rise toward the surface.

Regardless of his will.

Quite apart from his choice.

Just as it had the first time he was born.

“Hah—”

Oxygen pours in like a waterfall. His throat opens without warning and his lungs balloon like a wet sponge. The air is cold, heavy, alive. It floods into his flesh, into his blood, deep into his heart, driving out every trace of the stillness of a moment ago.

His heart pounded wildly. His vision flashed white, then slowly came back into focus: the grey grout between the bathroom tiles, the blurred outline of the steamed-up mirror, his own shadow rocking on the water, returning one by one. A prickling spread to the tips of his fingers and toes, as if a body that hadn’t existed a moment ago were coming back all at once. He gasped for breath again and again. In, out, in again—each time the air scraped his throat he coughed, and even the coughing felt welcome, like proof that he was alive. A drop fell from the point of his chin and made a small ripple on the surface. He sat still until it had spread and vanished, listening to nothing but the sound of his own breathing.

The water slowly cooled. Min closed his eyes and followed the temperature as it traveled from the surface of his skin to the inside of his heart. The gradual slide—hot to lukewarm, lukewarm to cold—resembled the arc of a life, and reminded him that every beginning loses its heat sooner or later. But it wasn’t the end. The water could be heated again. He could hold his breath for a long time again. Repetition was like a cycle, and a cycle promised, someday, a return.

Min stood up slowly, one hand braced against the side of the tub. He took a towel and pressed himself dry. As the rough weave soaked up the sound of his skin, he thought that tomorrow he would come back here. He would fill the tub and hold his breath. Practicing death—practicing drowning—as a way, paradoxically, of making sure he was alive. That was how he kept his life going.

When he turned the doorknob, cold air drifted into the room. He paused for a beat and looked back. The water still stood in the tub, its surface calm, as if nothing had happened. But Min knew. He knew what had happened beneath that surface, the name of the feeling that had sunk and risen again, what he had found and what he had lost. And what he would come back tomorrow to look for.

Yu-yeong reached over and stroked his left wrist. Time had left faint sentences on the skin there; the scars, like tree rings, kept different nights in rows of deep and shallow lines. Some ran straight down; some veered off at an angle. Her finger moved slowly along the oldest one. It dated from the day Min turned sixteen. That night his drunken father smashed every dish in the house, and his mother locked herself in her room and turned up the volume in her earphones to drown out the noise. Among the broken pieces of china, Min picked up one sharp shard. The first time he saw his own blood—hotter than he had expected, a more vivid red than he had imagined, and above all undeniably his own—he felt a strange relief that chosen pain gave him. He still remembered it.

“These are fading,” Yu-yeong said. Her voice was even, neither reproach nor prescription—just an observation. That was always her way: not a promise of healing, but simply staying. Min took her hand. Warm, soft, the hand that hadn’t flinched the first time it saw the scars. She read the lines like braille, slowly decoding the words hidden in them.

“Underwater’s still better,” Min said. “It doesn’t leave scars.”

Yu-yeong gave a short laugh—not a bitter one, a light one. “Right, it’s better. At least there’s no blood on the sheets.”

Night rain tapped at the window and filled the room with a soft patter. Lying side by side over that sound, Min drifted back for a moment into the cave of his childhood. On rainy days his father drank more, and he used to say the rain was a shield that covered the clinking of bottles. But Min knew. What his father feared was the rain itself—probably because that dull, endless falling sounded so much like his own life draining away.

“How’s your dad these days?” Yu-yeong asked.

“No idea. It’s been too long.”

“And your mom?”

“Same.”

A short silence passed between them—the kind that says more while words are resting. Staring up at the ceiling, Min said, “When I was a kid, I believed I was invisible. When my dad was shouting and my mom turned up the TV, it really felt like nobody could see me.” Yu-yeong’s hand tightened a little around his. “So I had to see blood. Blood is red. It’s so bright no one can pretend not to see it. The moment I saw blood, I was real again. It hurts, so I exist.”