Aphasics

The human body is sorrow. It is filled with hollows, soft spots, and vulnerable places. Arms, armpits, chest, between the thighs. This body was born to embrace others, to be embraced by others. Doesn't it sometimes feel strange? Our bodies have eyelids and lips. They can occasionally close from the outside, and they can also lock tightly from the inside. Without reason or warning, a woman can lose her speech. The first time was in the winter when she was 17. She felt as though her tongue and the sentences she emitted from her hands were binding her like white spiderwebs, and it was deeply shameful. She could clearly hear and understand every word, but she couldn't open her mouth to make a sound. What made her speechless lips tremble again was a strange foreign language—a French word. Her mother had passed away six months ago, and she had divorced several years prior. After three lawsuits, the woman ultimately lost custody of her nine-year-old son. After sending him away, she suffered from insomnia. The unbearable crystallization of words, like cold dynamite, was placed in the middle of her constantly beating heart. She saw a psychologist once a week. The psychologist, who was over fifty, determined that her temporary aphasia was due to the recent stress of her life circumstances, but she only repeatedly wrote on the table, "No, it's not that simple..."

The man was 40 years old, and his eyesight was destined to gradually weaken; doctors had predicted he would permanently lose his sight within a year. He left his family in Germany and returned alone to Korea after more than a decade to teach Greek. Among the students at the academy, he noticed a woman who didn't speak or smile. When the silence of a woman gradually losing her language meets the light of a man gradually losing his sight, perhaps everything is allowed to change.