Nolita

The wind blew.

Yet it blew so feebly that even the feeblest leaves and branches could not be bothered to take notice and sway. But SoHyun noticed. She noticed and swayed drunkenly. She felt small suddenly, but realized she liked the feeling, and the small space that she occupied in the world. She liked that she went unnoticed herself and yet noticed things, and noted these down in her Notes app on her iPhone mini. “The wind blew,” she thumb-putted with supernatural accuracy. “And yet no one noticed.”

SoHyun thought of the winds that one did notice. The winds of prophetic horns. The winds of war and change. The winds that eroded, and destroyed, and unleashed vengeance when you least expected. But this wind was gentle, and thus imperceptible, and wended its way unharried through the busy streets, through the throngs of people and the irregular greenery planted in token atonement for the city’s belching cars and factories.

SoHyun had already walked quite a distance lost in these thoughts. It was night. When did it become night? SoHyun noticed things like the wind playing nymph-like in the air, but not the coarse changing of light to dark. She took some solace that the street lights themselves had been remiss in their singular duty to light the way safely home for her.

She walked further and further, until she passed the intersection where she normally turned left to get home. The wind was going straight and she wanted to keep it company. The people she was walking with had long since thinned out. They had fallen off the face of the earth and left Sohyun alone. The cars, too, had gone extinct and the traffic lights blinked or glared their warnings and approbations to no one except Sohyun, who Foucauldianly obeyed and waited.

Perhaps she was imagining it, but the wind would stop with her and wait too, and coil around her like the tail of a cat. It protected her as best it could. You have to stop this, Sohyun told herself. Stop giving things life, thoughts, motives. And stop being other people and just be yourself. Sohyun had a problem with empathy. She had too much of it. It was her one mutant power, an excess commodity that other people pumped out of her like oil from the Middle East. Only Sohyun gave it away freely, to anyone or anything that wanted it.

Too much empathy was why she had left school abruptly after the first semester of her sophomore year. She had straight As. A pluses even in English and History. So it wasn’t an academic issue. There was nothing wrong with her brain, but something was lurking in her mind and playing tricks on her. The poems she read, for example, felt like poems that she herself had written but had forgotten about. Daddy, by Sylvia Plath, had an effect on her that she could not shake. It invaded her like a virus, infected her and reconstituted her being on a genetic level. Sohyun’s daddy wasn’t the daddy described by Sylvia Plath. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that the words rang true, truer than even the reality that Sohyun had lived.

At any rate, SoHyun’s talent for metempsychosis began to affect her in increasingly adverse ways. She was disturbed that at the movies she could take up residence in the minds of so many polar opposites: drug dealers and police officers, wife beaters and beaten wives, sinners and saints. Reading books, she laughed with pedophiles and rapists, and agreed philosophically with murderers and maniacs. When she watched true crime shows, she could even empathize with the psychopaths, who paradoxically could not feel the way she could feel. She could feel their inability to feel and felt deeply for them. She found that she could take anyone’s point of view and run with it as if it were her own.

She underlined a line in T S Eliot’s The Waste Land—“I Tiresias, though blind, throbbing between two lives”—and then wrote next to it: “That’s me. I’m Tiresias [double-underlined].” By winter, SoHyun was drowning entirely in the soul of her roommate. Her roommate was this tall talkative girl from Maine. She had rough red hair, and freckled galaxies mapped all over her body. She had never seen anyone whose skin was like art, a spam-complected mosaic, diaphanous, kaleidoscopic. Her body was beautiful, and when she walked about their cramped room in the nude SoHyun thought about Eve in the Garden of Eden. Her roommate never looked naked because her skin formed a kind of barrier or covering, the texture of camouflage, a moth that was immune to the flame in SoHyun’s eyes.

Though beautiful, SoHyun’s roommate soon revealed an unexpected darkness. She was prone to depression, to mood swings and insomnia. In the dark before bed, she confessed to Sohyun about her sexual insecurities, her suicidal urges, her ritualistic cutting between her fingers and her toes, her underarms and her inner thighs. One night, SoHyun got up from bed and took her roommate’s X-Acto and cut herself between the webbing of her thumb and index finger. To her surprise, there was no pain but relief. She squeezed out a dark teardrop (it positively glowed against the feeble night) from the site of her wound.

After winter break, SoHyun decided not to go back to school. If she had returned to that unhealthy dynamic with her roommate—to her unrequited fascination with this destructive and indifferent girl from Maine—who knows what might have happened? At least now, six months after leaving school and seeking therapy and rest, SoHyun was back to normal, or at least to a more neutral and stable state than before. Her thoughts were no longer fixated on her roommate, that much was for certain, but she still wasn’t sure if what she was thinking now were her own thoughts or the thoughts that were introduced to her by someone else, namely those of her therapist.

At any rate, SoHyun was following her therapist’s recommendation to notice things more about her surroundings, and to write down any observations that came to her. Stop being so inward all the time. Look out from yourself and see the world without losing your own origin. SoHyun was suspicious of any advice that sounded like the detritus from a self-help book. What did that even mean, to look out at things as they are? What am I? What am I to others? What am I to me?

Is the SoHyun of Seoul, Korea the same as the SoHyun walking aimlessly on the avenues of New York, New York? Where was she exactly? She had walked all the way to Nolita: North of Little Italy. Nolita, night of my death, ice of my … Nothing is ever the same, is it? Even New York, New York. The first one is a sophisticated city dedicated to art, money and decadence. The other New York is a paradise full of trees, lakes and tics. We think we are different, but all of us here in New York and in the other New York are bored out of our minds, having to endure the monotony of a sweaty summer night devoid of wind. We are individual cells within a—

SoHyun’s thoughts stopped. Surprising, since SoHyun thought her thoughts would always live on in their infinite trajectories, their vectors and their tangents. But something had taken precedence. Physical pain, physical violence. Something was occuring, and it was occurring on her. There were sounds that SoHyun could not understand, with pressures and forces that were being malevolently applied. Curiously, time stood still in all of this, like a paralyzed bystander who could only bear witness to her ordeal. Was she going to live, she wondered?

It was over, whatever it was. It was over. She thought she should get up now, and head home. She could feel blood fleeing from her like a stream over a rock. Was she the rock or the stream? She felt completely alone just then and considered crying. She remembered one of her favorite stories ebbing out of her consciousness. Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Match Girl. SoHyun was trying to escape her own situation and enter the more hopeful death of the match girl. But she wasn’t up to it. She had little energy for empathy, for the little match girl, for her attacker, for herself. She was getting cold.

An insidious wind began snaking up toward her body. It went up to her face and blew her out like a match.