ABFR 15

Chapter 15

SIDE OUT: Kim Ajin

I admit that I have a tendency to run away well. I also know that I am a pathetic person who cannot easily accept a situation and is afraid to face problems. I do dislike myself for being like that, but since I have lived my whole life as this kind of person, I had already made up my mind long ago that I would have to live with this version of myself for the rest of my life.

Ridiculously enough, I had a novel-like romance in a “world inside a novel,” so I thought I had learned quite a lot about how much trouble my tendency to avoid things could cause in a relationship, and I thought I had reflected on it quite a bit. But humans were simply not creatures who could easily change just because they reflected on themselves. All I had learned was that people did not change easily, by getting beaten over and over by my own reality.

So, this time, Kim Ajin actually had no intention of running away. Even though running away was always part of her nature, she had prepared herself to accept that love if the man who had finally found her at the end of everything called what he felt for her something close to love.

And so, when she finished her novel-like journey to another world and returned to reality.

But let us think realistically.

She had fallen in love in the world inside a novel. The man from that world had declared that he would follow her to this world. And she had returned to her own world.

Yet when she opened her eyes, her ordinary work environment was in front of her. Nothing in the world had changed. It was a world where magic and fantasy were nothing more than stories inside novels.

And suddenly, Kim Ajin reached a thought.

Was that all just my delusion?

Is this truly reality?

In truth, she had continued to believe.

She knew that, whatever else could be said about Railey Craha, he was the kind of person who kept the promises he made to himself, even if those promises were not made for her or anyone else.

So it was not that Kim Ajin could not believe that he would cross the gap between worlds and come looking for her.

What she could not trust was something much more basic.

Her own sanity.

If Railey Craha truly existed, then she could trust him.

But did Railey Craha really exist as a human being?

If the problem started there, then perhaps she sounded like an overly suspicious person.

There were quite a few illnesses in which people, after a convenient chain of delusions, became completely convinced that their absurd imaginations were reality.

Talking to empty space.

Believing something that had never happened actually happened.

Claiming that magic and fairies truly existed in the real world.

Unfortunately, Kim Ajin was not very different from that right now.

Perhaps people in the same profession as her were especially likely to become like that.

In fact, whenever she wrote, she had often felt that rather than actively creating settings herself, it was more like the so-called will of the universe simply handed her an entire setting on its own.

All the stories she had written until now had come to her in that way. It was almost as if she had received some distant story from somewhere far away, whole and complete, and then simply written it down.

One transcendent being in the other world she had visited had explained it differently.

According to that being, Kim Ajin had accidentally glimpsed another world that truly existed, and had merely turned the possibility of one of those parallel worlds into a work of fiction.

But even that explanation might simply have been another convenient delusion created for her own sake.

What if all of it had merely been an imagination she had created, as she always did when writing?

What if this time her imagination had simply been much more realistic than usual, and because she had experienced it from the inside, she had mistaken it for a journey to another world?

After believing that she had fallen in love with a fictional character who did not exist for more than half a year, and missing the man from that other world, she suddenly looked back at her situation with a cold eye.

Perhaps it was almost like self-reflection that she had desperately tried to avoid despite suffering through it for that entire half-year.

How much of the reality she believed in and experienced was actually real?

Her “experience of being possessed into another world” might simply have been the result of a desire and delusion to be loved by someone, or to experience a fated love.

“I’ll increase your medication a little.”

“Yes.”

After that problematic journey to another world, she began visiting a psychiatrist every week.

The doctor told her that she needed to learn not to “escape from reality.”

Her belief in the journey to another world and her longing for the person she had met there—which, according to the doctor, she had probably imagined herself—might have come from an urge to escape caused by dissatisfaction with reality.

Kim Ajin thought similarly.

As she had said, she already admitted that she had a tendency to run away. And she had not forgotten that even her romance in the “other world inside the book” had only happened after going through every possible disaster and tragedy because of her tendency to avoid things.

Maybe she had simply wanted to escape from her harsh, busy, difficult, and tiresome real life.

Maybe, out of that desire to escape, she had created a “wonderful other world” and a “perfect partner who completely accepted me,” and then sincerely believed in them.

Perhaps, just as she usually created settings and wrote novels, she had created the form that was easiest for her to understand and then forced it into her own mind.

Even so, she had believed it was real.

Even though she knew it sounded ridiculous, she had truly been transported into that world and returned.

She had fallen in love with that man.

She had gone through countless terrible things, and despite all of them, somehow reached a novel-like happy ending.

And that man had resolved to cross worlds and follow the woman who had come from another world.

Now all she had to do was wait for him.

She did believe that.

But the longer she spent learning, painfully and thoroughly, that this world was a realistic, logical, common-sense world where there was no place for talk of magic or spirits, the more her doubts grew until they became just as large as her belief.

The moment she thought that way, she could no longer trust her own settings and world-building.

She could no longer simply write without thinking.

It was not only because she was afraid that those things might control her own mind.

In the “other world inside the book,” she had learned that the stories she created might actually become real worlds.

Because of that, she could no longer easily write about someone’s tragedy or misery.

At the same time, she could not help wondering whether her act of “writing” was being used as a way for her to “escape from reality.”

Maybe she was creating something like this again because she wanted to comfort herself by believing that she was actually an important person in another world, and that she had been loved in a fateful and heartbreaking way.

Thinking that way made it impossible for her to continue writing carelessly.

The boundary between imagination and reality could collapse much more easily than she had thought.

She only learned that after the boundary had already collapsed once.

She often felt disconnected from reality, while constantly questioning and censoring her own imagination.

Regardless of what was imagination and what was reality, what she had created and what had actually happened, at some point she began to feel as though she had been cast out so far that she could no longer plant her feet in any reality at all.

She could not concentrate on work.

The same was true of her studies.

It was not that she had trouble forming relationships with people, but she could not properly handle anything else. Sometimes she even wondered if all of this was simply her exaggerating or pretending to be sick.

She had also been told several times that even such self-blame could sometimes be connected to the desire to escape, and that she did not need to blame herself so much.

So increasing her medication was unavoidable.

“What about dating someone?”

“One real relationship might help you keep your feet on the ground in reality.”

Dr. Jeong Sihoon, who also knew about the medication prescribed at another hospital, was looking seriously at her chart when he suddenly gave her that advice one day.

Unlike her psychiatrist or counselor, he had never listened to her long and complicated story about her journey to another world.

But he knew, roughly, that she had been going to hospitals for a long time because of her lack of a sense of reality—or her tendency to escape, which manifested in that way.

So perhaps his advice made sense.

“Putting all of that aside, Kim Ajin, you live alone away from your family. So it might be better to have someone you can lean on or depend on when you feel lonely or need someone. They don’t even have to be someone you like. If you date them, you might end up liking them.”

That was how she ended up dating one of the men who appeared every year or two as someone she was vaguely seeing.

Maybe having a real relationship would satisfy some of her unhealthy desires.

Then perhaps her pursuit of those delusions would become weaker.

Even if her ridiculous journey to another world had really happened, even if Railey Craha truly existed as a human being, and even if he was really planning to come find her someday, it would still be the same.

Railey himself had said,

“I don’t care if you play around with another guy as much as you want. But when I come to you, I’ll steal you away somehow.”

So perhaps meeting someone for a while was not such a bad idea. It could ease her sadness in the meantime.

She also could not concentrate on any of those relationships.

Yes, she could accept that.

They were all rather mediocre men. She had not started dating them because she actually liked them.

And, honestly, even Kim Ajin admitted that her relationship with Railey Craha had been far too stimulating compared to what a normal relationship should be.

Even if Railey was nothing more than a fictional fantasy inside her head, a man in a work of fiction was naturally going to be more impressive than a real man.

She even wondered if, as someone who loved fiction, she simply preferred two-dimensional men to real men.

At other times, she thought it was because she still missed Railey Craha and had not completely sorted out her feelings for him.

Then she would scold herself, thinking that perhaps that was exactly why her desires had become so concrete and realistic that they were called hallucinations and delusions.

But a stimulating man.

A stimulating romance.

Why had she forgotten that those things so often became synonymous with trash?

“…I take back what I said.”

That was why, on that rainy day.

While carrying her on his back, Dr. Jeong Sihoon finally let out a sigh as if he could not endure it anymore.

“Don’t date someone you don’t even like. At least, if he isn’t a man I can accept, I won’t allow you to date him from now on.”

“I’m really sorry.”

“…What is this? Instead of complaining that you’re young enough to talk like my father, why are you saying whether or not I have permission?”

“…Even I wouldn’t say something like that at a time like this.”

“You look so depressed that I can’t even nag you. But you don’t need to apologize to me.”

Dr. Jeong Sihoon’s gentle voice fell softly over her wet shoulders and hair.

“Kim Ajin, you should be sorry to yourself. You treated yourself as though you were worthless. You doubted yourself, pushed yourself, and treated yourself carelessly, just like you would do to your own intestines.”

“That wasn’t exactly what I did…”

His judgment that she might be like this because she had no one to lean on or depend on was wrong.

There were more than enough kind and warm people around her.

Kim Ajin suddenly realized that fact painfully.

She had never really had trouble forming relationships with other people, either.

Then, if that was the case, what was the lack in reality that had made her have such a special delusion about traveling to another world?

What was she trying to escape from?

“Anyway, I don’t think I’m going to date anyone for a while. There are too many trashy bastards in this world.”

“You’re making the right choice.”

“I really caused you trouble this time. I’m really, really sorry again.”

Maybe her lifelong habit of running away and avoiding things was not the cause after all.

Maybe everything had really happened.

Magic and spirits.

Being transported into a book.

A journey to another world.

A collapsing world.

And a star of machine civilization that was saved while blooming anew.

But it had already been two and a half years since she woke up from that “dream” and returned to her own world.

For two and a half years, nothing novel-like had happened to her.

She had simply stood alone in this realistic, ordinary, common-sense world that was her homeland.

Two and a half years.

She could not help constantly asking herself.

Was that all just my delusion?

Is this truly reality?

“Don’t worry about it. I’m just being nosy because I’m worried you might become extinct if I leave you alone.”

“Extinct?”

But she knew.

Whether it had been real or a delusion, the land she ultimately had to stand on and live in was this place.

This was her world.

Even if that other world could have been a delusion, this world could not be anything but reality.

So if she sometimes lost her sense of reality and drifted around without knowing what to do, it was simply a chronic illness she had developed.

And if that was the case, she had to do her best to think realistically, accept ordinary and natural things as they were, and figure out how to stay close to the people who cared about her and whom she cared about.

What did one man matter?

How could one man become an excuse to neglect everyone else?

What did love matter?

“I know this is my reality. To keep from losing this reality, I’ve worked really hard in my own way. You don’t know about it, and honestly, I don’t think you need to.”

He did not know, but she was the one who had decided to abandon that world and return to her own.

She had not forgotten that fact.

Maybe she was suffering like this now because she had held onto the pointless hope that Railey Craha would cross worlds and follow her.

But even if he could not follow her, she had intended to return.

So, in a way, nothing had changed.

Kim Ajin repeated that fact to herself again and again, then murmured.

“Even if I look stupid, I’m going to keep struggling. Until I properly regain my sense of reality and can plant my feet here again like I used to.”

She said it vaguely because she was speaking to Dr. Jeong, who knew nothing about the circumstances.

But perhaps it was also a kind of determination directed toward herself.

“Okay.”

Because those words had become a sentence after leaving her mouth, Dr. Jeong, who always ended up having to deal with her troubles, gave her the same kind of answer he always did.

“When you can’t do it properly and feel like you’re just floating around by yourself, I’ll grab you and pull you back down, even if I have to do it by force.”

And then the man from the novel comes to find her.

It happens exactly as promised.

She was the only one who had lacked enough patience, faith, and certainty to wait.

Some things simply reach their natural conclusion in the end.

After being transported into the other world inside a book and experiencing an amazing adventure, she returned to a reality filled with precious things she still could not abandon.

If even the person she loved had followed her into her reality, then perhaps the days after that return should have been filled with nothing but a sweet and ordinary romance.

But he was a man from a novel.

And she was a genre-fiction writer.

So some doubt and caution could not be completely uprooted.

In fact, as long as she was a person in this profession, perhaps it was a kind of caution that should never be completely uprooted.

And so, once again, she began to float around like a drifting weed.

Still, fortunately, Kim Ajin had always been relatively shameless and capable of pretending nothing had happened.

So this time, she decided to live like that for a while.

If nothing could give her certainty, perhaps it was okay to depend, just for a short time, on the people who would grab her by the collar or the back of her neck and shake her until she properly looked at reality.

Even so, deep down, she could not help wishing for the tiniest piece of certainty.

Just one tiny piece of certainty that could become her roots right now.

I know I’m pathetic.

But you know I’ve always been like this.

Can’t you understand me?

I know it’s ridiculous.

But still.

Please give me some certainty.

Even just a little.

It was possible that this desire, which she held as naturally as breathing, was itself another feeling born from her absurd fantasy about love and the ideal fiction she had drawn according to her own desires.

Was that all just my delusion?

Is this truly reality?

And finally, the boundary between fantasy and reality collapsed once again, in the most absurd way possible.

This time, it was her reality that was swallowed by the world inside the novel.