At The Station

I climb up the stairs to the subway station with a huff and mild panic. The subway clock blinked 8:01 AM. Drat, It seems I’m going to be late for work. Again.

I slap my subway pass on the card reader and climb my way to the tracks. At first I didn’t notice anything. Sure, there seemed to be a lot more people in the tracks than usual, but hey it’s the manic monday rush.

An announcement was blaring in the station, but it was in Korean so I looked around at the faces of people to check if what I was thinking was correct. There was a heavy hush, all eyes on the train tracks.

But then I saw them. Where I stood, I could see three pieces, all covered by a white plastic cover. And then the uniformed men came, lifted one of the white plastic cover and suddenly a wave of confusion and fear ensued.

It was a severed leg. So effing fresh and bloodied that the few seconds it took for the officers to bag it caused a few of the younger Koreans to cry in alarm.

Later, at the office, a Korean workmate relayed the news update from the internet: It was a girl, a lady in her mid-thirties. An unmarried office worker.

In the evening, a short 30 second news spiel was broadcast: A lady in her thirties who works or used to work in an office commits suicide at a train station. She was unmarried.

I remember that bloodied leg. Those pieces of her scattered and smeared, and I wonder, was it deliberately her choice to choose the busiest hour of the day? Was it her way of reaching? Of telling herself, “People should know. They should know about me.” I wonder if the thought of becoming a spectacle even after she’s gone gave her at least a bit of comfort, or was she by then totally numb , devoid of any thoughts, consumed by the urgency of ending what she has set up to end?

Was it loneliness? Depression? It’s a bit pointless to speculate. But somehow there’s something to be gleamed here.Somewhere between that lady’s sadness and that burning image of a severed leg being hauled into a medical bag is a disconnect. Some things are beyond rational explanation, how a soul, a life becomes trapped and turns in on itself.

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Event occured in mid-2008. I could not write about it then perhaps because I was, myself, in some sort of emotional shambles then and could not make a coherent entry of those images without rambling about my (now upon hindsight) totally blown-over-proportion dilemma. Weird but as I sat tonight and forced myself to blog, this was what came out. But, please do not be worried, I am in no way suicidal. And have been in a sort of happy and dreamy mode the past days ( a few more weeks and it's vacation time!)