Written by Jung Hyun Kim
Illustrated by Heesun Sim
Have you ever heard of a love that rips you apart? A love that is so passionate and so beautiful, so red but so dark at the same time, that it cannot be contained inside one heart? Well it exists.
Let me tell you my story. Let me remind you that love is evil and black and can easily rip apart a
fragile human soul.
She was nothing until she met me. Despite her sparkling eyes, her bright smile, and her vivacious attitude, she hadn’t quite figured herself out. And neither could anyone near her. Everything
about her was a mystery, an unsolved puzzle, an enigma. It was difficult to communicate with her:
she was in isolation, in alienation, stuck in her own little world.
I remember a time when she would come up to me with that bemused voice of hers, and
whisper, “I don’t know who I am anymore, Cyprus.” I would sit her down and tell her that she was
Delilah Sparks. She was the person behind the preeminent pen name, Rose. Preeminent, not only because of the glory obtained through her writing, but also because rumor had it that an unknown cause
had made her crazy. I would like to say that rumors will always be exaggerated, and that Delilah was
nothing near crazy, only temporarily confused.
But as the world goes, the rumor was not a rumor, it was a fact. The sudden craziness that
overwhelmed Delilah was a misfortune to society; we would no longer be able to read the works of
the next potential Tolstoy or Dickens, perhaps. Not to say that she had stopped writing, no, that was
not true. Beautiful words in beautiful sentences depicted her ill mindset, where time ceased to exist,
as did the law and logic and manners, and anything else that was created through time. No matter,
though; no one read her books, because no one reads the books of a crazy person, for fear that it
might craze them also.
If she had one adamant reader, it was me. I had worked at a publishing company, and whenever she brought me her works, I would read them. At first, I thought that writing would encourage
her to empty out her unrealistic thoughts on paper, and then her brain would be comprised of less
confusion. If only this were true. It seemed like alas, the more she wrote, the more she was swept
into her unrealistic world of pure creativity and ignorant fantasies. Once, as the proof of complete
craziness, Delilah wrote about being a goldfish, and the next day she woke up as one. Or at least, she
thought she did. “It’s a bubble, it’s coming toward me. Should I pop it? No, it seems innocent, yes,
should I leave it be?” Delilah would ask me in a watery voice. “How are you breathing, Cy? Are you
using your gills?”
Delilah was crazy, there was no denying this. The doctors would say that it was because of
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