-25-
In BLACK, Kim Bunhong may have been an endlessly lacking member, but geniuses always swarmed around him. That point, which he had always considered like misfortune, might be the luck he had been waiting for this very moment – he thought vaguely.
I’ll imitate appropriately, but show my own self. And I’ll have this song. The moment Kim Bunhong clenched both fists with such determination and finally straightened his back from where he stood,
Jeong Ido felt with his sharp intuition as a producer that the air flowing around Kim Bunhong had changed in an instant, and he suddenly lifted his head and began staring intently at him.
‘Oh ho……’
Meeting straight on without avoiding the eyes of Jeong Ido, who began looking at him with interest while touching his chin, Kim Bunhong thought.
‘This song was originally mine, wasn’t it, hyung?’
Again, it was a soundless cry that he couldn’t voice outward.
Because he needed a moment to think about how to reinterpret this song in that brief instant, some time was delayed in the process.
The moment someone sitting in the judging panel, who had grown irritated from waiting, picked up the microphone, he began to sing.
Determined to show once and for all who the real protagonist of this song was.
Bloom.
A song that compared the extreme climax of falling in love to a flower blooming, with a similar vocal range but arranged for Lee Hanbit who was a bit more husky and specialized in high note handling,
Unlike the recorded version, in live performances it was a song that received praise for showing excellent expressiveness not only to fans but also to critics through Hanbit’s unique ending note treatments and occasional ad-libs.
And today, Kim Bunhong decided to reinterpret this song in his own way right there. He decided to sing it without any technique in contrast.
Until now, he had lived falsely. His life and his songs had always been that way.
The more he embellished something, the more he gained minus points instead. Then he would face it head-on. At least for now, he would tell you that he loves you. Though his last love ended that way, even if the moment came again when he knelt before love.
Instead of asking to be loved, saying that he loves, and thus that he loved……
If Lee Hanbit sang about the moment when a flower in love blooms, he would cry out about the despair of that moment.
He always said he was okay but he wasn’t okay, because even the moment of falling in love was lonely, because he was unhappy in happy moments.
So…… this was his sincerity that he was sharing for the first and last time with Jeong Ido who had not loved him.
.
.
.
“Stop…… I’ve lost to love.”
There was no outstanding technique or anything like that. He didn’t use falsetto at all. It wasn’t that high notes contained emotion, but rather the singer was actually calm, yet it left a strangely long lingering effect. That’s why it was felt more completely.
The delicate and clear voice was like a knife. It pierced deeply into the heart just like that. The moment he squeezed his eyes shut, he realized. Vainly, that there wasn’t even a blade on that knife from the beginning. Therefore, it could neither stab nor be stabbed. It was miserable and wretched. In the end, nothing remained.
The voice that filled the space didn’t float in love but became nothing and disappeared just like that. So it was empty. That day, people who heard Kim Bunhong’s song thought.
‘The song is gouging out the heart.’
How can the voice of someone singing lyrics about falling in love be so painful…… they thought.
* * *
Crackle-.
[“I am beautiful. I will continue to be so.”]
As the projector turns, along with those words, the woman in the screen who had been stopped as if a spring behind a toy had been wound finally begins to move with vitality.
As if dancing, she waves one fingertip in the air while grabbing the abundant hem of her skirt with the other hand. Spinning around, as she slowly turns once in place, naturally the clothes she was wearing also flutter their hems, leaving long, long afterimages.
It was the movie <Gypsy>, which could be called actress ‘Yoon Hira’s’ masterpiece of a lifetime.
‘……’
Young Hangeul, with his mouth agape, stares blankly at that scene in the movie and reaches out his hand toward that woman who looks free despite being trapped in a rectangular world.
That hem, like the beautiful long dress like a chrysalis that a butterfly had shed before flying away.
[“Because I will be eternally beautiful.”]
The face of the actress smiling elegantly seemed to flaunt absolute beauty that would never fade, embodying the arrogant line she had spoken.
Should one say God had bestowed a blessing, she sparkled like a diamond and was as colorful as an opal.
But what captured young Hangeul’s eyes wasn’t the other things on the screen. It was none other than her bare feet.
‘She looks really free.’
Because they were bare feet without shoes, they had to be scratched and covered in wounds, but strangely that made his heart race.
Without realizing it, his mouth fell open and he quickly brought both hands to his face to cool his flushed face. Even at a young age, he knew. That the hot gypsy blood she possessed flowed in him too.
Unable to stay anywhere, like the wind……
‘That person is your mother.’
When he was young, Hangeul vaguely imagined that the world might be rectangular. Because to young Hangeul’s eyes, she definitely seemed trapped inside the screen.
‘This kid is saying something crazy! The Earth is round!’
Then the truth he learned when he first entered elementary school was shocking. My goodness. The Earth isn’t rectangular? That day, Hangeul’s world collapsed.
As he began opening books and receiving injections of common sense and knowledge, daily life gradually became only boring.
‘It’s boring.’
He somehow managed to attend until middle school, but perhaps because it became known that he was a trainee at a major entertainment company despite his young age, it was honestly annoying that whenever he moved, whether it was in front of lockers or in the library, people flocked like sheep.
‘……?’
He was pacing around the flower bed in front of the school, listening to music with earphones on, when someone blocked his path as he was walking.
‘Ha.’
It was an unknown female student. She shyly held out a letter and gift to him, asking him to accept them.
Instead of saying with cold eyes like a pure romance manga line ‘This is the 14th confession today,’ Hangeul scanned the wrapping paper that had been carefully wrapped as if she had prepared it all night, then smiled saying thank you.
And that day he headed to the faculty office. That’s why he decided to drop out before it was too late. Because there seemed to be nothing more to learn at school. It wasn’t that he was being arrogant, but what could he do when there really wasn’t anything he wanted to learn. That’s what he thought.
Fortunately, the agency staff respected his choice. Instead leaving him with the request to definitely pass the qualification exam.
She’s truly beautiful. People would always end their one-sided conversations asking about his mother’s well-being with those words like a habit.
However, unlike when he was young, to Hangeul’s eyes that had grown a bit, his mother’s appearance didn’t look beautiful as they described but rather precarious, as if stepping on cracked glass about to shatter, so they looked like monsters trying to hide his mother from him and torment him.
‘Are you really happy living like this?’
He always wanted to ask. Still, to her who existed only in the unseeable screen.
Though they were mother and son, there always seemed to be a wall between them. Like the screen that had looked beautiful when he was young was blocking between them.
Yoon Hira was an actress who dominated an era, so there were many places that called for her even after giving birth, making his mother an existence that Hangeul couldn’t easily see in daily life either.
To such a woman, he wanted to someday convey the words to remove the shackles from her ankles and be together.
―She was dead even while alive. It was always like that. The woman Hangeul remembered was beautiful but like a withering flower.
And looking at the overturned picture frame in his studio, thinking that she is trapped in a rectangular world even in death, he pictures his mother’s appearance from when she was alive. But that soon disappears with unclear form. Because memories are bound to become dull.
‘Hangeul. Beauty is power.’
Because beautiful things are also bound to disappear someday. That was the last will she left.
‘What’s not beautiful is ugly. Love is exactly like that. It’s the same as being dead.’
So did you choose to erase your existence entirely? Because you thought it was better for even your form to disappear rather than wither like that?
When he opened the bathroom door, the thin, white, delicate legs hanging down. He learned for the first time that a dead person’s tongue could stretch out so long.
And his mother’s words were right. Beauty was truth. At the same time, it was talent.
Everyone has beliefs they hold. He had never failed even once. That someone handsome and talented reaches the top was an unchanging truth and power since Oh Hangeul entered the entertainment industry. Before that, even Earth’s gravity was meaningless.
Life always had answers. The force that led Hangeul to where those answers lay was ‘power,’ and the source of that power all derived from his beauty.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
