Oldboy

(Park Chan-Wook, 2003)

If one rainy night you find yourself

leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man

with a lavender umbrella, resist

your desire to follow him, to seek

shelter from the night in his solace.

Later, don’t fall victim to the Hypnotist’s

narcotic of clarity, which proves

a curare for the heart; her salve

is merely a bandage, under which memories

pulse. Resist the taste for something still

alive for your first meal; resist the craving

for a touch of a hand from your past.

We live some memories,

and some memories are planted. There’s

only so much space for the truth

and the fabrications to spread out

in one’s mind. When there’s no more

space, we grow desperate. You’ll ask

if practicing love for years in your mind,

prepares you for the moment.

If practicing to defend one’s life

is the same as living? You’ll

hole up, captive, in a hotel room

for fifteen years and learn to find

a man within you, which will prove

a painful introduction to the trance

into which you were born. Better

to stay under the spell of your guilt,

than to forget; you’ve already released

your pain onto the world; don’t believe

there’s some joy in forgetting.

There’s no joy in the struggle to forget.

And what appears as an endless verdant field

only spreads across a building’s rooftop;

your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,

which secures you in a suitcase in this field.

A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage

like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?

You remember when you were the man

who fit those clothes, but you’ve forgotten this

world. Even forgotten scenes from your life,

leave shadows of the memory,

haunting your spirit

until, within a moment’s glance,

strangers passing you on the street,

observe history in your eyes. Experience

lingers through acts of forgetting,

small acts of love or trauma

falling from the same place. Whether

memory comes in the form of a stone

or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.

A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn

to secrecy; or if it were cut from one’s mouth;

yes, even without a mouth to envelop

its truth—the tongue continues to confess.