'Spring Night' finds grace in life’s cruelty

“Life is truly terrible. Isn’t it?”

— From “Spring Night” by Kwon Yeo-sun

The first sentence is like a button. In the grand fabric of a story, it may seem a small thing, but without it, nothing fastens and nothing begins. Each time I open a book, I gently feel for that button to see if the story will fit me. This sentence, sharp and biting, opens the very first short story in Kwon Yeo-sun’s collection Goodbye, Drunkard. For an opening line, it stings and lingers like spice, pouring the truth of life straight into the main act with no warning.

“Spring Night” tells the story of Suhwan and Yeong-gyeong, a couple living in a provincial care home. Suhwan suffers from severe rheumatoid arthritis and relies on painkillers, while Yeong-gyeong struggles with extreme alcoholism. Even knowing that another drink might kill her, Suhwan helps her out the door once again. He lets her live today the way she wants, because that is what love means to him. Could I have done the same? That moment makes me measure the true weight of the love I claim to hold.

The first sentence of “Spring Night” returns again and again, like a musical repeat sign. No matter how hard one tries to escape it or deny it, it pulls us back. And strangely, when we begin to accept the dread, fragility, and cruelty of life, something inside us changes. Like a spring that springs back even farther the more it is compressed, there comes a moment when our emotions reverse direction and surge outward.

Once, imagining Suhwan’s love for Yeong-gyeong, I wrote this line: “I wanted to know a love that drinks water but does not disturb it” (from the poem “Measurement”). It was a sentence I summoned in the spirit of “Yes, life is terrible. But still…” Love is born and grows from the realization that there is no single shape it must take. Remembering that simple truth can light the ground just ahead of our feet.