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20□□年 11月 □□日 2:00 am
A Night in Berlin
Tonight, in a mysterious coincidence, I met the past. In the cold air of the corridor, you stood before me. What is time? Is it merely the passing wind, or is it a space filled with the things we have lost? Though many years have passed, your face was still familiar, and our conversation seemed to break free from the chains of time.
The moment I saw you, everything stopped. No, perhaps it only seemed as if it had stopped, but within that stillness, something might have continued to move. The voice that called my name will not be forgotten. It felt like a scene from an old performance. What did we see in that performance? The scenes, the silence, and the cracks. Since that day, I no longer believed in the end of a performance. The performance hadn't ended. Even in the desolate space, it was still alive, still moving.
What surprised me the most in that performance was the audience. Just like the actors, the movements of the audience were also part of the performance. While stillness flowed on stage, the audience moved in search of something, filled with tension and curiosity. They examined the notes left by the actors like detectives, inching closer to the stage with each step. They looked as if they were trapped by the curse of the performance. Some audience members hesitated, holding the notes in their hands, silently slipping into the cracks, while others, with anxious expressions, whispered and passed notes to one another. In that moment, the audience felt like ghosts of the performance. They were not separate from the stage; rather, they lived together in the infected time, an extension of the stage itself.
Our conversation took me back into the labyrinth of old time. You spoke to me about stillness. What is it to stop? When the world urges us on, is stopping an act of resistance, or simply a sign of being left behind? You said, "Stopping is courage." I felt the weight of those words. And then I thought about the fragments you had discovered—traces of the performance, shards of a story left in the ruins. They seep into us like a curse, wandering like forgotten time, urging us to move again. Can we handle them? Or are we doomed to be infected by them?
When I fell asleep, I had a strange dream. It was a ghost story about time. An old train station. A stopped, worn-out clock. The clock stood in the ruins, having lost its time. I stood before the clock, staring at it. It seemed to gaze back at me, as if trying to say something. Suddenly, the hands of the clock began to move. A gap opened, and time, shifting between the past and the future, tried to consume me. It felt as if the ruins themselves had become a stage, alive, holding time within them and moving with it.
Then, the actor from the performance appeared. Faceless, he looked at me and spoke. "Time is the stage. It may seem still, but within it, the story flows. Even the ruins are a performance." His voice was ghostly, and I felt the swirl of that voice spreading within me. Time flowing through the gaps, and something living and breathing in that space between. I didn’t know what I was supposed to find within it. Not even whether it was the past or the future.
When I woke from the dream, the room was filled with cold air. What is time? Aren't we living as part of a performance within the curse of time? Aren't the traces of our finished selves endlessly continuing on that never-ending stage? With the questions you threw at me, I thought about the courage to step once more into the cracks.
-K*
*
K's diary was written by ChatGPT 4.0 and edited by Eugene Hannah Park. Eugene Hannah Park, who had never directly experienced the performance, suggested files such as “IMG_5418,” “IMG_5401,” “IMG_4746,” “IMG_4678,” “unnamed,” “220824 Second Letter to Eun-gyo.pdf,” “220823 Unsent Letter to Eun-gyo,” “220806 First Letter to Eun-gyo,” and “Post-performance Stage About” as primary sources in order to have a conversation with ChatGPT about the performance. Afterward, by chance, they met in front of a movie theater and had a long conversation about how they remembered the performance from years ago. K's diary was written based on this conversation.