Episode 1: Violet Twilight and the Tunnel of Light

Episode 1: Purple Twilight and Tunnel of Light At 6:45 p.m., the sun was setting on an extremely long and heavy autumn day over the old printing alley of Euljiro 3-ga, Jung-gu, Seoul. Between the acrid exhaust fumes of motorcycles filling the alleyways and the smell of oil coming from old rotary presses,

Siwoo Yoon, a 26-year-old junior architectural designer, walked out with unsteady steps, holding the strap of his bag tightly. In his ears, Manager Kim's venomous shout and the client's cold cynicism in the conference room on the 5th floor of the design office were still lingering like sharp fragments.

“Siwoo Yoon, is this a perspective drawing of a shopping mall complex that you stayed up all night drawing? Your sense of design is nowhere to be seen, and you just made a concrete commercial building from the 80s. If you’re going to do art, go to college and join an indie band. Why ruin someone else’s precious design project?” Dozens of sheets of tracing paper and 3D rendering printouts were thrown onto the conference table. Siwoo had to bow his head without being able to make a single excuse in response to those insulting words. As a child, he became an architecture student with a pure dream of building a warm, light-filled house where people's souls could rest comfortably.

An emotional boy who played the acoustic guitar in his small room every night and composed the only song in the world. However, after graduating from college and being thrown into the cold capitalist jungle of Seoul,

All that reality demanded from him was 'per pyeong sale price', 'shortened construction period', and the reproduction of soulless gray cement boxes. Blinded by the blue backlight of the monitor for fourteen hours a day,

While living trapped in the cold coordinate lines of AutoCAD and the angled corners of SketchUp

The melody of music and the warmth of literature that had lived and breathed in his heart crumbled like grains of sand. Just before leaving work, the manager gave a unilateral order to prepare three bird's eye views for the final presentation at 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, even if it meant staying up all night.

Si-woo felt a wall of panic as if he could suffocate at any moment and rushed up the emergency stairs of the office as if running away. Thousands of people on their way home from work were streaming down the stairs to the platform at Euljiro 3-ga Station on Subway Line 2. The gray faces of countless office workers who have lost their expressions. Everyone had their heads down and were blindly scrolling through provocative short-form videos and SNS feeds on their palm-sized smartphone screens. On Siwoo's shoulder, caught in the gap and hanging from the train's handlebar,

The weight of extreme chronic fatigue and burnout was pressing down on me, as if a huge chunk of granite rock was being placed on me. Although I was holding on to survive, it was an empty, ghostly time where I could not find any reason why I should live. Siwoo transferred to the subway and arrived at Seoul Station, trudging towards the steep hill of Huam-dong below Namsan Mountain. A Daldongne alley with old red brick multi-family houses and cement stairs intertwined like a maze. When I climbed up the steep slope of 108 steps, out of breath,

Suddenly, a cold, clear late-autumn night breeze blew from the western sky and gently caressed his forehead. The faint smell of dried leaves carried by the wind. Siwoo stopped without thinking, took a deep breath, and looked up at the Seoul sky. And at that moment, Siwoo stopped breathing. There he had been, completely forgotten, trapped in a forest of concrete buildings for the past several months.

An indescribably dazzling and mysterious panorama of light covered the entire world. The sunset that colored the western sky was not just a red glow. As the sun slowly hides behind the huge ridge behind Namsan Tower,

The water vapor in the air and the autumn wind delicately refracted the waves of sunlight, coloring the entire sky in a dreamy pastel tone gradation. The soft apricot and tangerine warmth burning at the lowest point of the horizon,

The brilliant magenta pink spreading over it,

And the deep violet and cool cobalt blue twilight slowly descending from the high sky. It's like a movie still shot with an old 35mm Leica film camera from the 1970s.

It had the faint particle feel of film grain and the fantastic temperature of 'Light Leak', which dyes the edges of the lens red. Electric poles and complicated black wires in the alley,

Even the old blue water tanks rising from the rooftops of multi-family houses.

In the purple twilight rays, it was colored like the background of the most beautiful lyric poem in the world. Si-woo, lost in his emotions, leaned against the guardrail of the hillside and watched the change in light. The moment I face that dazzlingly sad purple sky,

The door to memories that had been tightly sealed in the deepest abyss of his heart creaked open. ‘Siwoo, look at the sky. That fleeting moment when purple night seeps into the end of an orange sunset... Doesn't that seem like a little secret gift from the sky to us? When I stand in that color, all the loneliness in the world seems to disappear.'

A clear and friendly voice that passes by as if tickling my ears. It was a year ago, we loved each other so passionately, but due to extreme poverty, anxiety in reality, and an immature misunderstanding that prevented us from healing each other's wounds.

It was the voice of Han Seo-ah, his first love, whom he had to let go of in the end. After Seo-ah left, Si-woo's world was like a black-and-white ruin that had lost all color. The subtle scent of freesia and gypsophila that she loved, the smudges of the light purple watercolor paint she used to paint in her sketchbook,

And even those heartbreaking and warm times when we lay side by side on the floor of our poor home, looked up at the night sky, and dreamed of our future together. Seo-ah was not just Si-woo's first love. She was his window to the world and the only reason he sang. However, Si-woo's failure to find a job, frequent frustration, and the clumsy consideration that pushed each other into deeper silence while trying not to hurt each other.

In the end, it created an unbridgeable river of silence between the two. 'Siwoo, it hurts the most to see you losing your dream... I'm sorry.'

Seo-ah’s wet eyes disappeared after saying those last words. Facing the cold night wind that brushed his cheek, Siwoo barely swallowed the pain of longing welling up deep in his heart and opened the old iron door of his room. A rooftop studio in Huam-dong opened with the sound of clanging and creaking hinges. In the room, Siwoo was greeted by cool, dry air that had not been exposed to sunlight all day. In the unlit room, only the faint outlines of the furniture were revealed by the light outside the dusky purple window. That small space of about 5 pyeong was filled with traces of the extreme loneliness and wandering that Siwoo had experienced over the past six months. On the wooden desk are bundles of drawings that have been torn apart due to deadlines and 2B drafting pencils that have been sharpened.

And there were cold mugs covered in black grease all over the place. In one corner of the desk, there was a small stereo field recorder covered in white dust.

Music notes with yellowed leather covers were lying around. The first page of the notebook contained unfinished sheet music and lyrics written in Siwoo's neat handwriting. 《Like in a dream with you》. It was a song I wrote on the most dazzling spring day I spent with Seo-ah, looking only at her clear and transparent smile. 'Your warmth blooms clearly even when I close my eyes, the small promises we made under the falling cherry blossom rain...'

But since the day Seo-ah left his side, Si-woo has not been able to fill even a single note anymore. In the margins of the notebook, there was only a smudge of ink smudged from dried tears. A Martin D-18 acoustic guitar leans against a stand in the corner of the wall. The leather strap that Seo-ah had given her as a gift to commemorate the 100th anniversary of her part-time job was still hanging on the guitar neck.

The six strings of the guitar had been out of tune for a long time and were silent, losing their tension. His musical passion, which at one time seemed like he could sing about all the love in the world,

I had already suffocated a long time ago due to the negative balance in my bank account and the cold reprimands of my boss. Even a small scratch on the spruce top of the guitar body contains memories of playing around with Seo-ah.

Siwoo had not been able to even look near his guitar bag for the past few months. Siwoo threw the heavy backpack he was carrying on the floor, took off his shoes, and fell down onto the single bed. The old springs of the bed mattress creaked and strained against his tired body. A feeling of extreme exhaustion, as if every bone in my body was crumbling like grains of sand. However, even though his body was so heavy and in pain, his cranial nerves were tense and tense, like wires carrying high-voltage current. Insomnia. It was the cruelest and harshest curse placed on him after sending Seo-ah away. During the day, I was able to force myself to ignore my sadness by focusing on work, but

When I lay down alone in a dark room at night, the ghosts of repressed memories would rise up from all directions. When I close my eyes, I remember the alley on that last rainy day when Seo-ah turned around with tears in her eyes.

When he opened his eyes, the bleakness of the quiet room weighed on Siwoo's heart. Siwoo lay on the bed and stared blankly at the ceiling. The streetlight outside the window and the purple afterglow were drawing a light shadow like a slanted square bar on the ceiling wallpaper in the room. Dust particles were rotating silently in the transparent beam of light. Tick, tick, tick... Only the sound of the second hand of the wall-mounted analog clock was ruthlessly cutting through the heavy silence in the room. “Please... I want to fall into a deep, dreamless sleep, even just for an hour.”

Siwoo cupped his dry face with trembling hands and let out a dry moan between his lips. And he slowly closed his heavy eyelids. Darkness slowly engulfed Siwoo's vision. But strangely enough, the darkness of this night was quite different from the terrible sleepless darkness that tormented him every night. The soft purple afterglow of twilight shining outside the window,

It was as if it gently penetrated the thin skin of his closed eyelids and seeped into his mind. It is like a drop of warm honey falling into the water of a clear glass and spreading out in a spiral.

Every nook and cranny of Siwoo's hardened brain cells began to be filled with soft and cozy light purple warmth. The sound of the clock's second hand, which had been ticking sharply throughout the room, gradually receded beyond the distant horizon. The noise of cars in the city center and the footsteps of drunk people passing through the alleys of Huam-dong all disappeared like a mirage. Instead, like the gentle currents of the deep sea, or like the warm embrace of a mother.

The soft, rhythmic rippling of waves embraced the skin of my entire body. Siwoo feels as if his body is sinking endlessly deep into the old bed mattress.

But at the same time, it seems as if it has thrown off the chains of gravity and floats lightly into the air like a feather.

I was captivated by the strange and ecstatic feeling of swimming in weightlessness. 'This... isn't reality. 'Is this a dream?'

Siwoo realized. Although his consciousness was surprisingly transparent and clear,

His body and soul had already escaped the physical laws of reality and crossed the threshold of deep unconsciousness. It was the beginning of a perfect and brilliant lucid dream that I had never experienced before in my life. The old wallpaper and cracked ceiling of the room in Huam-dong where he was lying,

Like a 35mm film exposed to hot projector light, it gently melted from the edges and dispersed into transparent particles. What spreads endlessly where the walls of the room disappeared,

It was a dazzling fantasy space and time that cannot be described in any language of reality. It was a huge tunnel of light with no end. Siwoo's body is like a meteor passing through a black hole in the night sky and sliding into a new dimension.

I began to be gently drawn into the rotating, brilliant cylindrical light passage. The inner walls of the tunnel were pulsating with fantastic pastel colors as if they were alive. Warm apricot and light pink, mysterious deep violet and lavender purple,

And the silver and gold particles sparkle like bursting champagne bubbles.

It danced endlessly in a spiral like the giant wings of the Aurora. In the air in the tunnel of light, tens of millions of flower petals were swirling like a snowstorm. Small grains of pure white gypsophila and soft yellow petals of freesia,

And the transparent pink cherry blossom leaves flying in the spring wind.

It gently grazed Siwoo's cheek, forehead, and between his fingers. The sweet and faint scent of life that embraces the tip of your nose every time a flower petal passes by. When Seo-ah was alive and breathing, it always oozed out subtly from the nape of her neck and collar.

It was the sweetest scent of vanilla and lily in the world. Siwoo was descending, swimming freely in the air. There was not a single gram of fear of falling or dizziness. Rather, all the fears and wants that had been weighing on his heart for so many years,

Self-blame for one's incompetence and uncertainty about the future

Every moment it passed through the tunnel of light, it was being washed clean as if it were peeling off a skin. It was a tearful feeling of liberation, as if every cell in my body was being reborn. Between the transparent beams of light that form the inner wall of the tunnel of light,

Siwoo and Seoah's brilliant old memories came to mind like a 35mm color slide film projected from a projector. In the spring of my first year in college, on the campus lawn where cherry blossoms fell like snow.

The moment when Seo-ah lay on Si-woo's lap and smiled while pointing at the blue sky. We jumped into a narrow public phone booth together to avoid a sudden rain shower on a summer day.

A trembling moment when we looked at each other's wet shoulders and listened to the heartbeat. On an autumn night, sitting on the bank of the Han River, when Siwoo played the acoustic guitar and hummed an unfinished song,

Those moments of extreme comfort when Seo-ah quietly approached him and placed her warm hand on the back of his hand. ‘Siwoo, you shine the most when you make music. 'Your song is like magic that melts people's frozen hearts.'

Seo-ah's warm eyes and voice became particles of light and tickled Si-woo's ears. Siwoo stretched out his hand and carefully held the transparent piece of film of memory flying through the air. The fragment of light that touched my palm turned into sparkling golden powder, leaving behind a subtle body heat, and seeped into my heart. And from the far end of the abyss of the tunnel,

The faint and clear humming sound of a woman began to echo like an auditory hallucination. La la la, la la... la la... la la la... That's the song that Si-woo composed for Seo-ah but never completed.

It was the very chorus melody of “Like a Dream with You” that I had sealed deep in a drawer. That sad and beautiful melody that has never been heard by anyone in the world,

Seo-ah was singing to Si-woo beyond that tunnel of light. The tunnel of light gradually widened, and Siwoo's descent speed slowed down as smoothly as a feather. Hundreds of millions of swirling flower petals became a cozy cushion and firmly supported Siwoo's feet. Beyond the tunnel's exit, the shape of a cozy, old-fashioned space that was so eye-watering slowly emerged. High vaulted ceilings with deep crimson velvet curtains,

A classic brass chandelier that emits a soft orange glow.

And the luxurious wooden herringbone floor that has been polished with wax over several decades and has become shiny and shiny. Chirrrrrrr, tick, tick... rattle. Somewhere, an old 35mm movie film projector made a pleasant, regular analog mechanical sound as it wound a huge reel. A thick cone of white light emanated from the projector lens.

The fine dust particles floating around the room sparkled like diamonds and were spreading out toward the huge silver screen. The sweet and nutty smell of caramel popcorn, the subtle scent of vanilla from old books and film reels,

And the heavy, warm scent of red velvet sheets that have absorbed the body heat of countless people over a long period of time. On one wall of the lobby, antique posters of classic paintings from the 1950s to the 1980s were neatly framed.

Inside the small ticket booth with a glass window, there was a faded handwritten sign that read, 'Admission ticket to the most beautiful moment in life: 1 ticket.' It must have been in an alley in Seoul in the 1980s.

It was the most cozy and mysterious vintage single-stage theater in the world, where time had stopped forever. Siwoo's feet finally landed completely on the creaky wooden floor. The hard and warm feel of wood on the soles of your feet. It was so overwhelmingly vivid and realistic that it made me forget that it was a dream. Siwoo took a shaky breath and looked down at his hands. The fine down and blue veins on the back of the hand,

And even the fluffy wool yarn texture of his favorite thick beige oversized knit sweater.

It was alive and breathing, more vividly and warmly than reality. The temperature in the air, the breeze that touches your cheek, and even the unique lyrical scent of the theater that seeps into your nose.

All of them were welcoming him warmly, awakening all five senses. Siwoo crossed the theater lobby with careful steps and walked inside the theater along the red carpeted hallway. A vast theater with hundreds of red velvet seats immersed in soft darkness. Only the blue and silver rays pouring from the projector softly illuminated the dark auditorium. On the huge screen, black-and-white waves, forests, and blurry images of times gone by were playing quietly like a silent movie without dialogue. And in the exact center of that empty theater,

The silhouette of only one person sat quietly, bathed in the light of the screen. Long dark brown hair that flows gently down her shoulders and down her back. Wearing a light floral vintage dress embroidered with subtle wild flowers,

A slender and elegant back looking up at the movement of light projected on the screen. It was Han Seo-ah. The person who made me clench my heart with tears of longing every night for the past year,

His eternal first love and musical muse, whom he had never forgotten for even a second, was sitting right there. The clothes she was wearing were the same clothes she wore on the day she and Siwoo walked along the stone wall path of Deoksugung Palace for the first time in college.

The silver violet earrings that sparkled in her ears were also the same earrings that Siwoo had given her as a gift to commemorate the 100th anniversary. Siwoo walked slowly down the narrow aisle between the velvet seats, not even able to breathe properly. The carpet on the floor drowned out the sound of his footsteps,

As if Seo-ah sensed Si-woo’s presence through the frequency of her soul.

I slowly turned my head and looked up at Si-woo, who was standing frozen at the end of the passage. Seo-ah's deep, clear eyes shine brightly and transparently like stars in the dark, illuminated by the light of a projector. Her cherry lips trace a gentle arc,

Siwoo smiled brightly, as if all the ice and wounds that had accumulated in his heart over the past year, as well as the poison of this difficult world, would melt away in just one second. “Are you here, Siwoo? ...You made me wait too long.”

A sweet and natural voice, like a couple who broke up yesterday and met again today. The moment that voice rang in his eardrums, a stream of hot tears that had been suppressed from Siwoo's eyes rolled down his cheeks. They were not tears of sadness. It was a tearful tear of joy that only those who have finally found a haven for their souls in the long and difficult maze of reality can shed. Seo-ah quickly got up from her seat and held out her delicate hand towards Si-woo, who was standing in the aisle. “This is our own world where you can come whenever you are having a hard time. Forget all the cold things in the outside world. Tonight… let’s watch a movie with me, listen to music, and talk a lot.”

Siwoo stretched out his trembling hand and held Seoah’s hand. Amazingly warm and soft body temperature transmitted through your fingertips. It was a dream. But it was a miracle that was more real and precious than any other cruel reality in the world. In this fantastic theater where time has stopped forever,

The magical honeymoon of these two people, who will breathe new life into the heart of youth that was collapsing from exhaustion, is finally opening up to its brilliant first chapter.