Dream of one nerd

 “Wang Jing!”
I woke up, drowsy and annoyed. I slowly lifted my head that throbbed after being pressed on the hard surface of a wooden desk for a long time. My classmates were staring at me for the moment and went back to their own futile businesses. My physics teacher ‘Sumting Wong’ called my name again with his unusually strident voice, waving my physics exam sheet in front of the classmates.

“Come and take your exam sheet quickly Wang Jing. You are the first place in physics exam again!”

The teacher grinned, showing his rusty dentures.

He looked disgusting.

Hiding my great annoyance and disgust with a benign smile, I politely stepped towards Mr. Wong and gratefully took my exam sheet with a large, red A+ written on it.

A+ was my savior who will someday extricate me from my detestable reality in school and endow me wings that would lift me up to the top of the society I am belong to. School failed to carry out its role as an educational institute, students were disappointingly boorish, teachers wallowed in lassitude, and most of all, there was no one who could embrace me wholeheartedly. Therefore, I had an extremely strong desire to escape to upper class of society.

There, I thought, would be people who are more talented, passionate, responsible, and civilized.

There, I thought, would be someone worthy enough to devote my love and passion into.

There, I thought, would be nothing that makes me disappointed and lonely.

However, invisible barricades in modern society hindered my access to such ‘utopia’. The barricades demanded me to show that I am qualified enough to penetrate them and savor unimaginable merits that the upper class can offer. Therefore, I strived to attain excellent academic achievements to enter a prestigious college, the most credible route that guarantees membership to the upper class. To reach the summit of invisible hierarchy in modern society, I decided to abandon my friends, happiness and morality. These possessions are invaluable, but they were too florid and burdensome for a climber to carry when attempting to conquer a precipitous mountain so-called society. Instead, I packed myself with more utilitarian equipments to reach my desired destination: hard-heartedness, rationality, and inclemency. People started to call me ‘nerd’ when they saw me struggling for my dream. Nevertheless, my firm resolution turned out to be fruitful when I received a score report embellished with A+ and an accolade awarded to the student who has the highest GPA in school. I was moving closer to my goal everyday. But did I feel contented? Did I feel satisfactory when I abandoned everything that I once cherished to ‘go up’?

A rusty bell attached on a ceiling began to rang, ruthlessly breaking my contemplation. Physical education class arrived again, a moment I despised the most. My classmates grabbed their sports uniforms and hurried out of the classroom as if they were trying to vanish away from my sight. A group of girls ran past me, their golden hairs leaving a pleasant scent of shampoo. I gratefully inhaled the sweet smell, filling myself with deep fantasy about girls again. Having never talked with girls in my life, I have considered girl as a subject of fantasy and a veiled existence that is an enigma itself. To me, girl was like a bundle of beautiful and exotic flowers locked in a glass showcase. All I could do was simply to savor its glamour and enchanting scent strong enough to penetrate through the glass showcase. If the flowers walked out of their showcase by themselves, I would have gratefully seized them. But that never happened. With the sweet scent of shampoo still lingering in my nose, I dreamily walked towards a locker room to change my clothes. I suddenly burped, my habitual behavior that became more frequent when I became too immersed in my thought. Burping kicked me out of the fantasy by replacing its sweet redolence with odious smell of tuna sandwich that I had for lunch. Looking around me, I realized there was no one next to me in a locker room. I could hear distant yet exuberant shouting from a football field. The shouting delivered a strong sense of camaraderie that was no longer my possession. Overwhelming loneliness crept into my heart as if trying to ruthlessly break the already fragile existence into parts. I firmly grabbed my sports uniform, struggling to drive away the feelings that would weaken me.

The rusty bell rang again, indicating the end of the school. Facing the sunset that drenched the sky with crimson beauty, I dragged my tired feet toward my home. Feeling that the sunset was the most beautiful one I had ever seen in my life, I decided to sit on a bench under a lone cherry tree standing beside a fence of my school and breathed in the beauty of the scene. To enjoy a pleasurable respite from suffocating life, I took out my smart phone and started to watch my favorite Korean webtoon. I used to watch the Korean webtoon translated into Chinese, but feeling that translated version cannot deliver the webtoon’s unique charm, I decided to learn Korean to comprehend the Korean webtoon. When I reached the level in which I could easily comprehend Korean webtoon, I felt the relationship between me and the webtoon becoming more intense and intimate. Korean webtoon was a source of mental healing in that it has enthralling ability to drag its readers into its own fantasy world and make them oblivious of their reality while reading it. As I was happily scrolling down the screen, enjoying every scene in the webtoon, a short conversation between two protagonists caught my attention.

“I hate companions. I consistently have to check if they are better than me when I am with others.”

“Then… Doesn’t it mean that you are lonely?”

     

     The second phrase pierced into my heart and made a fissure in it. The webtoon that was once my panacea turned into a malicious villain that stabbed knife into my heart. Immense loneliness oozed out from the fissure. I struggled to scoop the loneliness and put it back deep in my heart to make myself unaware of it. But I failed. Loneliness kept pouring out. I felt myself being weakened as if I was suffering hemorrhage. Loneliness soon soaked every part of my soul and body. I haplessly knelt on the ground. Tears kept running down, drenching crimson paving blocks with dark spots when tear drops splashed on the ground. I kept crying and crying and crying…. There was no one next to me.