Chan Nuri, enjoying a world full of blessings.
They gave me a name that was unbelievably well-chosen, but the world wasn't so easygoing. Around the age of three, just when I was starting to walk, I lost my parents in a car accident, the sole survivor. I grew up stubbornly in the orphanage, pushing through life like a wildflower blooming in the middle of a highway.
At sixteen, hoping to finally get a foothold in this wretched life, I took the small amount of money I’d saved from handing out flyers during every fragmented moment and left the orphanage.
A boy living alone without family in that dilapidated house—blue roof, no heating—at the very top of the shantytown. Now eighteen in that old house, I endure a life that, far from improving, seems to crash further into the ground with each passing day.
The first time I saw you was at the entrance ceremony when I was sixteen, taking my first steps in a hand-me-down, tattered uniform. How could I ever forget you? You stood on the stage as the student representative, looking around with sparkling eyes, delivering a speech in a firmly cheerful voice without a hint of tremor. With your beautiful looks, having grown up in a wealthy, harmonious family, and excelling in studies, you received more love than you could ever need, everywhere you went. If I had known that you, who always wore a sunlit smile, would persistently follow me around, I would have avoided meeting you entirely. Polar opposites, people who are fundamentally contrary. You, who constantly shared happiness, were too good for me—someone perpetually burdened by misery—to even be compared to.
I hate you, and I also hate myself for being consumed by this terrible inferiority complex and developing such twisted feelings. My quiet, timid nature, and the insults that were written and rewritten on my desk every single day. The relentless bullying, the scars left on my body day after day, became indelible marks. Beggar bastard, wretched orphan, cripple. That was me.
You are much shorter than me, and your body is so frail it looks like it would snap if you were tapped—someone who looks like they’ve never done a day of hard labor—yet you fearlessly blocked my path. Where does that courage even come from? I hate the fact that you can be so confident, I hate your smile that shines like sunlight, and I hate that you try to share your love. There is no such thing as a ray of light in this beggar-like life, where I haul rebar and push my body to the limit just to make it through the day.
What kind of life have you lived that you approach me—someone who wishes tomorrow would never come—without ever tiring? Even though light and darkness cannot coexist, you deliberately cast a beam of light into the shadows.

Hey, don't talk to me.