D-100 Days

The bell signaling the end of supplementary classes rang out long and clear. To the me of the past, that sound had meant liberation from a tedious bondage, but to the me of the present, it sounded like a bugle call announcing the start of a 100-day war.

“Hey, Min-jun! Aren’t you going to the arcade?”

A friend’s voice calling from behind sounded distant. I didn’t look back. I didn’t have the luxury to do so. My heart was pounding like crazy, and my mind felt engulfed in a massive storm, a swirling mix of memories from the past 53 years and my plans for the next 100 days. I fled the classroom almost as if I were running away from everything familiar around me.

In a shabby alleyway in downtown Mungyeong, the moment I opened the rusted iron door to the rented room where I had lived alone since my first year of high school, I involuntarily frowned at the pungent, musty smell. A tiny room that barely saw any sunlight. On one side of the wall, comic books were precariously stacked as high as I was tall, and on the low dining table lay the remains of a half-eaten cup of instant ramen from yesterday.

The wreckage left behind by complacency, laziness, and an aimless youth. In my past life, I had lived under the delusion that this space was freedom. But to my eyes now, it simply looked like a prison gnawing away at my potential.

I stood in front of the mirror. In the reflection stood a young, fresh-faced boy with peach fuzz on his cheeks. I raised a trembling hand and touched my cheek. Elastic skin without a single blemish. The deep wrinkles and age spots that made me sigh every time I looked in the mirror in my past life were nowhere to be found. As I swept my shaggy hair back, I felt its thick volume and dark roots slipping between my fingers. When I clenched my fist tightly, firm muscles flexed without any joint pain. The youth that my fifty-three-year-old self had missed so desperately, a youth that could never be bought with money. I was witnessing the miracle of this physical body with my own two eyes.

However, the gaze held within that youthful body was filled with the emptiness and bitter regret of a man who had weathered all the storms of the world.

‘I… could have done it.’

Memories of my past life flashed by. When I studied belatedly after being discharged from the military, my grades had improved remarkably. ‘I should have done this sooner’—a regret I had repeated countless times. I had potential. I just realized it too late and gave up too early. The price for complacently settling for reality had been severe. I had to live my whole life panting a step behind everyone else, and in the end, I had to grow old as a pathetic husband beside my brilliantly successful wife.

‘Not this time!’

As if making a firm resolution, I walked over to the mountain of comic books piled in the corner of the room. They were precious friends who had comforted my nineteen-year-old self. I picked up the final volume of my favorite, Slam Dunk. I gently stroked the last page, filled with Hanamichi Sakuragi’s burning passion. Yes, I used to be passionate once, too. But I had compromised with reality and extinguished my own spark.

“…Goodbye, my heroes,” I murmured softly, and began to tie all the comic books together with string. This was a true ritual of farewell to my past.

The desk, now cleared of comic books, looked almost emptily wide. I took a damp rag and wiped the thick layer of dust off of it. It felt as though I were wiping away the distracting thoughts cluttering my mind. On the spotless desk, I reverently placed my copies of The Essence of Mathematics and Sungmoon Comprehensive English. In my past life, I had arbitrarily set the limits of my own grades and tried to settle for a nearby local college without even doing proper research. I had been a frog in a narrow well. But now, my mind contained over 30 years of insight and knowledge. There was no longer any reason to hesitate.

I opened the old diary, which felt like an extension of myself. And on the page for August 12, 1996—today—I pressed my pen down firmly and wrote:

[Goals for Life: Round 2]

1. Prove my potential 100%. The only goal is the most prestigious university in South Korea.

2. Meet my wife, Park Seo-yeon, again as the absolute best version of myself.

This was no longer a passive goal of merely “fixing regrets.” It was about drawing out the “best version of me” that had been sleeping inside. It was about starting my life from the very top, not the very bottom. This was the first step to making my wife, Seo-yeon, the happiest woman in the world, and the final chance I was giving to myself.

I sat in front of the desk and opened the first page of The Essence of Mathematics to the ‘Sets’ chapter. Outside the window, the cicadas were still crying loudly, but I couldn’t hear them anymore. The sound of my beating heart, the sound of the countdown to my new life, was swallowing all that noise.

D-100. My real life was starting right now.