Old Boy

(Park Chan-Wook, 2003)

If one rainy night you find yourself
leaving a phone booth, and you meet a man
with a lavender umbrella, resist
your desire to follow him, to seek
shelter from the night in his solace.
Later, don't fall victim to the Hypnotist's
narcotic of clarity, which proves
a curare for the heart; her salve
is merely a bandage, under which memories 
pulse. Resist the taste for something still 
alive for your first meal; resist the craving 
for the touch of a hand from your past. 
We live some memories,
and some memories are planted. There's
only so much space for the truth
and the fabrications to spread out 
in one's mind. When there's no more 
space, we grow desperate. You'll ask 
if practicing love for years in your mind, 
prepares you for the moment,
if practicing to defend one's life
is the same as living? You'll
hole up, captive, in a hotel room
for fifteen years and learn to find
a man within you, which will prove 
a painful introduction to the trance
into which you were born. Better
to stay under the spell of your guilt,
than to forget; you've already released
your pain onto the world; don't believe
there's some joy in forgetting. 
There's no joy in the struggle to forget. 
And what appears as an endless verdant field, 
only spreads across a building's rooftop;
your peaceful sleep could be a fetal position,
which secures you in a suitcase in this field. 
A bell rings, and you fall out of this luggage 
like clothes you no longer fit. Now what to do?
You remember when you were the man
who fit those clothes, but you've forgotten this 
world. Even forgotten scenes from your life, 
leave shadows of the memory,
haunting your spirit 
until, within a moment's glance,
strangers passing you on the street,
observe history in your eyes. Experience
lingers through acts of forgetting, 
small acts of love or trauma 
falling from the same place. Whether
memory comes in the form of a stone
or a grain of sand, they both sink in water.
A tongue—even if it were, say, sworn 
to secrecy; or if it were cut from one's mouth;
yes, even without a mouth to envelop 
its truth—the tongue continues to confess.