Metafiction (Modified)

Note: I found the chain writing thing to be simply impossible to use as part of my metafiction, so I decided to use "The Way I View My Life." The link is here.

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Looking back on my high school “philosophy”

           

Samuel is a student at the Yonsei University, and left the arms of his family after entering the university. And today, he decides to visit his home that he hasn’t seen for three years.

His home was located in Jeolla-nam-do, and as his school is in Seoul, the travel to his house almost took three hours by car. When he arrived parking lot and went outside, he found the atmosphere to be somewhat humid and annoying.

However, as he entered the house gate and started walking through the front yard toward the house, he saw a warehouse, a large steel container box. Somehow, the storage that was so unfriendly before seemed to be asking for him to enter it. Soon, he found himself standing in front of the rusty door.

The door opened with a creaky sound. A cloud of dust released into the air from the steel structure. After leaving the door open for few minutes for ventilation, he stepped inside.

As soon as he turned the light on, he found himself in a complete chaos. The whole place was covered with things that were no longer used. Tools that his father used to use when he was fixing the roof were wandering around in the floor all rusted.

He started slowly walking through the mess, his childhood reminiscences constantly coming to him. And then he found a small notebook that read "My Philosophy" with his handwriting. Hmph, he thought, had I ever had things like a "philosophy"?

Quickly shaking off the dusts on the notebook, he started reading through the first paragraph, which said:

Roll up a boulder to a top of a hill. See the huge, heavy piece of rock roll down the hill. This is the infamous punishment King Sisyphus had to face for infinite times in the famous Greek myth.

“I know this myth, a good one.” Samuel murmured. His eyes started to scan through the second paragraph:

And indeed, I believe that my life doesn’t share much differences from this frustrating penalty that King Sisyphus had to suffocate every day. My life is also consisted of hundreds of “boulders” that I have to mount towards the top of the “hill” with so much effort and simply sit and watch them falling back down with hopeless, frustrated eyes. When I am just about to think that a boulder tagged “Academically successful life in elementary school” is over, “Good grades in Middle School” appears, while “Entrance to KMLA” is idly waiting on the queue.” Even after the “Entrance to KMLA” boulder (that used to so easily fool me that ‘this one would be the end’) is successfully located on the hill top, suddenly a series of huge, colossal rocks named “Good GPAs” or “Entrance to Ivy League Schools” appears.

Samuel was now starting to find the essay to be pretty much intriguing. Though the handwriting obviously showed that it was written by himself, it seemed as if he had forgotten about all this over time. He then went on to the third paragraph:

Yes, I’m starting to get extremely bored and somewhat “immune” to the mental (and sometimes physical) pain I feel as I see all my effort invested in pulling up the rock go into vain. The frustration and fatigue I feel has now become so evident that I’m almost in the state of “expecting” an another objective to pursue by the time I’m done with my work with the previous rock. Now, as I see the boulder running away from me down the hills, the pain I feel is finally almost close to nothingness. I’ve grown so numb out of it.

And the essay stopped here suddenly. The last sentence of the notebook, separated from the essay by about four lines said:

Hell to the world for giving me this cursed fate.

And when he finished reading these lines, suddenly, the light bulb flickered and then went out. Maybe it was too exhausted.

The whole place was now consumed with absolute silence and darkness. Samuel sat down on the couch that used to stay in the house.

Is my life really that bad? Is it really something to “give hell to” and something to be “cursed”? It took him some time spent in meditation to come up with the answer.

And then he realized that himself as a high school was actually wrong. The biggest thing that the 17 -year-old Samuel was not able to consider was that it is basically the task of everybody to pull up the boulder to the hill. Everybody has a boulder to move up; it’s just that the notoriousness of such tasks that is different.

And since it is something that every human being has to do, the job that seems to be so repetitive and meaningless is no longer that of foolishness; instead, it is something that can be enjoyed as one sees the color and the shape of the boulder changing depending on the work he invest on pushing up the heavy rock.

My life is not a cursed one, Samuel thought.

And as he walked to the creaky door and pushed it open, Samuel found the air and the sun to be more pleasant than as it was when he first walked into the storage. Because he had work to do. A work that could be awarding later on if he keeps up with his effort. His life was a blessing of the god.