I didn’t have sleep paralysis at night from then on, but I just couldn’t sleep. I was used to being so tired all the time, so this was quite troubling. I wanted to go outside and roam around when it was still midnight. I was being changed. Music would not leave my mind.

But I didn’t go outside again for awhile. I didn’t go back to ‘Sori Soundscape’ either. I tried my best not to make eye contact with Sori. I was afraid of change coming to my life. I thought I had no interest in life for sure, but humans instinctively fear change when they find it. I did what I always did. I read and wrote. I tried to distance myself from music. To maintain the ‘present’ - to protect my ‘present’.

But I couldn’t even write like I had before. The reason I could write all the time was because I was always negative. To be more specific, I used my inferiority to fuel my creativity. One of the most effective motivators for writing is the will to ‘prove’ oneself. In a word, spite. The urge to say ‘suck it!’ to everyone who looked down on me, or told me ‘there’s no way you can do that’, or looked at me with doubtful eyes - that’s why I wrote. They say revenge is a dish best served cold, but I disagree. Revenge is a burning will. That, to me, was writing.

But every time I would remember Song Sori’s voice, those thoughts became meaningless. I could not cry even if I wanted to, and nothing would come out even when I wanted to scream. My heart would start pounding all of a sudden and my body became paralysed. My head began to heat up and my legs shook. Energy would store itself in my heart but I could not let it out.

So I decided to write a poem instead. I don’t read poems. They seemed too formulaic and limiting. Writing prose made me feel free. But it seemed like what I needed at that point was a ‘restriction.’ And by writing a poem, I could turn the music inside my head into something I could perceive.

The following is a poem that I wrote back then.

The heart is stopped
Breathing is stopped
But the crybaby
Is standing still

Afraid she would be had herself
If she were to help
The crybaby
Runs away

For even the stamping feet
Or the pouring tears
End up being useless
If you don’t know how to say ‘help’.

When the crybaby
Becomes an adult
The heart is stopped
And breathing is stopped.

It was mostly written in a ‘stream of consciousness’. So I tried rhyming near the beginning then gave up. (It’s one of my first poems ever. Give me a break.) The third bar is especially too wordy that it just reads like a novel. So I started the bar with “For ~” to give it a sort of poetic edge. And by referencing the first bar with the last, I gave the impression that I had thought it out all along, making it seem smart.

I would soon fall into an ocean of words. I almost drowned to death, but I learned how to swim my way out. I kept writing. I heard music. I didn’t know at the time, but what I was writing out was that music. I was writing an idea known as ‘Song Sori’.

---

This happened a few days after I had started writing poems. During break time in school, I was once again staring at my desk. I started to count the ringing in my head with my fingers. One, two, three, four, one, two, three - One two, three, four, one, two, three... I started to hypnotize myself by repeating this rhythm.

At first I only did it in my head. Then soon, my head was nodding along to the beat. My leg dropped in at one, two, one two, and my fingers naturally moved along to the other beat - two, four, two four. This is how the music conquered my mind. I soon entered a subconscious state. Keeping up this beat had become like breathing for me.

In this subconsciousness, I was thinking of words. It was like what a rapper would do. (I’ve never listened to rap though.) I would then also start whispering these words to myself. My head started churning out these rhymes. ‘Summer is a burning heat / Plotting its deceitful cheat / Flirting with an added treat’... These words turned into a spell. I fell into a complete trance, building castles in the air.

Someone ran into me. I fell down on the floor easily because I wasn’t putting much strength into my body. It seemed that the person who ran into me didn’t fall. I stared at the floor while face down. I was still in a trance state, so it took some time to realize what happened. I internalized the situation that just occurred around when I could hear my breathing again.

I held on to the floor with my hands and stood up. As I stood up, I saw Song Sori standing to the side too. When I turned around, I saw the boy I ran into and some who seemed to be his friends. They were looking at me, holding up their hand, and saying something. I’m not sure what I was even doing when I ran into him, but I didn’t care. I realized my sight was becoming blurry. I also realized after blinking a few times that I couldn’t hear anything. I couldn’t hear anything except for my own breathing. Not just what they were saying, but also the beat I’d been hearing. Fear creeped into my heart. I started clicking my fingers to confirm. I couldn’t even feel my fingers clicking. The boys in front of me stopped saying anything and stared at me with a confused look on their faces.

That’s when I started hearing not a beat or rhythm but a noise in my head. It was like a ringing you’d hear when a bomb goes off. The volume of the noise soon grew exponentially. The noise seized my breathing. My pupils grew and my legs were shaking. My blurred sight started becoming darker. My head was aching and I felt my heart begin to beat faster. The terrible noise was like a scream. It was screaming for me, because I could not do it myself.

The noise stopped when Song Sori grabbed my shoulder. I turned my head to her. I could hear my breathing again. The next thing I slowly started to hear were voices. I turned my head to those boys. Only the one who had ran into me was still looking at me.

“Are you okay, Sia?” Song Sori put her hand off my shoulder and asked me. “Need to go to the nurse’s office?”

I gulped and looked at her face. That boy - and everyone else too - were looking at me confused, but Song Sori was making a worried expression. There was something warm but sharp in her eye, something that realized something serious was going on. I kept trying to say something but my voice wouldn’t come out yet.

So I closed my eyes and ran out of the classroom. The last thing that I realized when I closed my eyes - was that I was crying. I could even feel the warmth of my tears. I didn’t know what these feelings were about. I tried to organize them, but I couldn’t express it in words. If I had to put it to words now, I’d say it was a ‘killing urge’. It was not an urge born from rage or despair. But as I was hearing that noise, I certainly wanted to murder someone. But I can’t really speak much about that. You’ll understand later. For now, that’s all I’ll say.

I always realize things one step too late.

---

I silently went into my classroom again the next class. I avoided that boy deliberately. He didn’t come up to me either. I think that was peace.

After school, I attempted to run away immediately. But as I expected, Song Sori called me from behind. I had no choice but to stand still.

“Sia.” Song Sori tried to show me a smile. “Are you free today?”

I didn’t say anything. I just looked at her. Sunlight shined through the window, lighting the distance between us. Song Sori soon gave up waiting for an answer.

“Wanna come over to my home today?”

Song Sori put her hands behind her pack. Some of the girls who were leaving said something like, “what the heck, even I’ve never been there!” Sori showed them a smile too. I couldn’t smile. I just froze there, still. I didn’t say anything. Actually, I didn’t make any sound from my mouth. After the music died, my voice died alongside it.

I lowered my head. Sori said “Is this... a yes?”. Then I raised my head again. This looks like I had nodded. At least, it did to her. Come to think of it now, Sori was most likely looking for any excuse to bring me along. Sori laughed and came up to me to hold my two hands. “Let’s go!” I was puzzled. I could not properly process the situation. Sori’s hands were so warm. That’s when I finally could muster up a sound that went “yes”.

---

I learned of three facts as I was walking with Song Sori.

The first was that Song Sori is an altruistic person. When she invited me before, she asked if I had “wanna” come - she asked for my intention. Not if I ‘can’ come, nor if I ‘will’. She also never looked down while walking. She would move out of the way so that she wouldn’t run into anyone, before they were even aware she did that. Every action she took - from the way she invited me to the way she walked - she never once considered ‘herself’ in the equation.

The second thing is that ‘Sori Soundscape’ was quite far away from the school and my house. I’m really not sure if the fact I walked all the way over there that day was fate or coincidence. But her house wasn’t far from the store. I soon remembered their location.

Before I say the third fact, I wanted to talk about something interesting that’s relevant. They say one is shaped by the ‘environment’ they live in. This doesn’t just mean the people closest to them - family, friends, etc, - but also the language they speak, the food they eat, the culture where they were raised in, and the place they live in. It is especially known that someone’s room tells much about that person. I’m not sure if that applies everywhere, but the place Song Sori lived in did tell me something interesting about her.

Song Sori’s house was on top of a hill, far from the residential districts. I say a hill, but it’s essentially a mountain. As we went up there, I instinctively looked down the hill often. Typically in comics or movies, only when you finish the hike can you look down and see a great view. But here, the whole way up was built on the edges, so you could see everything down all the way through. And like I said, it was far from any residential or market districts, so most you could see were roads or trek paths. So Song Sori would walk up and down this place every day, looking at this scenery which seemed to contain an entire world. You could see everyone, and see every cloud - just walking up here made you feel like a queen.

Once I stood in front of her house, such feelings dissipated. Weirdly enough, her house took the form of a traditional Korean house. The size wasn’t big. The outer structure seemed a bit shabby. Sori opened the door without saying anything and invited me in. (I didn’t know at the time, but there never was going to be anyone inside. But Sori didn’t tell me this. Her parents worked all day so she deemed it to be obvious.) I hesitated before going in. But when Sori reached out her hand to me, I went in first. I didn’t want to show her my embarrassment.

I followed Sori to her room. What I saw there is hard to describe with words. It’s a little weird to say this, but it didn’t seem like a girl’s room. The walls were covered in shelves. On the side where the bed and the table were, records were hung on those walls. Half of the shelves were records and half of them were books. I’m not sure about books, and it was the first time I’d ever seen someone with so many records on their shelf.

On the table were piles of textbooks and study sheets. I could also see a keyboard instrument. I didn’t see a computer. Actually, I didn’t see much colour beside the sky blue coloured bed. Instead, records formed a certain hue, like an art exhibition. It formed its own kind of harmony. I think she just hung the ones with pretty covers on the wall. That felt a little girly. (I feel weird when I keep talking about what’s ‘girly’ or not. What are you, fucking stupid, Lee Sia?) In between the bed and the table was a record player. It seemed much older than the one at the store. I looked at the ceiling. A single bulb was flickering. I wonder what I should say. Maybe it felt like the room of an ‘otaku’?

The reason I say is because her room was very similar to mine. The differences were that my room was much smaller, the shelves were also smaller and only filled with books, that I didn’t have anything hung on my walls, and that I had a computer. Maybe one could mistake our two rooms for belonging to sisters. I recognize this quickly. Maybe the surprise on my face looked to Sori like I was having trouble.

“I’m sorry my room is like this.” Sori put her bag on the chair. “You can sit there.”

I sat on the pillow that was on the floor.

“I’ll get something to drink, so do you wanna listen to something?”

I waited until Sori played something without an answer. She seemed to have understood this and started pulling out a record from a shelf next to her. On the cover was the face of a man on a yellow background. I waited as I looked at the flickering bulb.

Sori left the album playing and told me to wait as she went to get tea. A bluesy piano arrangement started playing. As the cheerful instrumentation kicked in, it started to form a jolly sounding country tune. The chorus part had these brass parts that couldn’t help but make you hum along to them. The quality of the record was rubbish so I couldn’t hear the lyrics well, but I couldn’t forget this one part. “Change is gonna do me good...”

The album Sori played was Sir Elton John’s 1972 album, “Honky Château”. The horn instrumentation of the first track, “Honkey Cat”, spread across this worn-out but lively room. The song was about 5 minutes long. As it faded out, Sori came back with two cups of tea.

“Oh, did I completely miss the first song?”

Song Sori gave me a cup and sat across me. And then the piano accompaniment of the next song, “Mellow”, started.

“I like this one, the second one.”

The bass and the drums kicked in, as the song started for real. The bright texture of the piano followed the heavy sounding chords, and I could hear the singer say this: “Mellow's the feeling that we get / Watching the coal fire glow”.

At around the 3 minute mark, something started playing, and it was a sound I’d never heard. It had the timbre of an organ, but it was playing as if it was a string instrument. (I looked it up later, and it was the sound of an electric violin.) The vocals came back, and that sound formed a sinister sounding harmony with the singer’s voice.

“Isn’t this part good?” Sori said as she drank the tea.
“Yeah.”
“I like songs like these, that sound bright and sad at the same time.”
“Yeah.” I looked at the floor. “By the way...”
“What?”
“You don’t have a computer?” I kept wondering as I listened to the music.
“Oh. When I need to study, I can just go to a PC cafe... It’s not like having my own would help that much.”
“I see.”

I looked at Song Sori. She had the same expression as the one I saw at school; she had her eyes closed, and didn’t show any emotion. She opened her eyes when the song finished. When she noticed I was staring at her, she got embarrassed and started drinking more tea. I didn’t even touch my cup.

The next song was a piano rock with a faster tempo. This time, the lyrics came into focus more than the music. Just before, I could only hear stuff like ‘change’ or ‘love’, but suddenly there were words that seemed a little different. “I'm getting bored being part of mankind / This race is a waste of time”.

And the chorus came as a shock to me. I learned this later, but the first line here is the name of the song. “I think I'm gonna kill myself / Cause a little suicide sticks around for a couple of days / Yeah, I'm gonna kill myself / I'd like to see what the papers say on the state of teenage blues”.

These rebellious lyrics were being sung on top of a song that you’d dance to at a ball. And the way the song slowed down with the word ‘blues...’ - it made it hard to resist clicking my fingers. And the second verse had a humorous edge too. Basically, the story of the song is, it’s about a teenager whose parents wouldn’t let him ride a car, and he’s mad that they told him to come home by 10, so he starts having these stupid thoughts like, ‘if I killed myself, I wonder if that’ll get their attention.’ I didn’t need Sori to tell me that this was a song from 40-50 years ago, so I was just curious who could’ve written a song like this in the 1970s.

“Uh...” I pressed my lips on the cup of tea, but it was too hot so I put it down again.
“Yeah?”
“Whose songs are these?”
“Oh.” Sori got embarrassed again and laughed. It felt a little weird that Sori couldn’t manage well. “This is Elton John. He’s probably like... 70 now?”
“Oh.”
“What is it? Do you like it?”
“It’s alright. The lyrics were just funny, is all...”
“The LYRICS??” Sori put down her cup too. “Sia, you can understand all of this?”
“What?” I was confused. That’s when I realized; not everyone is as good as English as I am. I keep forgetting that. I don’t really go around parading that fact around.
“Wow, I guess you’re good at English?”
“It’s not even that.”
“But I don’t understand a lick of this.” Sori kept talking with amazement. “I just like it if the music is good. But you’re awesome, Sia!”

As we were talking, the next song already started playing. It was a song called “Susie (Dramas)”, and just as the title suggests, it’s a song about a harp player who falls in love with a dancer girl. When the bright look on my curious face faded away, Sori also closed her eyes and started listening to the song.

“Is Sia...” Sori tilted her head, and still had her eyes closed. “Is Sia a foreign name?”

Is it? I don’t care much for myself. My parents might’ve given me a foreign sounding name. I never asked them, and I don’t really care to.

“I wonder. I don’t really care about my own name.” I said.
“Yeah? My name is a little funny, but I really like it. It’s the one thing my stupid dad did right in his life.”

Sori laughed. It was light but melancholy. Each word she spoke had its own weight and emotion to it. I kept observing her. It was as if the girl in front of me known as Song Sori was becoming music itself, entrancing me.

When the next song started playing, Sori stood up all of a sudden. “Oh. This next one is my favorite. In this album, I mean.”
“Okay.” I grabbed my cup of tea and blew into it.
“Though, it’s the most popular song here. But it’s a masterpiece.” Sori sat in her bed instead.

The song started as a piano ballad first, but that vintage bass tone you’d only hear in a 70s rock ‘n’ roll song was added on top of the drums. For a whole minute, the song kept adding on to the instrumentation, and the minor chords created tension.

The drums revealed every moment, as it blew us away into the chorus. The acoustic guitar started the chorus with a bang, as if it was a bomb going off. The ‘ooh’ background vocals formed an angelic major chord. If the Beatles song felt like it was sending me up to ‘heaven’, this felt like it was launching me off into ‘space’. Not complete hope, but rather the bittersweet ashes of a blastoff. The melody was faster than that song, and a bit repetitive, but inside that repetition was ‘grief’ - or perhaps ‘sweetness’ - and it possessed all elements of an emotion. In the last part of the chorus where he sings ‘Rocket man’, it was like every voice was screaming in freedom. The piano, the guitar, the bass, the drums - everything made my heart rise up.

“Hey, Sia...” Sori talked to me during the instrumental part.
“Why.”
“Can you, uh, tell me what this song is saying?” Sori looked down at me. “I’ve always wanted to know...”
“...”

I looked at the floor. It took awhile to remember the lyrics, then translate it to Korean. I closed my eyes and restructured the words. I also shortened some sentences.

“It’s gonna be a long time. Till touchdown brings me round again. They’ll find I’m not the man that I used to be. I’m a rocket man. Burning out his fuse alone...”

The vocals kicked in again. I looked at Song Sori again. She was sobbing. She kept her eyes closed so I couldn’t see tears. I didn’t ask her if she was crying. I didn’t want to interrupt the music. That’s when I realized the meaning of her emotionless expressions. That was to completely relate herself to the music. And my voice became part of that music, and reached out to her. I put my cup down on the floor and looked down. I placed my ear closely to the music. It rang, and rose up. The music she showed me was, to me, my saviour. And no one knows if it was me or Song Sori whose saving hand was being reached out to.

“

And I think it's gonna be a long, long time
'Til touchdown brings me 'round again...
“

- “Rocket Man (I Think It’s Going to Be a Long, Long Time)”, Elton John