Leo (his English name) told me the legend of the heart-shaped lake a long time ago.
He told me that when he was in the military, he worked in an area behind a chain link fence where civilians were forbidden to go. It was just a military base – just the base, the soldiers posted on rocks, and nothing else, because the area could not be developed. Just the base, the soldiers posted on rocks, and stars.
He said,
“I’ve never seen so many stars like that. It seemed like stars were falling down from the sky.” And the animals were so wild they were not afraid of humans. Roe deer, fireflies, eagles, hawks, wild pigs. Leo feeds them leftovers with his comrades. He feels, over the course of his assignment, that he raised them. They know him. He feels them look at him with their eyes and know him.
He skips his last meal and leaves it all to boars. He realizes how much of an outsider he will become – how soon the fence will keep him out just as well as everyone else. But before he leaves, he goes to his post for one more afternoon on the mountain overlooking the heart-shaped lake.
Long ago, in the village on the shore of this lake, there was a couple: a patient, diligent man and a beautiful, loyal woman. All the villagers loved them each separately, and loved them each more when paired. The people knew of their relationship and smiled as they courted. The man and woman were in the Spring of love – cherry blossom days and light breeze whispers in the evenings.
They often spent time together on the shore of the lake, like anyone else. Swimming, walking, wading. Near them, children ran and splashed while their mothers scrubbed clothing on the boulders half-submerged. Men took small boats to the middle to fish. All the while, the couple sat on a hollow, fallen tree and let the day pass them together.
They planned to marry. The man had given his proposal on that familiar log. But misfortunes come without warning: before they could wed, war broke out. The man left, promising that he would return soon, return soon to his love and marry her.
She sat on the log and waited for him, though the other villagers spent more and more time inside. They hid from the military men that marched through. The women of the village urged the woman to marry, and soon, before the military men took her away to the battlefield. She needed a house and a husband to guard her.
But the woman stood firm: “I will marry no one but him”. And whenever the war men came for unmarried women, she managed to hide somewhere until they had passed.
So ten years went by. The war was prolonged. Then one day it ended. The woman sat again on the log that she and her lover had shared. It was there the neighbor sat beside her to deliver the news that the man had not survived the war. She nodded, but would not give him a reply.
That night, the villagers say, they slept soundly, and when they awoke the lake had been transformed to the heart shape it is now. The log and the woman were gone, though some villagers claim that when the fishermen fall over the sides of their boats, they feel a buoyant pressure from below, something pushing them back up to the world of air.
On a mountain overlooking the lake, Leo knows there is no soft hand, no push to rescue him. He is already leagues in the sky. There is lake and earth and sky and lake and earth and sky further away and beyond that, and a cigarette lit, propped on the boulder next to him. Leo regrets. Didn’t he have anymore leftovers to give? His pig had a black spot on the right side of its face. Leo called him Spotted. He wondered if somehow the pig would remember him. But he knows it will snuffle away into the woods just as eagerly as it came. He knows should he trespass months later, there will just be pigs again.
Leo feels his uniform heavy and scratchy as it’s never been, prickling even through his undershirt. He feels that everything should be felt, not just wool and duty, but bark, cattails, fog even though he’ll never see it up close. It fades away when he tries to chase it early in the morning.
He takes a long inhale, feels the cool air in the back of his throat. Drizzle makes pinprick sounds on the leaves around him, pinprick points of coolness on his cheeks, colored like ground cinnamon spilled in yellow curry.
But he must turn. There must be movement. There is always movement as his cigarette goes spinning off, flicked over the edge of the cliff, but it never feels like it’s falling. Spinning, spinning always, caught in a net of air. But Leo must descend. He must take solid steps on the path down the mountain, aware as soon as he turns that there is an expanse at his back, open in all ways, the lake, the earth, the sky, the moon on the other side of the world, and he doesn’t know if he’s suffocating from the pressure or from the lack of pressure, but he knows that after today, military service will just be something he can call the hardest thing he’s ever done in his life, that nothing will hurt this much again. A breeze blows against his face the whole way down the mountain.
His Korean name means hero of the East. I learned that while I learned how to wait for a man who lived across oceans and great sweeping swathes of land. I learned it while he told stories to pass the time. I learned his name and curled into my idea of his heart.
Keep up the good work, and keep writing!
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