Description Part 1: Bird 1. Crystallization 2. Thread 3. Heavy Snow 4. Bird 5. Remaining Light 6. Tree Part 2: Night 1. We Do Not Part 2. Shadows 3. Wind 4. Stillness 5. Falling 6. Under the Sea Part 3: Flame Author's Note Inside the Book "I realized then how fragile life is. How easily flesh, organs, bones, and lives carry within them the possibility of being shattered and severed. By a single choice." (p. 15) "We know from experience that some people, when they leave, draw the sharpest blade they possess—to cut precisely at the softest part of the other, a place they know so well because they were once close." (p. 17) "Having decided to write about massacre and torture, how could I have been so naively—so shamelessly—hopeful that someday I might shake off the pain, that I could easily be rid of all its traces?" (p. 23) "There was a quiet strength woven into her words and gestures that made you believe all our actions have purpose, that even if every effort utterly fails, meaning alone will remain." (p. 44) "Snow almost always feels unreal. Is it the speed, or the beauty? When snowflakes fall through the air at a pace as slow as eternity, what matters and what doesn't suddenly become starkly clear. Certain truths become frighteningly obvious." (pp. 44–45) "Strange, isn't it, snow. In-seon said, her voice barely audible. How does something like that fall from the sky?" (p. 55) "Those who were shot, / beaten with clubs, / cut down by blades and died. / How much must it have hurt? / Losing two fingers hurts this much. / Those who died like that, whose lives were severed, / whose bodies were pierced and torn somewhere." (p. 57) "A seventeen-year-old child—how much must she have hated herself, hated the world, to hate someone so small? For sleeping with a hacksaw blade beneath her. For grinding her teeth and weeping through nightmares. For having a small voice and shoulders curved like a ball." (p. 82) "When snow falls like this, I think of her. Though I never saw it myself—the girl who wandered that school yard until evening. The thirteen-year-old who, mistaking a seventeen-year-old girl for an adult, clung to her sleeve, to her arm, unable to open or close her eyes, and walked on." (p. 87) "Patience and resignation, sorrow and imperfect reconciliation, strength and loneliness—sometimes they look alike. I thought it must be difficult to distinguish those emotions in someone's face and gestures, that perhaps even the person themselves couldn't separate them precisely." (p. 105) "People say it's as light as snow. But snow has weight too, as much as this drop of water. They say it's as light as a bird. But they have weight too." (p. 109) "Strange, the sensation of having touched something alive. I wasn't burned, wasn't wounded, yet it won't fade from my skin. No living thing I had ever touched before was as light as they were." (p. 109) "What can I think of to endure this? If there is no fire blazing in my chest. If there is no you to return to and embrace." (p. 134) "I don't know how birds fall asleep, how they die. Whether life is severed the moment the remaining light disappears. Whether something like an electric current of life lingers on until dawn." (p. 135) "Everything I have experienced becomes crystal. Nothing hurts anymore. Hundreds, thousands of moments, like snowflakes unfolding their intricate forms, sparkle all at once. I don't know how this is possible. All the pain and joy, the piercing sorrow and love, remain whole without blending into one another, shining together like a vast nebula, as a single mass." (pp. 137–138) "I thought it resembled nothing else. Nothing else has such delicate structure. Nothing else is this cold and light. Nothing else remains soft until the very moment it melts and loses itself." (p. 186) "I thought I would not forget. I will not forget this softness." (p. 186) "But it's not over yet. In-seon's voice spread through the heat. We haven't really parted, not yet." (p. 197) "Dreams are a frightening thing. I say, lowering my voice. No—they're shameful. One's own..."