Forever Eighteen
This story is based on the Sewol Ferry Disaster that occurred in Korea on April 16, 2014. All conversations are based on video recordings from the students’ phones.
Our school trip turned out to be more epic than we expected. During our way to Jeju Island, our ship had begun to tilt little by little, and now, we were almost standing on the walls of the ship. Ironically, I was listening to You Raise Me Up with my iPod when the boat started to sink- I hate the mandatory english course at my school, but english songs… well, that’s a different story.
- — -
The speakers crackled, and a young female voice, accompanied by mechanical rustles, echoed across the hallway.
To all students and teachers, please remain seated in your current place and do not move until you are rescued.
It was the same announcement as the previous one, and the one before. As I looked up from my iPod screen, I could see my friends obediently aligned across the hallway, each one of them wearing a bright, neon-orange life jacket. They were clutching onto each other’s pale hands, shifting awkwardly within their designated positions like candles shivering in the cold night, praying to escape the violent gush of winds.
God. This is like Titanic.
My fingers glided across the iPod screen until it reached the M section. There it was. Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On.
It fits the situation, I thought. Besides, it’s one of my favorites.
With the gentle flute sound humming through my earphones, I took a quick glimpse of the window and tried to capture the outside scenery as the boat continuously rocked to and fro.
Thin strays of fog were setting up behind the window, and in the middle of it rested a misty figure, dark and blurred, dancing in rhythm with the waves. Before I had any chance to inform my friends about a possible-sailboat coming to save us, I realized that the object was slowly moving away from the ship.
It must be garbage floating around the sea.
“Dude. This so-called life jacket is ten years old. It’s not even going to save us.”
It was Woojae, my so-called friend since seventh grade, who was joking as always. Next to him sat Minjae, another friend of mine since seventh grade. Unsurprisingly, we had all entered the same high school, and for that reason, we were all on the same boat, experiencing the same bloody situation.
“What a great field trip,” snorted Minjae.
“What a good statement,” I snorted back.
This is what I liked about my friends. We never forgot to refute back at each other’s sarcastic comments. After a short I’m-not-backing-down staring contest, Minjae gave me a playful shove on the back. It wasn’t painful, but it was hard enough to knock the iPod out of my hands. As the iPod collided with the floor, an abrupt sound buzzed through my earphones, and a new track began to play. I could instantaneously hinge the title to the tune: Adam Levine’s Lost Stars.
Please see me,
Reaching Out for someone I can’t see
I began to croon the lyrics under my breath.
But are we all lost stars
Trying to light up the dark
Who are we
Just a speck of dust within the gal-
THUMP.
THUMP.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhissssssssssssss…
A thundering sound echoed across the hallway, soon followed by the thin, hissing voice of water slithering into the rooms located at the opposite side of the ship. My body toppled over as the water began to pull the boat down into the lightless sea, but I managed to regain my balance by positioning myself onto the wall of the ship, which had become the new floor.
The only sounds left in the hallway was the deafening silence from the students and the harsh voice of water shrieking for more space.
Moments after, the speakers crackled and a familiar voice repeated the perfunctory announcement.
To all students and teachers, please remain seated in your current place and do not move until you are rescued.
The students’ joking laughter had gradually transformed into nervous mutters as a sense of fear and urgency swept among them like a wave crashing against the shore, pulling the small, uncarved pebbles into the deep, dark sea.
“Why isn’t the captain doing anything?” a girl uttered across the hallway.
“Where are all the adults? Where’s our teacher?” another girl cried.
Songwon, if I remembered his name correctly, suddenly jolted up from his seat with his bloodshot eyes staring at his phone screen. “I just received a text from my friends saying that the captain and his crew aren’t aboard.”
A series of panicked voices shouted back, “Nonsense! They’re making things up just to scare us.”
“They’re saying that someone saw the crew escaping on a lifeboat,” Songwon replied.
“Didn’t you hear the announcements?” one of the voices asked, “Someone must be on the ship to make those announcements. Besides, do you actually think that the adults will abandon us without notifying anyone? Do you?”
That, I thought, only leads to one answer.
“Yeah, they’re probably just joking,” Songwon mumbled, collapsing back down to his seat.
The voices began to chatter in triumph, as if they had defeated the fear that had been persecuting them since the tilting of the ship. A chilling thought was creeping into my mind and tapping into my conscious, but I refused to let it in.
Everything is ok, I told myself. A ship full of high school students has never sunk before and we’re not going to be the first ones. We’ll be rescued.
I glanced back at Woojae, who had been awfully quiet for the past few minutes. Pained and perplexed, Woojae slump lifelessly with his arms slack at his side and his eyes staring at the wall of the ship. The only thing moving, except for his heart, which was probably having its hardest workout since the day of his birth, were his pale, quivering lips. “Oh my god. Oh my god. The boat is tilting more.”
“It’s ok. We’re going to be fine.” I said, trying my best to sound confident and convincing.
“This kind of thing doesn’t happen often right?” Woojae commented back. “I feel like we’re actually going to die. We’re dying at the age of eighteen.”
I decided not to reply to that. I was confident that this didn’t happen to everyone.
“I really want to live…”
“What are you talking about?” I shouted back, almost defensively. “We’re going to be rescued.”
There was a small pause, and a new melody began to play through the earphones. An undulated run of notes rippled across the piano, followed by cold, staccato touches that struck down on the keys as if someone had frozen the entire world. A young female, accompanied by a harmony of violins, began to sing.
The blue ocean that the red sun used to wash its face turns black
My eyes trailed back to the small window that had once presented a horizontal view of the land.
The white sky that had clouds, rain, and wind turns gray
The only thing I could see now was the thick, grey fog dooming behind the window, completely concealing the blue sky.
I leave the darkness that finds my heart.
Among the 476 students and teachers who were aboard on the Sewol Ferry, 299 died and 172 lived. 5 Students’ bodies have still not been retrieved from the open sea. During the disaster, the captain and his crew had escaped the ship without notifying any of the passengers, and the president of South Korea had remained silent for the first six hours of the tragedy, eliminating the chances of saving more students. After multiple peaceful candlelight vigils to remember the lives of the students and to demand for the impeachment of the president, Sewol was lifted from the sea on March 22, 2017, 1035 days after it had sunk.
The final song that the narrator listened to was Melted by a Korean duo group AKMU. In Korean, the word “ice” has a similar pronunciation to “adults”. The music and the video depicts the cold nature of adults from a child’s perspective- language is unnecessary to understand emotion. Coincidently, the song was released a week before the Sewol Tragedy.
