#seo_eunkwang

From this introduction, the MV cuts to the small happenings of this house and its surroundings to showcase the song’s conflict.

First, we cut to a rivulet. Although the sound of running water is always calming, this rivulet flows sluggishly, almost sadly on the surface. Underneath its dark surface it may harbour turbulent currents.

The MV also uses images of ants struggling alone. One ant crawls across a tomato (I think), while another stays trapped inside a glass. These ants are separated from their companions and wandering through (what to them will be) vast tracts of land without hope. It is an image of loneliness.

A mosquito repellent coil maybe a harmless household item, but I found it to be the most unsettling image in the MV. These coils burn quietly, releasing poison in their slow simmer to death. 

In a song that claims that “no one knows what I feel,” it comes across as a cry for help. A person maybe a useful shoulder to cry on for someone else but be inching towards their own exhaustion at the same time. As the lyrics say next:

The plastic toy that Eunkwang finds in a transparent plastic cover tells the same story. Its smile is plastic—a show for the world. The toy smiles, but it lives alone in a bubble.

Even as Eunkwang sings about meeting his friends, there is no relief in these meetings. He waits at train stations alone and restless, contemplating his surroundings with the same thoughtful look. 

Journeys generally symbolise a change, a transformation, but all we see in this fast fading twilight is a quiet frustration.

At this point, the song and the MV reach a crisis. Until now, Eunkwang sang the refrains “It doesn’t matter whether no one knows I’m hurt” and “No one knows what’s on my mind, no one does” with restraint. He whispered them rather than singing high notes at the top of his voice while he was lost in his own inner world. Once we come back to the house, something changes.

Eunkwang toys with a small plane showpiece a couple of times and seems to derive some form of serenity from it. Planes represent an idea of freedom. We can fly to distant lands and escape with these machines. We can fly. The planes in the MV form a showpiece that allows them to only go around in circles. These planes cannot take us to our dream lands anymore. Those dreams are no longer available for us to chase, or so we think.

Eunkwang stops playing with the showpiece as if something has snapped. The music, too, approaches a crescendo (and Eunkwang proceeds to show off his vocals). 

Instead of looking outwards to the fact that no one knows his struggle and finding reflections of it in his surrounding, Eunkwang reflects on his relationship with himself and cries.  

It is not only that people do not know what happens inside our minds, but there is a part of us that does not know how to show these emotions or even how deal with them. It is a struggle against ourselves, where we must struggle against this reflex of trapping ourselves inside a harmful mindset. This self is not evil. It is a part of us that, for some reason, thinks that our problems are somehow not worth the attention of others. We are too afraid to dig deep and be vulnerable except when we are alone in our rooms, shielded even from our own sight in the dark night. We have to take off this burden from our shoulders and accept our own feelings at the very least.

The road to recovery is long and slow. We may have to be as slow and vulnerable as a snail in this process, but one cannot rush it.

We finally see this vulnerability in Eunkwang himself. Instead of calmly studying his surroundings, Eunkwang furiously pedals in the next sequence as if he were trying to get away from something.

He was pushing himself physically and mentally, but he now lets exhaustion show as he stops and hangs his head. The camera leaves him alone, as if to finally reflect on his state by himself rather than the expectations of an outsider. 

After holding in emotions for so long, we finally reach the boiling point and let it all out.

As the song comes to a calm end, the screen goes blank and Eunkwang sings “Farewell” to that self in the mirror that held him back. Life has returned to normal as Eunkwang cycles calmly through the same landscapes again but:

a) in the opposite direction.

and b) with the beginnings of a genuine smile.