Ep. 1 Spaced Out

Whether it was moisture rising from the grass or the lack of water to hold daytime heat,

the air—warm just minutes ago—plunged the second the sun sank below the horizon.

A biting chill, unique to the Mongolian night.

Gasps of Wonder

For days, we rattled across roadless terrain that appeared on no map.

An eight-day journey that felt endless was already drawing to a close.

Without saying a word, the walls between us had crumbled, and a quiet reluctance to let go settled over the night.

Every night before, clouds rolled in or a bright moon washed out the sky, keeping the stars hidden.

Tonight, the moon was completely new.

Expecting an ink-black canvas, everyone bustled around in anticipation.

Stepping out of the bright ger, pitch-black darkness swallowed everything.

Without a single lamppost around, we unrolled our mats and sleeping bags by touch alone.

Lying side by side a short distance from the camp,

it felt as though we were the only people left in the world.

Even bundled to the chin in thick sleeping bags, the freezing air seeped in.

As we finished getting settled, a friend who had laid down first gasped.

"Whoa...!"

I hurried to zip up and leaned back.

A pale, misty haze stretched directly in front of my eyes.

'Are those clouds...?'

Seeing it for the first time, my mind needed a moment to take it in.

It was the Milky Way, densely blanketing the entire night sky.

In an instant, the name made complete sense.

How could there be so many stars, and how could their colors vary so widely?

They seemed poised to pour straight onto my chest.

A sudden wave of vertigo made the world spin.

Encounter with the Cosmos

Like a child peering through a kaleidoscope for the first time,

I was lost in the star-speckled dark when a sharp voice broke the stillness.

"Look—over there!"

Where my friend pointed,

shooting stars streaked endlessly across the sky, almost unbelievable in their frequency.

'Is it even possible for this many stars to fall?'

The sheer, unfathomable scale of the cosmos.

Lying under hundreds of billions of shining stars,

my body felt infinitely heavy, sinking into the ground beneath me—

or more precisely, pulled toward the opposite side of the universe.

Suddenly, who I was, the work I had done, and the worries I carried felt as small as dust.

Myself—the relentless ambition to achieve something grand.

My past—the pride built on years of hard work.

My future—the sudden terror of coming to an inexplicable halt.

The deep guilt of leaving behind my mother as she fought her illness.

And the nameless fears that followed.

Back in Korea, I had trapped myself inside walls of my own making, on the verge of suffocating.

Back there, every single concern felt like the most urgent, monumental matter in the world.

Under Mongolia's empty night sky,
the crushing anxieties that weighed so heavily upon me
were nothing more than a speck of dust before the cosmos—if even that.

Trapped on a daily treadmill with tunnel vision, I believed whatever was right in front of me was everything.

Confined behind walls I built myself, I pushed harder and harder with restlessness and fear.

A Small Dot on the Cosmic Stage

Beginning to see myself as nothing more than a tiny, humble speck—

paradoxically, that realization pulled me out of the cycle of self-punishment and pressure.

Is this the humility ancient sages spoke of?

The pressure to find a definitive answer,

the terror that failing to outpace everyone else would spell disaster—

they were merely fixations created by my own narrow mind.

If I am truly this small,
taking a detour or losing my way won't cause the world to collapse.

I drew in a deep breath of cold air through my chilled nose.

Even in the freezing cold, something inside quietly began to thaw.

The tension slowly left my clenched fists.

From high above, a star that seemed fixed firmly in the night sky suddenly streaked across the dark.

(End.)