Letter 0 — I Plead Not-Guilty
A Note Before We Begin
On the night of August 25th, 2025, I stood on a mountain at 3 a.m. while a dead grandmother spoke through a living woman and named me 인간 동티 — a human affliction. Not possessed. The affliction itself.
I didn’t cry. I froze.
And then I thanked her. I meant it completely.
This is where the story ends. Which means it’s where we have to begin.
I arrived at the temple on the 28th of August 2025 — our third anniversary, one day after the breakup. We had started on August 28th, 2022. Three years to the day, I walked into a mountain and began again.
I told myself I came to heal.
What I was actually doing was preparing a PowerPoint presentation to prove I had changed enough to be taken back. I named it Why You Should Choose This Product. I was version 3.0. New and improved. Ready for relaunch.
Here is the timeline, because the timeline is part of the story:
We moved in together in March 2024. We met the shaman the same month, before any of the patterns had time to form without her influence. The first ceremony was in September 2024. By October, we were living under my parents’ roof while I was at my sickest. We moved into a new apartment in March 2025. Her middle sister arrived in April. The cat ceremony was in May. The 3 am ceremony was the night of August 25th, running into the 26th. The breakup — officially August 27th, though the ending had already happened on a mountain in the dark — was the day before our anniversary.
For several months, I wrote letters I believed were addressed to a reunion. I wrote from inside the verdict. I wrote grateful to the people who had dismantled me, because I believed their dismantling was correction and their correction was care.
I was the villain of my own story. I was certain.
I kept every letter. I thought I would hand them to her when we reunited — look, I wrote to you every day, I never stopped, here. She never came. And the letters I had been keeping for her became something else entirely.
There is a line from Hamilton I keep returning to. Before the finale, when Eliza finally stops performing the role the story gave her:
I’m erasing myself from the narrative.
She takes the letters. She steps back. And then — after everything — she steps forward on her own terms.
Who lives, who dies, who tells your story.
I am telling mine.
January 2026: a conversation with a Buddhist nun cracked something open.
I came home. I read back what I had written from inside it — with some distance, some time, some of my own mind returned to me. And I began to see what had actually happened. Not the version I had been given. The truth.
What you are about to read spans forty-four letters across ten and a half months. It tells the story of a relationship, a shaman, a system that had no door, two sisters, cats abandoned in the night, a house that was never mine, an engine I kept running out to meet — and the 3 am ceremony on a mountain where I finally understood what I had walked into.
The verdict the shaman delivered: cleverly evil. Human affliction. Too broken to fix.
My verdict: not guilty.
Not guilty does not mean blameless. It means the case does not hold.
If you have ever been so convinced you were the problem that you felt grateful to the people dismantling you, this is for you.
It is also for me.
I plead not-guilty.
Emotionally yours — and finally telling the story in my own voice,
Suinny
From a Buddhist temple in the mountains, where I arrived to be corrected and stayed to become myself.
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I’ll be publishing the letters slowly.
Thank you for reading this beginning.
The story unfolds slowly from here.