The real reason I rushed to enlist in the Korean military

Okay I wasn't going to post this but I need to get it out.

So before I got drafted, I went on this Europe backpacking trip. First time leaving Korea. I'd killed myself maintaining my GPA, got a scholarship, and my parents said if I got the scholarship they'd give me the tuition money as spending cash. So I had actual money for once. Germany, France, the whole thing. I was SO excited.

And yeah, backpacking as a first-timer is exactly as rough as it sounds. Language barrier, couldn't find basic stuff like medicine or laundry powder anywhere, constant small disasters. But I was managing. Two weeks in, almost at the finish line.

Then I did something stupid. SO stupid.

It was the last day of the trip and I was going through my photos and realized. I had barely any pictures with my own face in them. Weeks of travel and nothing to show for it personally. I was gutted. So I'm in this church, right. This 800-year-old church. And my smooth-brained 20-something self decides the solution is to take out my Monami ballpoint pen (the Korean one, the dark blue one) and WRITE MY FULL NAME, the date, and "was here" on the actual wall of this centuries-old church.

Then I posed in front of it. Took three photos. Kept the best one. Deleted the other two. And just. walked out. Like nothing happened.

I went home. Trip over.

That night I got hit with a fever so bad I couldn't move for THREE DAYS. My parents nursed me the whole time. I didn't even get to brag about my trip, I was just lying there burning up. The fever broke eventually but even after I recovered I kept getting random chills and shaking for no reason. Constant low-grade dread. Something felt wrong in a way I couldn't explain.

And then the sleep paralysis started.

Now I'd had sleep paralysis before. Never scared me. It always felt like something was watching over me, weirdly. This was different.

In the dreams I wasn't lying in my bed. I was hanging upside down from a massive wooden gallows structure, feet bound, suspended. Like the Hanged Man tarot card, I realized later. And things would approach me. Not people. Things that looked vaguely human but weren't. Faces with blood running down them, grinning. Cackling "hehehe kekeke hohohoh" at me strung up there.

But that wasn't even the scary part.

The scary part was that these things would lean in close, curious, and then something ELSE would appear and just. decapitate them. One by one. They'd stretch toward me and their heads would come off, and they'd drop in front of me with this expression of complete confusion on their severed faces, and I'd wake up screaming.

This happened for days.

I couldn't function. And then out of nowhere I remembered something. Before my 수능¹, my mom had taken me to a shaman just to calm my nerves before the exam. The shaman had looked at me and said I had strong guardian spirits around me, that I'd rarely get sick and when I did I'd recover fast.

That memory hit me like a truck. I was shaking.

I didn't think the shaman was a fraud. I started thinking maybe whatever was wrong with me wasn't physical at all.

That same night I saw it properly.

I woke up to a sound and my body just. got up. Not because I wanted to. Against my will I walked to my balcony and looked down at the apartment complex below. I didn't want to look. But I looked.

There was thin fog over the parking lot, the streetlights barely cutting through. And something moved in it.

It was on a horse.

I had never seen anything like it. I'm still trying to figure out how to describe what I saw and I genuinely can't—