#112
“Hey. You know perfectly well these walls aren’t soundproof, so why are you doing this? Do you know what time it is?”
“I’m… s-sorry.”
His voice came out trembling pathetically, so Nam Seonwoo swallowed once and apologized again. His appearance must have seemed strange, as the man grumbled with annoyance.
“Shit, first some crazy guy making a racket earlier. People are trying to sleep and in pairs you—”
“Earlier?”
Nam Seonwoo suddenly lifted his face. Startled by the unexpected reaction, the man flinched back, but Nam Seonwoo stepped two paces closer and asked:
“Who… who came here?”
Sensing that Nam Seonwoo wouldn’t back down easily without an answer, the man cursed. But Nam Seonwoo turned pale at the witness account that followed.
“You think he just came? He was pounding on your door like crazy. I thought he was a real lunatic. Did you get mixed up with some mental patient?”
“What?”
“Damn, this really tall guy mumbling to himself—it was creepy as hell. And he was barefoot, that guy.”
The moment he heard those words, the rest of what the man said became inaudible. It was Kang Jihan. Kang Jihan had come here looking for him, and then disappeared somewhere.
‘Where on earth…’
Where could he have gone?
…Think. Think, Nam Seonwoo.
He said he had the same dream every night. Recalling how he had gasped as if swallowed by the dream, Kang Jihan might not be in his right mind right now. If he was so consumed by the content of the dream that he couldn’t even take his phone or shoes…
‘You said we should break up…’
The place where they had broken up was in front of the school gate where the graduation banner had hung. Had he gone to the high school? Or should he check the family home where Kang Jihan had lived before?
But his intuition seemed to whisper that it was neither of those places. That wasn’t the only time you spoke of breaking up, was it?
‘Dream of disappearing.’
Suddenly, what came to mind was Kang Jihan in a white gown and the porridge placed beside his nameplate.
His thoughts became foggy, as if he’d been hit on the head with a blunt object. Then his mind began rapidly rewinding through memories as if searching for a particular scene. When it suddenly stopped, the scene replayed from the hospital room where Kang Jihan had been lying.
Kang Jihan looking blankly at him as soon as he woke up. Reaching out as if he couldn’t believe it, touching him, calling his name, endlessly repeating that he was sorry. Looking back, it seemed a bit excessive for how this life’s Kang Jihan should have reacted.
And the nightmares that began from that time…
‘Lately, it… doesn’t feel like a dream anymore…’
Baek Heeyeon’s room, the only place that had been in disarray, and the necklace that had been taken out there seemed to overlap before his eyes.
…Could it be?
Suddenly, an absurd hypothesis occurred to him.
At that moment, Nam Seonwoo’s feet headed toward the apartment they had lived in during his previous life.
* * *
Nam Seonwoo looked up at the building’s exterior.
His gaze climbed floor by floor until it stopped at where his study had been. Looking at the house where he had lived before gave him an odd feeling. Moreover, the entrance where he was standing now was where Kang Jihan used to smoke. He could almost see his own face secretly watching Kang Jihan from that window when he wouldn’t come inside.
Well past midnight, the dim apartment was filled only with the sound of insects. He had gone up to the floor where they had lived before, just in case, but there was no trace of Kang Jihan having been there. He had expected as much. Kang Jihan had left without even his phone, let alone his wallet, so he was probably wandering this long distance on foot.
‘Will he come?’
He didn’t know whether to hope Kang Jihan would come here or not. Unorganized thoughts floated around wildly.
When had it started? When had Kang Jihan begun to remember?
His thoughts kept returning to that hospital room where Kang Jihan had awakened. Now he heard differently those words asking if he could do better this time, if Nam Seonwoo couldn’t like him again.
Had his memory actually returned from that moment? But even then, there were still many things that didn’t make sense. His reaction when Nam Seonwoo had asked about the bed sheets and toast, for instance.
Kang Jihan had seemed flustered then. That expression of being caught off guard wasn’t one that someone pretending not to “remember” would make. It was closer to a look that said “that’s impossible.” So clearly, until a few days ago, Kang Jihan hadn’t remembered.
‘What exactly is going on here…’
Everything felt as vague as clouds. Only Kang Jihan could solve all these questions. He needed to ask Kang Jihan directly.
Just then, he heard footsteps. The soft sound beneath the insect chirping was so familiar he could almost estimate the stride length.
Fixing his eyes in the direction of the sound, he began to see a familiar silhouette in the distance. The moment he realized it was Kang Jihan, complex emotions surged within him, but his legs were already running toward him.
“You…!”
Numerous questions and reproaches mixed beneath his throat. Unable to grasp what to say first, Nam Seonwoo bit his trembling lips firmly and looked at Kang Jihan’s face.
But Kang Jihan had a strange expression. Though he clearly recognized Nam Seonwoo, he had turned pale as if seeing someone he shouldn’t see. As if he had hoped Nam Seonwoo wouldn’t be here.
Bewildered as he was, Nam Seonwoo needed to confirm the most important thing first. He asked with a trembling voice:
“What are you? How did you know to come here?”
“…”
“Do you… remember everything?”
If the answer was yes, what should he say? What words should he start with? Nam Seonwoo held his breath and waited for Kang Jihan’s answer. He saw the heavily silent mouth slowly open.
“Memory.”
But what came out wasn’t an answer, but a soliloquy.
“So it really was me…”
After uttering these incomprehensible words, his lips stopped moving. Listlessly frozen, they had lost their original color and were palely dried up.
Nam Seonwoo’s gaze, which had been fixed there, slowly moved upward. Through the disheveled hair, he could see eyes floating in empty space. What filled those unfathomable eyes was pitch-black despair. Nam Seonwoo hurriedly spoke:
“Jihan.”
“Then you…”
The voices that emerged simultaneously seemed to make the frozen air vibrate. Nam Seonwoo hesitated, but Kang Jihan’s voice continued:
“Why did you accept me?”
“What?”
He couldn’t follow Kang Jihan’s words. Was it true that his memory had returned? If so, why were these his first words, and exactly when had he started remembering? He couldn’t grasp anything. It felt like something was subtly misaligned.
It was Kang Jihan who broke the creaking silence.
“You asked what I would do if I could go back to the past.”
It was a question Nam Seonwoo had asked Kang Jihan when he was using his arm as a pillow. A question he had asked to confirm, when Kang Jihan had asserted that he wouldn’t lose the ring. The subtle sense of incongruity he had felt then was now filling the air again.
“That ‘past’ is now, isn’t it?”
At that moment, Nam Seonwoo realized where this sense of incongruity was coming from.
Kang Jihan knew about his previous life. The fact that he had found this apartment was proof of that. But he didn’t seem like someone whose memory had “returned.” From the beginning, he had been talking about his memory as if observing it from a third-person perspective. The feeling of something not aligning, of being out of joint, originated precisely from there.
With his thoughts in a jumble, Nam Seonwoo touched his temple and said:
“I don’t understand a word of what you’re saying.”
To understand exactly what was going on, he first needed to hear precisely what the dream was about.
“Explain it to me step by step so I can understand. What exactly did you see in your dream?”
The dream of breaking up and disappearing. He needed to confirm first whether it really matched what had happened in his previous life.
As Nam Seonwoo asked in a calm, settled voice, Kang Jihan’s agitation subsided. The eyes that had been emptily wandering in space were now clearly focused on Nam Seonwoo.
“…At first, I thought it was an absurd dream.”
The voice that came from Kang Jihan’s mouth was still hollow.
“You were smiling and saying we should break up, and I just let you go.”
As expected, Kang Jihan’s dream was not about the breakup at nineteen, but at thirty-four. Nam Seonwoo recalled how he had smiled with relief as he said they should break up. But the story that followed was unfamiliar to him.
“I kept waiting. Here in this apartment, at the hospital with my name on it, and also at the nearby hotel and in the car.”
“…”
“I didn’t close my eyes for a moment, afraid you might come and go while I was briefly asleep, yet I never went to look for you.”
Kang Jihan hadn’t followed him when he left after breaking up, nor when he left the hospital. It was somehow difficult to imagine that Kang Jihan, whom he had believed would go on with his life as if nothing had happened, had been continuously waiting for him.
“Then when I found you lying in the hospital room…”
Kang Jihan, who had been struggling to continue, tried to compose himself. His face, contorted with agony, was already revealing what would come next.
Nam Seonwoo swallowed a sigh. Since the emergency contact was set to Park Gyuhyeon, it wasn’t hard to understand that Park Gyuhyeon hadn’t contacted Kang Jihan. And how Kang Jihan, who had been notified too late, must have felt… Nam Seonwoo thought it wouldn’t be much different from the Kang Jihan standing before him now.
“You can stop there.”
There was no need to hear the rest. It was an ending Nam Seonwoo already knew. He didn’t want to know in detail what thoughts Kang Jihan had during that time or what emotions he had felt. It was already terribly painful just to watch Kang Jihan struggling in his nightmares.
Whether due to the shock of the accident or not, what was certain was that from that point on, the memories of his previous life had been recreated as dreams. But then why didn’t Kang Jihan speak of those memories as his own? He had thought the memories connected as if synchronizing, but was that not the case?
As if reading that question, Kang Jihan spoke:
“You said it too. That when you come to like someone too much, you become anxious.”
Nam Seonwoo nodded. He remembered his answer to Kang Jihan when asked for the reason for the breakup—that it was because he liked him too much—and how Kang Jihan had unexpectedly understood. And also the anxiety that had been present in Kang Jihan’s eyes at that time.
“So I thought that was it. Since you were meeting me again, I was so happy but anxious, and that’s why I was having those dreams.”
So Kang Jihan had believed that his vague anxiety about possibly breaking up again had manifested as dreams. Nam Seonwoo, following Kang Jihan’s story step by step, was stunned by what came next.
“But if it was just a delusion, how would I know about habits you never mentioned?”
…So that was when.
It wasn’t that his insomnia had worsened because his mother’s return from business trip was approaching, and he was afraid of being separated soon. The turning point in Kang Jihan’s condition was then. When Nam Seonwoo had asked how he knew about his usual breakfast menu and favorite bed sheets. After that, Kang Jihan could no longer dismiss the recurring dreams as mere delusions.
It was a perfect misunderstanding. At that time, Nam Seonwoo had been genuinely relieved by Kang Jihan’s reaction. He now keenly realized how selfish he had been, feeling reassured that Kang Jihan remembered him, even if only in his subconscious.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
