#Side Story 13
Ji-ae didn’t regret bringing Hwi-kyung back to life. It was better to make him unable to die than to attend a child’s funeral. Using any means to save Hwi-kyung was the best option available to Ji-ae at that time.
It would be a lie to say she felt no guilt. Hwi-kyung repeatedly died in front of Ji-ae. To fulfill Ji-ae’s wish, Hwi-kyung inevitably had to die. Death had to precede salvation.
Ji-ae gradually became desensitized each time she witnessed her son’s corpse through various means of death. At first, she screamed, but afterward, she didn’t even flinch when faced with a dead body.
Eventually, when time was turned back, Hwi-kyung would revive. Even if she said harsh words now, the child would forget after dying, and if she left him for a few days, once time was reversed, the neglect never happened.
Turning back time meant being able to sweep up spilled regrets. Each time the dead Hwi-kyung came back to life, Ji-ae felt both remorse and relief. The child grew up on his own without her care, even if growth was slower due to time reversals.
How convenient is the excuse that it couldn’t be helped? To avoid feeling guilty, Ji-ae often fell into the delusion that she had done her best. Indeed, without her, Hwi-kyung would have died at the age of five. Being unable to die was better than dying. At least Ji-ae thought so. You can’t die. Without you, I…
So who could blame her?
Ji-ae sometimes disgusted herself. When self-justifications and comforting delusions failed to function, she often couldn’t understand what she had done. What was I thinking, wanting to kill my child? With what resolution did I make him unable to die?
That’s why she didn’t want to meet Hwi-kyung again. Even when she heard through Ok-ja that Hwi-kyung was seeing someone, she didn’t bother to ask for details.
Hwi-kyung was now a child who had left her hands. Not a child who had left, but a child Ji-ae had let go. What could be more absurd than trying to return and play the role of a mother again?
“I really didn’t know things would turn out this way.”
Familiar excuses flowed from Ji-ae’s lips. She had uttered the same words when she studied hard but failed to get into her desired university, when she lost financial control due to a wrong marriage, when she decided to remain silent despite knowing her husband’s infidelity.
Really, she didn’t know it would turn out that way. How many people would be certain that a wish would come true just because they made it? If Ji-ae had known early on what Hwi-kyung would go through, she wouldn’t have made the wish even with a knife to her throat.
“I just wanted him to live healthily, without illness, and happily.”
“I didn’t bring it up to blame you.”
“I know. You think I should say something to Hwi-kyung?”
“……”
“I don’t even have the right. If I had held out a little longer, I might have killed the child with my own hands.”
“But you didn’t.”
“I may not have done it, but I always thought about it. Sometimes certain thoughts become sins even if not acted upon.”
Do a mother and son really need to be this similar? Gyo-ha looked bewilderedly at Ji-ae, who was digging her own grave just like Hwi-kyung would.
Mother and son resembled each other not just in appearance or small habits but in personality too. Ji-ae was, if anything, identical to Hwi-kyung when Gyo-ha first met him in the thirteenth regression. Especially in how her nerves were on edge, drawing lines and displaying defense mechanisms before others could say anything.
Gyo-ha had become skilled at dealing with such personalities thanks to Hwi-kyung, but persuading Ji-ae was difficult even for him. Just as Ji-ae was a huge trauma for Hwi-kyung, Hwi-kyung was an indelible wrong for Ji-ae.
“Is he not sick these days? In the past… the child was sick quite often. I was a bit concerned about that.”
Ji-ae asked Gyo-ha as she left, almost like she was escaping.
“Yes.”
“That’s all I needed to know, then.”
Cold words followed, suggesting they would never meet again. Gyo-ha knew she was deliberately being harsh, but this time, he chose not to point it out.
* * *
Gyo-ha’s graduation certificate was placed in the center of the living room. This was thanks to Hwi-kyung being greatly impressed by Gyo-ha’s graduation. I absolutely thought you’d never graduate, but you actually did!
While integrated master’s and doctoral programs typically require graduation within 8 semesters1), Gyo-ha could only free himself from graduate school after a full 12 semesters. It couldn’t be helped since all his dissertations lacked expertise.
If only the system of granting degrees just for paying dissertation review fees, like in Korea, had prevailed, but unfortunately, American graduate schools had strict graduation requirements. Gyo-ha couldn’t meet the rigorous graduation criteria and had to spend an additional 2 semesters as Professor MacGuire’s teaching assistant.
As a result, he finally succeeded in wearing a doctoral cap. How much tuition had gone into this degree? It’s truly absurd that learning costs this much.
In any case, Gyo-ha proposed to Hwi-kyung as planned right after graduation. Since it was a long-anticipated proposal, Hwi-kyung readily accepted Gyo-ha’s request to marry him.
“I still think it should have diamonds embedded in it. It’s a wedding ring after all.”
“Didn’t we agree to match with a simple design?”
“This is simple enough.”
“What I mean is… is there really a need for diamonds to that extent?”
“Yes.”
But the real challenges always begin with wedding preparations.
According to one study, two out of ten couples break up while preparing for their wedding. Hwi-kyung recently began to believe in this baseless research.
The wedding ceremony he had taken for granted cost too much money. Hwi-kyung was shocked at the venue rental fee. They’re charging this amount for renting the venue for just a few hours, not a month? It surely seemed like an extra zero had been mistakenly added.
If someone were to ask what he was worried about when his partner was the youngest son of a chaebol family, Hwi-kyung would have much to say. Though they say even the rich can last three generations after going bankrupt, Hwi-kyung had no intention of living off Gyo-ha unilaterally.
Having worked a job and earned money, with savings from aggressive regression investor stock investments, Hwi-kyung’s pride wouldn’t allow him to cling to Lee Gyo-ha, who wasn’t even earning money despite being from a wealthy family.
Others would click their tongues, calling it the complaints of someone who already had plenty. If Hwi-kyung were a bit younger (his perceived age had already exceeded a century), he would have freely spent money from Gyo-ha’s pocket. What reason could there be not to do so when that’s what Gyo-ha himself wanted?
However, having aged and lived through sixteen regressions, Hwi-kyung was only young in body. The rest of him was all old-fashioned. Jung Hwi-kyung seriously believed that people should have ‘principles.’
“I said I’d bring the rings as my dowry.”
“I didn’t say to bring ones at that price.”
“What does the price matter!”
“Didn’t we initially promise to stick to a budget?”
“Ha, Hwi-kyung is too innocent to know, but promises are made to be broken.”
“More nonsense.”
Gyo-ha was exasperated by such a Hwi-kyung. Just when he thought Hwi-kyung had gotten used to accepting things from others, he regressed back to being a conservative old-timer with the wedding preparations. The soul of the TF team leader who used to suggest weekend hiking had possessed Hwi-kyung.
“The house is in your name, so bringing a dowry itself doesn’t make economic sense…”
“I really hate the word ‘economic sense.'”
“But listen. Even between people who love each other, one-sided giving and receiving isn’t healthy…”
“I think it’s more pathological to calculate everything so precisely and think you must pay back exactly what you receive.”
And so began the battle between spear and shield.
Here is a spear that penetrates everything. This spear values efficiency and rationality, and is steeped in the belief that one shouldn’t unilaterally receive from others. Having received much from Gyo-ha, the spear—Jung Hwi-kyung’s opinion—is that the wedding should be paid for with money he has saved.
And here is a shield that blocks everything. This shield believes that considering efficiency and rationality in love is worse than being a machine. If you’re dating a person, not an AI, shouldn’t you give more when you want to give more and receive more when you want to receive more?
People these days are problematic because they want to extract from others exactly what they’ve given, but Hwi-kyung, a fake modern person who had lived for over a century, was in a frenzy wanting to do for others exactly what had been done for him. Thanks to this, the shield, Lee Gyo-ha, was distressed to death.
…Even if life in general is black, should the wedding preparation process also be this black?
[Footnotes Collection]
1) In theory, integrated master’s and doctoral programs can be completed in a minimum of 4 years (8 semesters). It can take longer due to issues with dissertations or credit completion. On average, many graduate in their 5th-6th year.
Author: Hyacinthus B
Hyacinthus
