A Sense of Loss
A sense of loss.
In this world, there are people who pull adventure forward, and people who simply stay behind.
I had always been the latter.
Taking someone by the hand and leading them out into the wide world had never suited me. Remaining at their side, quietly looking after them — that was all I knew how to do.
There had been a time when I poured my whole heart into caring for someone, only to be left holding nothing at the end.
Whose face it had been, I could no longer clearly remember. What lingered was only that hollow feeling of having stayed until the very last moment and still having nothing left — a emptiness that followed me for a long, long time.
That was a story from my previous life.
That day, too, had been nothing special.
To kill some leftover time, I had idly switched on a perfectly ordinary harem romantic comedy of the kind you could find anywhere.
Several girls circling a single boy, each of them quietly growing a heart of her own — a story without a single original bone in its body.
Everyone else fell for the protagonist. I was a little different.
My gaze never stayed in the center of the screen. It kept drifting to two figures who always stood off to the side.
The frail heroine, and the supporting male lead who never left her side.
A man who spent his whole life never abandoning a girl who might collapse at any moment, and who in the end received nothing in return. That bitter relationship brushed against certain stretches of the life I had already lived, and the resemblance unsettled me.
Perhaps that was why. Even knowing the supporting male lead's inevitable ending, I kept finding my heart drawn back to the two of them.
I remember thinking, uselessly, through the glass of the screen: If it were me, I would want at least that person to be happy.
And then one day I opened my eyes, and I was that supporting male lead from the anime.
At first I assumed it was a dream I would wake from after a few feverish days. But the time here was not some counterfeit world on the other side of a monitor.
A narrow room faintly steeped in the smell of disinfectant. The small, labored breathing of a child burning with fever. A face that would shake its head, refusing medicine, and then reluctantly smile the moment a piece of candy was pressed into its hand.
From the earliest years of this second life of mine, she had always been there.
Woo Han-gyeol. That was her name.
Knowing the original story's course, I still stayed by her side.
At first it was only because of the bitter memories of my previous life. A cheap little compensation complex, directed at my own past — the wish that this small world I was looking after, at least, would not break.
But nearly twenty years was never something that could be summarized in a few anime scenes.
While other children were learning to ride bicycles, I was first memorizing how to read a thermometer and the names of every medicine she took.
The summer she turned ten. A simple cold could still spiral into pneumonia and land her in the hospital, and because of her I never once went to the ocean the way everyone else did.
One day when the cicadas were especially loud, she stared endlessly out the hospital window and said to me,
"Because of me, you can't even go to the sea. Don't you find me annoying?"
"I do. So get better already and walk around on your own two feet."
At my curt answer she must have felt a surge of feeling; she yanked the blanket up over her head.
Instead of coaxing the covers down, I sat beside the bed and quietly turned the pages of a book until she fell asleep — until the intermittent sniffling from under the blanket evened out into steady breathing.
The winter she turned fourteen. It was the day of the first snow.
Caught in a sudden flurry on the way home from school, she fell badly ill for days afterward.
Watching her thrash through the night with a fever so high she talked in her sleep, I stayed awake until dawn, holding her hand.
A few days later, when the fever finally broke and she opened her eyes with that pale face, she carefully stroked the hair of my head where I had dozed off slumped over the chair.
"…I'm sorry. I'm always just getting sick."
"If you know that, then take your medicine on time."
"Later, when I'm really healthy…"
Her voice trembled, just barely.
"Then I'll take care of everything for you. All the places you wanted to go, all the fun places — we'll go together… and if you get sick, I'll stay up all night nursing you."
I couldn't answer that promise. I was the only one who knew it was a vow that could never be kept.
The sports festival the year she turned sixteen.
When everyone else had gone out to the field and the empty classroom left just the two of us alone.
A cold, damp can pressed against my cheek while I stared blankly at the cheers drifting in through the window. It was the sports drink she had set aside as her own share.
"You're good at running, you know. You don't have to worry about me. You could go out and play."
"It's fine. I've always hated sweating."
Whether she believed the lie or not, she sat down beside me and quietly rested her head against my shoulder.
I spent most of the school years I had been given a second time as her guardian.
My world was locked inside the narrow radius of her house, the hospital, and school.
But I never felt cheated. For every hour I gave, she was filling in my empty corners in her own clumsy, gentle way.
I remembered the hands that, after a bout of sulking behind the excuse of being sick, would quietly set the tastiest side dish from her own portion onto my rice bowl the moment I looked tired.
The letters she wrote me every birthday in crooked handwriting. The scarves she knit with awkward skill each winter and wound around my neck.
Those small, heavy hours piled up, layer upon layer, until somewhere along the way the original story stopped mattering at all.
I was sincerely in love with her.
But time moved exactly as it was meant to.
The spring she turned seventeen. After Ha Yu-jin — the protagonist of this world — appeared, her world expanded beyond me in an instant.
Eyes that had always been calm and quiet when they looked at me sparkled whenever they turned toward him.
The girl who used to grow melancholy at the mere sight of leaves falling outside the window would laugh out loud at one of his throwaway jokes, as if she had been given the whole world.
The moment I saw that healthy, dazzling vitality, I knew the ending that was coming.
What he gave her was hope itself — happiness and a sense of a future I had never managed to give her, even after pouring twenty years into the effort.
I could never become that kind of person. Taking someone by the hand and drawing them out into the wide world was a garment that, no matter how hard I tried it on, would never fit me.
And then today.
On the familiar school rooftop, I finally heard the words I had rehearsed in my head a thousand times.
"Hey… I think I like Yu-jin sunbae."
Careful, but unable to hide the certainty underneath.
A line I had heard repeated hundreds of times in the anime landed against my ear as reality.
In the original, I had been unable to bear the betrayal in that moment. I had cursed him out and gotten angry. Despairing that twenty years of time had been shoved aside by a single season of excitement, I had ended that long connection in the pettiest way possible.
But I didn't want to do that.
In the eyes looking at me there were none of the damp fragments of my past. There was no frightened little girl terrified of collapsing at any second.
Just the face of an ordinary person who had fallen in love, looking forward to tomorrow.
"…I see."
It stung a little — no, quite a lot — but I nodded calmly.
"I'll root for you. Give it your best."
I saw her shoulders stiffen, but I didn't add anything more.
I looked at her face one last time, as if to fix it in my eyes. Then I slowly turned my back and walked toward the rooftop door.
Behind me I felt the faint sense of someone about to speak, but I never looked back.
In the end, I had failed to become the protagonist in this life either. Twenty years of unrequited love closed out this hollowly.
But it didn't matter.
In my previous life I had stayed by someone's side and still had to let them go. This time was different.
She hadn't died. She was no longer sick, and she was walking forward on her own two feet, smiling brightly.
In exchange for losing my place at her side, she had survived. At least that much was certain.
My devotion had not been completely meaningless. That a first love would remain not as a lover, but as a longtime childhood friend — I told myself that was enough.
And so my second unrequited love came to an end.
"…It's really over."
The words to myself came out more calmly than I expected.
Somewhere between relief and the hollow feeling of having emptied myself completely.
Without deciding where to go, I simply walked wherever my feet carried me.
On the street where the sun was tipping toward evening, students heading home and people finished with their work mixed together, each of them flowing toward their own night.
Laughter, chatter, footsteps hurrying somewhere. The world turned as lively as it always had.
Only a strange sense of disconnection clung to me, as if all that vitality were simply going around me.
Something I had spent twenty years building had collapsed in an instant, and not a single detail of the street had changed. That fact felt lonelier still.
Suddenly it struck me that at this hour, on any ordinary day, she would already have messaged me. Asking what I had eaten. Whether anything had happened.
Out of habit I took out my phone, then put it straight back into my pocket. It was no longer something I needed to look after.
How long did I walk? When I came back to myself, I was standing in front of a quiet park in the opposite direction from home.
A place I would never have bothered to set foot in under normal circumstances.
Further along the sparsely lit path, I saw an empty bench.
Wanting to rest my legs, I shoved my hands into my pockets out of habit and walked slowly toward it.
And there I stopped.
In one corner of the bench, where the dark had settled lightly, a girl in school uniform sat curled into herself.
Face buried in her knees, small shoulders shaking as she tried to smother the sound.
The way she was swallowing down a cry that kept trying to escape looked, somehow, a little like me from just a moment ago.
I told myself I should turn around. I had no right to casually peer into someone else's grief.
And yet, for some reason, I found I could not easily lift my feet from that spot.
