Half a Step Behind
His back.
As I left the cafeteria, the clamor behind me faded into the distance. I slid my tray into the return slot and stepped out into the hallway, only to find that Kim Seol-ah, who had left her seat first, was already nowhere to be seen.
The stiff profile of her face as she set down her spoon and walked out had stuck with me the whole time, but she had been gone long enough that she must have gotten far by now.
Beside me, Park So-yeon grumbled.
"I finally thought I could eat a decent meal in peace, and she just gets up without a word. If it was that uncomfortable, she should've just moved seats."
Apparently that awkward table earlier hadn't sat well with So-yeon either. I couldn't find a proper reply, so I simply kept walking.
I could have just let it go. I had no right to go prying into someone else's heart. And yet my feet kept carrying me toward our classroom.
Class 1-7. The room I shared with Kim Seol-ah and Woo Han-gyeol.
When I opened the door, Seol-ah's seat was empty. She was the kind of girl who always sat by the window during lunch reading a book alone, but today only her bag sat there forlornly. There was no sign she had come back into the room at all.
Given that she had left halfway through the meal, she couldn't have gone far. I ran through the places she might go, and the library suddenly came to mind. The place she slipped away to every lunch period to secretly read romance novels. If that was where she went when her heart was a mess, she might be curled up in some corner seat by now.
I thought I understood what Seol-ah must be feeling. That sensation of standing right there and watching the person you had held in your heart for so long turn out to be thinking something completely different from you. I knew that feeling. I had lived through it only a few days ago.
Which was exactly why I couldn't pretend I hadn't noticed.
Strangely enough, my feet were already heading for the library. After nearly twenty years of a body trained for nothing but looking after someone else, even with that someone gone I was still glancing around for a person to take care of.
I had no idea what state Seol-ah was in right now. She might be crying somewhere alone. Or she might be swallowing something down and taking it out on thin air. In moments like that, a whole crowd rushing over does no good. All you need is one quiet person willing to stay by your side.
So if I was going, it had to be alone. Me, the one who could meet her with the same emotion and actually understand.
"So-yeon. Let's talk later."
That was all I left behind as I started toward the library. So-yeon looked like she might say something in reply, but I didn't turn around.
I stood still and watched Lee Ji-an's retreating back grow smaller.
Ah... even just now, I couldn't catch hold of that back. I had lifted my hand halfway and then simply let it fall again.
The words let me come with you had risen all the way to the top of my throat, and still I swallowed them in the end.
It wasn't anything new. I had always been like this in front of Lee Ji-an.
Pulling back the hand I was about to reach out. Swallowing the words I was about to say. That was the way I loved him.
I remembered a summer when I was around ten.
Woo Han-gyeol's cold had turned into pneumonia and she had been hospitalized, so Ji-an spent the entire vacation at the hospital. I went to visit the room once and stopped dead in front of the door.
Ji-an was sitting at the bedside peeling fruit for Han-gyeol to eat. The air between the two of them looked like a finished painting all on its own—bright, healthy, happy without a single crack. I stood in the gap of the door and simply watched.
I had been about to tug on his sleeve and ask him to come play outside, but I lowered my hand. My fingertips never even brushed his clothes. There didn't seem to be any room for me in the profile of a face that only looked at Han-gyeol.
I left the room without managing a single word. The hallway on the way out felt especially long and lonely that day.
The winter I was fourteen, the day the first snow fell, is even clearer.
I found out late that Han-gyeol had gotten badly sick after playing in the snow. Days of unanswered messages about going to look at the snow together sent me all the way to the hospital, where I found him keeping watch at the bedside, tightly holding the hand of the sleeping Han-gyeol.
The hand that had reached for the doorknob stopped in midair. It felt like I shouldn't go in there. I quietly lowered my hand and left the hospital alone. Then I walked all the way home, letting every flake of falling snow hit me.
That year's first snow, I faced alone too.
The sports festival when I was seventeen was no different.
Everyone on the field was cheering themselves hoarse, but Ji-an was nowhere to be found. After searching for a long time I spotted him through the window of an empty classroom. Han-gyeol, who hadn't been able to join the events, was resting lightly against his shoulder.
I put my hand on the doorknob to open the classroom door and call him, then took that hand away again. That quiet classroom with just the two of them in it looked, through a single pane of glass, like some distant other world. In the end I never opened the door. I went back to the field and raised my voice as if nothing were wrong.
Then and now, all I ever did was pull back the hand I had stretched out.
If I just made up my mind it would only be half a step away, yet that half-step was the farthest distance in the world to me. Between Lee Ji-an and Woo Han-gyeol there was always a place I could not step into. In none of their summers, in none of their winters, did I ever manage to set foot. I simply grew used to watching the two of them from outside the door.
To me he was always the person on the other side of a door, the other side of a pane of glass.
But I thought today would be different.
In the few days since Han-gyeol had turned her heart toward someone else and Ji-an had stepped back from her, that seat beside him that had always been occupied stood empty for the first time. If I sat in the place Han-gyeol used to sit and tossed him some stupid joke, maybe this time he would look at me instead of her and give me a faint smile.
I painted that tiny scene inside my head over and over throughout the day. It felt like this time I might finally cross that half-step.
So today in the cafeteria I actually sat down next to Lee Ji-an. Right in the seat that had always been Han-gyeol's.
And only after I was sitting there did I understand. Just because the seat was empty didn't mean he would look at me. Even with me right beside him, Ji-an kept staring somewhere else the whole time. The seat next to Lee Ji-an had always belonged to the person he was looking at, never to the person sitting there.
Today I even steeled myself and followed him out when he left. Holding my tray, I tried for the first time to walk side by side with him and say let's go together. But the moment we stepped into the hallway he left me behind again and walked off alone.
In the end I was back half a step behind him today too. My feet could follow, but my hands could never quite reach. Only the person he was looking at had changed from Han-gyeol to Seol-ah. What I always saw was still his back.
I knew the back of Lee Ji-an far better than his face. Which way his shoulders tilted, when his steps quickened. I felt like I could draw that back with my eyes closed. Yet the memories of him actually turning around and smiling at me I could count on one hand.
Sadly, I understood better than anyone what kind of person he was to Han-gyeol. And how bitter it is to stay by someone's side for so long only to remain nothing more than the person who is there.
And yet the fact that I was exactly that kind of person to him was something neither of us had ever put into words.
Everyone wanted something from Lee Ji-an. Han-gyeol wanted care. The kids in class quietly dumped the dirty work on him. Only I pretended to want nothing. In truth I wanted more than anyone, but I was so afraid of being found out that I always just smiled and acted fine.
I never once spoke my heart straight out. The words I like you and don't go I always wrapped inside jokes and handed over that way. At least then, if I were caught, I could laugh it off. If I clumsily showed my feelings and lost even this comfortable place, I wouldn't be able to stay by his side at all.
Right. Even this relationship would end someday.
To Ji-an I was just an old, comfortable friend. And comfortable people never become special people.
Still, even half a step behind counts as by his side, I told myself again today. I had watched from right beside him how chaotic his head must be over the whole Han-gyeol mess. Piling my own feelings on top of someone who could barely steady his own heart was something I simply could not do.
So I finished lowering the arm that had been hanging half-raised. As always, the answer was the same. Not now. When he was hurting over Han-gyeol, and now that Seol-ah had entered the picture, for me it was always not now.
If I keep putting it off like this, that someday will never come. I know that, and still every time I lower my hand.
Toward the back growing smaller in the distance I murmured, very softly,
"......Idiot."
Whether I was saying it to him or to myself, even I couldn't tell. He was an idiot for never noticing a heart that had stayed by his side so long, and I was an idiot for years of never once grabbing the hand I had stretched out.
He had watched Han-gyeol's back for a long time, and I had watched his back just as long.
Tomorrow I would probably be standing next to him again with a perfectly normal face, tossing out some dumb joke. It was the only way I knew.
And so today, too, I stayed half a step behind him and watched for a long time as that back disappeared into the crowd. That half-step that had always seemed close enough to touch if I just reached out—today, once again, I never managed to close it by even a single pace.