The Sun and the Wind
After the words I found you left my mouth, a brief silence settled over us.
And then a tear slipped from Kim Seol-ah's eye.
One drop became two, and soon her shoulders began to shake in quiet sobs.
I stood frozen with my hand still on the doorknob. My ragged breathing stopped cold.
I had thought I'd seen enough crying people to last a lifetime. Cries from fever. Cries from fear of needles. Cries that leaked out of pain.
But I had no idea how to soothe this kind of crying.
If it were a fever, I would know. If it were a fear of needles, I would know. In front of those tears, my body moved first. Take her hand, feel her forehead, tell her it would all pass.
But before this unfamiliar weeping, I couldn't tell which hand to offer first.
A futile thought drifted through me.
What if I had been Ha Yu-jin?
Could I have laughed and made a racket like the wind and cut those tears short? Could I have coaxed a smile onto that face?
...Right. A smile.
The smile I had never once managed to bring to her face in the end.
Then Kim Seol-ah's shoulders heaved hard once more.
Asking why she was crying wasn't the answer. Neither was saying sorry, nor turning away and pretending I hadn't seen.
Because yesterday's me had been the same. If someone at the hospital room door had demanded to know what was wrong, if they had tried to soothe me and say it was fine—that would probably have been the hardest thing of all to bear.
And yesterday, Kim Seol-ah hadn't asked me anything either. She had simply said let's go, and fed me something spicy. I knew now that comfort could look like that, too.
Today it was my turn to give that back.
I drew a long breath at the doorway, careful not to let my still-ragged breathing sound like a rush.
Then, without a word, I stepped into the storage room. I left the door open. Crying in the dark seemed worse. Through the gap, the noon sunlight stretched in and lay across the dust-coated floor.
And I sank down a mat's width away from Kim Seol-ah.
Not beside her, not across from her—an in-between distance. Close enough that she wasn't alone, far enough that I didn't have to stare at her tear-streaked face. Exactly that much.
From the inner pocket of my school blazer I pulled out a handkerchief and held it out toward her.
A habit born of looking after that frail girl for nearly twenty years. A day never went by without a handkerchief in the inner pocket. Today that habit belonged to someone else.
Kim Seol-ah hesitated a moment, then took it. And blew her nose with a loud honk.
...Ah. That one was actually pretty expensive.
Still, the complete lack of dignity in the sound put me a little at ease. If she could cry that hard, she would be all right.
After that we simply sat for a long while.
I leaned against the wall and still worked on my rough breathing, while Kim Seol-ah's sniffling came and went like waves until, at some point, it quietly ebbed away.
Inside the storage room there was only the smell of dust, the sunlight on the floor, and the occasional sniffle.
The old vaulting horse, the mats stacked in layers, the line marker collapsed in the corner. What was so comfortable about a place like this? Had she been coming and going here for as many years as the paint was peeling from the doorframe? How many people, in all that time, had ever opened this door for her? I wondered, but I didn't ask.
I had thought I'd grown thoroughly used to keeping watch at someone's side. But simply being there and doing nothing—I hadn't known that was so hard, because it was the first time.
That girl, in that tiny hospital room, had always had so much to say and never stopped talking to me.
I opened my mouth three times or so and closed it again. I had decided not to offer words of comfort to the end. Instead I only wanted her to know that one more person was here. That seemed like enough.
The fact that fifth period was approaching brushed through my mind, but I set it aside. One late mark hardly mattered.
My grades weren't especially important anyway.
How much time had passed? Kim Seol-ah spoke in a locked-up voice.
"......How did you know I was here."
Here it came.
I couldn't very well say I'd seen it in the original work. That this world was an anime and I had watched it. How was I supposed to say a thing like that?
Should I claim someone told me? There was no one who would have. That I happened to pass by? There was no reason to walk behind the gym at lunch. One by one the excuses in my head erased themselves.
"I checked the classroom and the library and you weren't there. So I started going through the places someone might hide, and this was the last one left."
"......Don't lie. How would you even guess this place."
I paused a beat, then chose the words closest to the truth.
"Just... I figured if it were you, you'd be somewhere like this."
Once I said it, it sounded strange. But there was nothing else I could say. And it wasn't entirely a lie. When I thought of a place where Kim Seol-ah might curl up alone, this was truly the only spot that came to mind.
Kim Seol-ah shot me a look. Glared at through swollen eyes, the effect was about a quarter of full strength.
"......What's that even supposed to mean."
Even as she said it, she didn't press further. Instead she pressed the handkerchief hard against the corners of her eyes, then suddenly asked,
"......What do you have for fifth period."
"No idea. You?"
"......Me neither."
At that answer Kim Seol-ah let out a snort of laughter she couldn't help. Smiling with swollen eyes wasn't a pretty sight, but a smile was still a smile. Only when I saw that face did the tension drain from my back.
Then the preliminary bell rang in the distance. Lunch was ending. The sunlight on the floor had already shortened by a handspan or so.
Kim Seol-ah got up with a rustle and brushed the dust from her skirt. Looking down at me, she said in a low voice,
"If you tell anyone about today, you're dead."
"Yeah. Nothing happened today."
When I nodded without protest, Kim Seol-ah looked like she might say something more, then closed her mouth. She turned sharply and went out the door first.
I got up as well. I closed the storage room door behind me. The sunlight had been let in long enough.
Following after her, I stole a glance at Kim Seol-ah's steps. They looked lighter than I had imagined when I first walked in. Maybe I was imagining it—but I hoped not.
When we left the storage room, the afternoon sun was dazzling.
I was going to have to run to make it to the classroom before the fifth-period bell, and yet somehow my steps refused to hurry.
Walking out into the sunlight with swollen eyes made for a ridiculous sight, but strangely, I didn't feel bad. My chest was unaccountably light—as if I had dusted off years' worth of grime. Was crying always this cleansing? I'd been shortchanging myself all this time.
I glanced back. Lee Ji-an was carefully shutting the storage room door. He'd been the one to leave it open in the first place. Finishing things properly before he came after me—that was so very like him.
I kept turning over the time we'd spent inside that room.
Lee Ji-an never asked me a single thing, not to the end. Not why I was crying. Not what was wrong.
He just sat at that in-between distance, held out a handkerchief, and leaned against the wall working on his own breathing. After running all that way, he never once made a show of it.
That was all. And because that was all, I could bear it.
If someone had asked me why I was crying, I would probably have snapped that it was nothing and burrowed even deeper into hiding. But because he asked nothing, I could cry my fill. A strange thing, really.
The heart is truly ridiculous. Something a decade-plus of unrequited love had broken, and a few moments of silence were enough to help me stand again.
I had expected the silence to be awkward. It wasn't awkward at all. The whole time I cried, Lee Ji-an never once showed a sign of rushing me. Like sunlight waiting for everything to dry.
Come to think of it, the handkerchief was the same. It came out of his blazer pocket so naturally. A high school boy who still carried a handkerchief in this day and age. For something like that to be second nature meant he had spent a long time looking after someone. And I knew whose years those were.
I had blown my nose into that clearly nice handkerchief... I'd have to wash it and give it back.
But what was it about this boy? The day before yesterday I'd been caught crying on a park bench in the rain, and today I'd cried in a storage room again. Even if I counted yesterday's tteokbokki tears as the spice's fault—how many days had we even known each other, and how many times had I already cried in front of him alone?
My face burned with embarrassment. Shyness, pride—neither of them seemed to work properly in front of him. Was it because we were in the same boat? Or was it simply that he was that kind of person?
If it had been Yu-jin, it would have been different.
He would have flung the door open, laughed and made a racket, and blown the tears away on the wind. That would have been good, too. That was why I'd liked him for more than ten years.
But today I learned something. There are other ways in this world.
Not shaking someone awake like the wind—just being there, like the sun.
Like the afternoon light that had slipped in through the open door and lain soundlessly across the floor. That was exactly how Lee Ji-an had sat.
When the wind passes, it leaves no trace. But sunlight stays on the body long after it has gone.
Even now. It's been a while since we left the storage room, and my back is still warm. Whether from the sun or from something else, I decided not to think about it.
I figured if it were you, you'd be somewhere like this.
Tossing out a line like that as if it were nothing—that was foul play, too.
And answering my threat that he'd die if he talked with a simple, unteasing yeah—that was foul play as well. If it had been Yu-jin, he would have held it over my head forever.
...I want more of it.
This warmth. This sunlight I've only felt once.
I know full well that this sunlight originally belonged to someone else. Knowing doesn't help.
In this storage room I used to crawl into whenever I wanted to hide from the world, I learned something today for the first time in my life.
How warm it is to be found.
And how easily a person starts to want that warmth for themselves.