A Kindred Feeling
I thought I ought to turn away, but my feet would not move.
I had no right to casually peer into someone else's sorrow.
Besides, I was in no position to comfort anyone. Barely an hour ago I myself had left twenty years of feelings behind on a rooftop and come down.
And yet I could not bring myself to leave. Perhaps it was because the figure of that girl huddled there somehow did not feel like a stranger.
The park was empty and still. Only the sparse light of the streetlamps faintly touched her small back.
Unable to go anywhere, simply curled in on herself—she looked not so different from me a short while ago, wandering the streets with nowhere left to go until I drifted here.
How long had I been standing there? At last raindrops began to fall from the overcast sky.
What started as one or two drops soon became a fairly heavy downpour.
Cold rain settled mercilessly on the shoulders of the girl still huddled there. And yet she stayed put, as if she had no thought of seeking cover.
Her motionless form in the rain strangely overlapped with the image of myself standing blankly before the rooftop railing only a little while earlier.
After a moment's hesitation, I took a folded umbrella from my bag.
I always packed one on the strength of a single forecast line that it might rain—ever since that girl had caught a cold from a sudden shower on the way home from school a few years back.
Living at someone's side meant, in the end, a continuous act of preparing for things that had not even happened yet. Buying medicine in advance, packing an umbrella ahead of time, counting the days she might fall ill.
Old habits lingered at my fingertips like this even after the person I was supposed to stay beside had disappeared.
I opened the umbrella and slowly held it over her head.
For a moment, the sound of rain ceased only above her.
Sensing a presence, she slowly lifted her head.
A face a mess of something that might have been rain or tears looked up at me.
"……What."
Her voice was thick and hoarse, edged with sharpness.
"Did you come to gawk because you feel sorry for me too? Forget it, just get lost…"
Then her words trailed off, as if she had recognized who was holding the umbrella.
Her eyes, having known me, wavered for a moment, lost for somewhere to go.
Kim Seol-ah. A girl from the same class. Our seats were far apart and we had barely ever spoken, but we knew each other's faces and names at least.
And I knew a little more about who she was than that.
In the original story, one of the heroines who had held Yu-jin in her heart for a long time. Someone who never quite reached his side and was quietly pushed aside—a story only I knew for now.
In other words, she was not so different from me. Someone who circled the edges of a person they could never reach, only to be left behind in the end.
Perhaps she, too, had gone through something similar today and drifted to this place.
I could easily guess why the sharp words she had been about to fire off had stuck in her throat.
She knew me as well, after all—as the guy who followed Woo Han-gyeol around like a shadow, the girl who hung about the Yu-jin she liked.
I did not bother asking why she was crying.
I knew she would not answer honestly even if I did, and more than that, I already knew all too well what the emotion on her face was.
When you have stayed by someone's side for a long time, you learn to read expressions before words.
From a fleeting look alone, you can roughly grasp what that person is feeling, what they are swallowing down. It was a habit worn into my body after living twenty years at a sick person's side—one I wanted to shake off but could not.
What rose on her face now was not so different from my own face as I had come down from the rooftop a short while ago.
This was not something that got better by someone poking at it from the side. You needed time to swallow it alone and let it settle alone.
So there was not much I could do for her right now.
I gently pushed the umbrella handle toward her.
"You'll catch a cold."
Words I had said out of habit for years while packing medicine for Woo Han-gyeol and pulling blankets over her slipped out unbidden in front of the wrong person.
Leaving the umbrella with her, I stepped out into the rain.
Raindrops immediately struck the crown of my head. The cold sensation slid down my shoulders, but it was familiar. Handing someone an umbrella and taking the rain myself was only natural to me.
I figured it would be better to give her space. She would need time alone to sort things out as well.
But in that moment, my clothes were tugged.
When I turned, she was holding the end of my sleeve. Her face looked startled, as if her hand had moved before she could think.
"……It's your umbrella. Why are you leaving it."
The pretext was the umbrella. But both Kim Seol-ah and I knew that was not the real reason.
I did not pull my sleeve free. Instead I stood still and waited for her to say whatever she would.
The rain was still falling. My shoulders, out from under the umbrella, slowly grew wet, but I did not hurry her.
If there was one thing I was more familiar with than anyone, it was waiting. For a fever to break, for sleep to come, for a sick person to say with her own mouth that she was fine. I had always lived waiting for something.
A long silence passed.
Only the sound of rain filled the space between us until at last she opened her mouth, quietly.
"……If you go getting completely soaked, you'll be the one who catches a cold."
Her tone was still blunt. But the end of it trembled faintly.
And starting from that tremor, everything she had been holding down inside began to spill over like a levee giving way.
"……Is it that it just can't be me."
Head bowed deeply, she muttered as if to herself.
"I knew him first, I liked him first, I was by his side before anyone else. So why does he never look at me—why does he smile looking at someone else."
Her words grew faster, and wetter by the same measure.
"I know I'm a little prickly. But after knowing each other this long, I thought he'd just take it as affection. But I guess not. To him, was I just someone a bit rough around the edges."
Her fingertips gripped my sleeve harder.
"Why do I always have to be like this. Why do I always have to stand there so pitifully, just watching from the side while he only looks at someone else."
I could not say a word.
Only, none of the words she was pouring out felt unfamiliar to me.
I was by his side first. Those words were also my own, after twenty years spent next to Woo Han-gyeol.
Assuming that after all this time, he would understand at least this much. Having no choice but to watch her smile at someone else in the end. The shape of the misery she was spilling out resembled too closely the feelings I had left behind on the rooftop barely an hour ago.
Suddenly I remembered Woo Han-gyeol's hands, quietly adding a share of side dishes even to me, who was so curt.
I had always lived thinking of that as affection. But now that I had failed to reach her in the end, I wondered if even that had been nothing more than the fondness you show someone who has simply been around a long time.
Just as Kim Seol-ah had hoped he would take her prickliness as affection, I might have been carving meaning of my own into those small gestures.
So I could not offer any comfort.
I wanted to say something, anything, but if I opened my mouth every word would feel like an empty lie.
It'll be okay. Time will make you forget. Someone better will come along. I could not bring myself to speak those common, worn-out comforts. I had no right to offer them.
In this very moment, I was not okay either—not even a little.
After a long while, I managed to let out a single phrase.
"……Yeah."
It was a word meant for her, and at the same time a word for myself.
Why had I been like that too. I had watched just as pitifully myself.
At that brief word that had slipped out, she slowly lifted her head.
Her wet eyes looked up at me quietly.
Her face was one that seemed to have realized something. That this person was going through the same thing she was.
She and I said nothing more.
We simply stood in the same place under the same rain, quietly recognizing that we were suffering the same pain.
Eventually she buried her face in her knees again. But she did not shake her shoulders the way she had before.
She simply stayed there, still, like someone waiting for the rain to ease.
Standing at her side, I did not lower the arm holding the umbrella.
It was a strange thing. I was clearly someone who had lost the same thing today, and yet unlike before, standing like this at someone's side made me feel somehow a little less cold.
If there was something that could be understood without a single word exchanged, it was probably this. A kind of comfort known only to those who had stood in the same place and taken the same rain.
In the end we neither called each other's names nor asked what had happened. There was no need. Even without putting it into words, we already knew each other's situations all too well.
The rain that day did not stop for quite a long time.