The Laughter Beyond the Door
Outside the hospital room.
In the end, I decided to go deliver the medicine.
Even after resolving to step back from her side, I could not simply ignore her medication. It was a matter that went straight to her health—and, more than anything, it was a request from her mother.
Sorting out my own heart and abandoning basic human decency were two different things.
I knew the rehabilitation center she visited every afternoon for physical therapy. We had come and gone from the place together for years.
The entire way there, my thoughts tangled themselves into knots. What face was I supposed to show her now? Would it be enough to hand over the medicine and turn away, or did I need to say something? Would she treat me as lightly as she always had?
One thought chased another, yet none of them settled into anything clean.
Only a few days earlier this same road had felt completely natural to me—the path we walked together while I carried her bag and traded pointless talk. I never imagined how strange and distant that identical stretch of pavement would feel when I walked it alone.
I made my way slowly down the familiar route, turning the medicine bag over and over in my hand.
At the center I asked the nurse at the desk,
"Which room is Han-gyeol in this time?"
"Ah, Han-gyeol. She should be in the rehab room at the back. End of the hall."
The familiar nurse smiled as she told me. She clearly remembered me; after all, we had crossed paths here often enough.
"You came by yourself today? I don't think I've ever seen you come alone."
The casual remark left me with no choice but to offer an awkward smile. Even to the people here, the two of us had always been a pair. The realization pressed on my chest, but I kept it off my face, gave a light nod, and started down the corridor.
While she was in treatment I always waited in the chair outside that room—reading, scrolling my phone, or simply staring blankly at the wall. When she finished and opened the door, I would gather her bag as if to say "good work," and we would head home together. That had been our long-standing routine.
Today that same familiar chair somehow looked farther away.
I had just reached the door when laughter floated out from inside.
Her laughter. Clear, light, the kind that only appeared when she was truly enjoying herself.
I absently reached for the doorknob, then froze.
Mixed into that laugh was a man's voice I did not know.
I pushed the door open the slightest crack, soundlessly.
Through the narrow gap the scene inside came into view.
A young man with one arm in a cast sat across from her.
The original male lead was right there in front of me.
He had said he hurt himself exercising; the cast must have been why he started coming here. They had run into each other at the same center by chance. In the original story the two of them had been drawn together in exactly this way. The fixed plot was marching on its own path whether I stayed or left.
Whatever joke the lead had made, she burst into another peal of laughter.
The senior awkwardly waving his casted arm and clowning around, and her laughing so hard tears nearly came to her eyes at the sight of him.
The air between them was a finished painting all by itself—bright, healthy, perfectly happy without a single crack.
I stood in the doorway and simply watched.
Why had I never been able to draw that kind of smile out of her?
Twenty years. I had stayed by her side through all that time, and not once had I made her laugh like that.
What I had always given her was stability. Taking her temperature, sorting her medicine, keeping quiet watch—calm, lukewarm stability.
What that man offered was different. Even with a cast on his arm he could laugh that brightly, giving her the sheer vitality of being alive. He was handing her a sensation of living she had never once possessed.
Why him and not me?
…My thoughts were sliding into a bad place.
Something black and heavy was quietly lifting its head from the bottom of my chest.
Resentment and jealousy were rising, slow and stealthy—the leftover scraps of feeling I had denied so fiercely yet had never managed to erase.
That seat should have been mine. I was the one who had poured twenty years into her; how could this man who appeared for a single season take everything? Some corner of my heart was screaming it.
For a moment I even wondered what it would have been like if I had been the one sitting there. If I had stepped into the original story's current and blocked the space between them. Then the person sitting in front of her now might have been me, not him.
The instant the thought fully formed, I began to feel sickened by myself.
No. I was not allowed to think that way.
I hurriedly forced the feeling back down.
If she could laugh that happily looking at someone, that was enough. Holding resentment because that someone was not me would only dirty the heart I had carried for twenty years.
I had wanted her happiness, not to monopolize it.
…Had I really?
I could not answer the question I put to myself.
Maybe, hiding behind the excuse of wishing for her happiness, I had simply wanted to remain at her side. I no longer had the confidence to deny even that petty little desire.
I looked back into the room.
The two of them were still laughing, bright and easy, completely unaware that I stood at the door, wrapped inside their own shining world.
I could not go in there.
To hand over the medicine I would have to open the door and shatter that happy air in a single moment. I would have to wedge myself between her and the senior like some foreign object that did not belong.
I did not want to do that.
Forcing my way into that completed picture while hiding a crumpled heart would be unkind to both of us.
I clenched the medicine bag tight in my fist.
I could pass it along later through her mother or some other route. There was no reason in the world to open that door right now.
I closed it again without a sound.
Then I walked quickly back down the corridor as if fleeing.
With every step, the laughter fading behind me lodged itself deeper in my ears.
I was just rounding the corner after leaving the hallway when I nearly collided head-on with someone and stopped short.
When I raised my head, my eyes met a familiar face.
She had stopped as well at the sight of me. A small bag of drinks hung from her hand.
She must have come to visit. She had learned that the original male lead was hospitalized and had come to see him. Finding him gone from his room, she had been searching for where he had wandered off to.
For a moment we simply looked at each other without speaking.
She seemed to read the expression on my face at a glance. Her gaze flicked toward the corridor I had just left, then returned to me.
"…Is he in there?"
Her voice was low and quiet.
I did not bother answering. I only gave a faint nod, letting that stand in place of words.
He is not alone. The person you came to see is laughing with someone else right now.
Even without me saying it, she understood everything.
Her expression slowly hardened. The hand gripping the drink bag tightened.
The me of yesterday might have offered some kind of comfort. But every scrap of strength I had was being used to hold down what I had just seen and the thoughts that came with it. I had nothing left that could serve as consolation for her.
"…Let's go."
I was the one who spoke first.
"There's nothing good that comes of staying here."
She stared a little longer down the corridor, then bit her lip and turned away.
As if we had made a prior agreement, we walked out of the center side by side.
Outside, the sun had already begun to sink; the streets were steeped in the light of sunset.
We walked for a while in silence, with no destination, driven only by the shared wish to put distance between ourselves and that place.
She was the one who broke the silence.
"…It's ridiculous. I even bought him drinks."
She muttered, looking down at the bag in her hand with a self-mocking twist of the mouth.
"I heard he was hospitalized, so I thought he might be bored. I wondered if he'd like it if I brought something he enjoyed… so I came."
I did not know what to say to that.
I did not think it was pathetic. I understood better than anyone the heart that chooses a single drink for someone else's sake. The medicine bag in my own hand was no different from her bag of drinks.
"…It's not pathetic."
I said it quietly.
"I brought the same kind of thing."
She stopped walking and glanced at my hand. Only then did the tightly clenched medicine bag seem to catch her eye.
She looked at me for a moment, then let out a short, empty laugh.
"…What the hell. We're exactly the same."
It was a lonely laugh, yet somehow a thin thread of comfort ran through it as well.
On the street washed in sunset, her shadow and mine stretched long and side by side.
Once again she and I had lost the same thing in the same place, and once again we had run into each other there.
That was why neither of us tried to comfort the other. People who have lost the same thing already know that walking together is better than clumsy words of consolation.