...I Love You
About an hour later, the phone buzzed again.
It was Yuna. That afternoon in the hallway she'd called out my name, then said it wasn't me.
The read receipt popped up, and for a long while nothing came. She was probably typing and deleting — that's when the three little dots flicker on and off.
Three lines, sent in three separate messages. Words that could have fit in one, but somehow didn't.
I set the phone down. Someone who couldn't ask in the daytime asked at night instead — and then, having heard the answer, asked nothing more.
I started to search my memory for a time Yuna had ever asked me anything, then gave up. If I remembered, that would become another reason.
The night deepened, and the phone buzzed again. This time, the number had no name attached to it.
I set the phone down, then picked it up again.
I asked a question that had no reason to be asked. After sending it, I waited for the reply.
It came late.
I sat there for a long while, unable to answer, and then opened the drawer. The calendar I'd bought at the stationery shop yesterday was still lying inside.
I hung it on the empty nail. The day before yesterday I hadn't known what I was supposed to write on it; now I knew one thing.
Go look at officetels
That was the only entry on the entire calendar.
Ding-dong. No one would be coming at this hour. The doorbell rang again.
When I opened the door, my mother was standing there. Behind her, my father was coming up the stairs with a black bag in each hand.
"...How did you two get here?"
"It took two hours."
As she said it, she took my face in her hands. She looked at my forehead, then my cheeks, then turned my head to check my neck.
"You're not coming down with something, are you?"
"I told you I'm not."
"Sure you're not. After that phone call you made."
On the phone I had said only that I was fine. Now she was staring at my forehead, and her hand swept twice over the place where my bangs used to be.
"Why did you cut it this short?"
"...I wanted to."
Father set the bags down beside the shoe rack. Inside were two containers of kimchi and one of soup, and they were still warm.
"Why did you bring all that?"
"Since we were coming anyway."
Click. Mom slipped off her shoes and came inside, then made a slow circuit of the room. She opened the fridge and closed it, opened and shut the cabinet under the sink, tried the window handle. She wasn't looking for anything — she was looking at the room her son lived in as if for the first time.
It wasn't her first time here. On moving day she'd helped haul my things up, but back then she'd only seen the boxes.
Her hand stopped at the wall.
"What's this?"
"...A calendar."
"What's written here? 'Go look at officetels'?"
"......"
"So you wrote it down."
Then she asked nothing more.
Rainy padded out of the room and stopped beside her.
"Oh my."
Mom sat down right there. She bent her knees and held out a hand; Rainy backed away two steps.
"...You're keeping a cat?"
"...Yeah."
"Since when?"
"Not long."
"You didn't even tell me something like this."
It hadn't occurred to me that it was something to tell. When there's nothing to call about, there's nothing to say; and because I didn't call, the things worth saying kept shrinking away.
"What's its name?"
"...Rainy."
"Rainy."
At the name, its ears turned. Faster than when I called.
"Oh, look at this one. Honey, come look at this."
Father came in, taking off his shoes. When he crouched down, something cracked.
Crack.
"...It's a cat."
"What else would it be."
"...That's a lot of fur."
The two of them crouched side by side. Father had come without even changing his clothes — the knees of his dress pants were creased, and he hadn't bothered to smooth them out. Those were the kind of trousers you sent out to be pressed.
People who had driven two hours were now sitting on the floor, watching a cat.
Mom took out her phone and started taking pictures. Rainy turned its back; she kept shooting anyway.
"Turn around for me, come on."
"It doesn't understand words."
"Why not? It looked when I called its name earlier."
Rainy retreated under the bed. Mom knelt there in front of it for a long while, phone raised, before finally getting up.
"Stay the night."
"We can't. Dad has to be out early."
"...If we leave now, it'll be the middle of the night."
"We saw your face. That's enough."
Clatter. Then she began taking the containers out of the bags and loading them into the fridge, rearranging everything as she went — what had been there before came to the front.
"Eat this one first. This one goes on the bottom."
"Okay."
"You have to actually eat it. Storing it does no good if it just sits there."
"Okay."
"Don't just say okay."
Mom went down first; Father took longer getting his shoes on.
"On the phone earlier."
"...Yeah."
"You were about to say something and stopped."
He'd heard. He'd been standing close enough that he couldn't not have.
The entryway was so narrow that putting on shoes meant pressing your back to the wall — and from that spot, everything said inside the room carried.
"...It was nothing."
"Alright."
That was the end of it. If he pressed, I'd have to answer, and I had no answer; he spared me the question, and I got by.
Only after thinking got by did the word strike me as strange.
"Call again next time."
"...Yeah."
"I mean it."
Click. Footsteps faded down the corridor, the sum of two people's. Through the window I watched the car take its time leaving the alley.
I had made one call with no reason behind it, and they drove two hours to come and two hours to go back.
It had come to this because I never called. Whether calling would have changed anything, I couldn't say.
Rainy emerged from under the bed and prowled back and forth in front of the fridge.
Ranking of difficult things.
I'd always thought refusing was the hardest. Afterward, the strength wouldn't leave my hands for a while.
But there was something harder.
Three syllables. A word no one hates, a word people are glad to hear — and a moment ago I had tripped on the very first one. Refusing, at least, you do knowing the other person will dislike it. This wasn't even that.
The word no one could hate was the one that wouldn't come out.
With no listener, I tried saying it aloud.
It was something I could have said two hours ago.
I sat at the desk and opened my laptop.
The day before yesterday, the first word hadn't come. The next sentence kept trying to start with Dogyeong, so I'd shut the lid on it.
Today, something else came first.
I have never once told anyone that things were hard. Not because they weren't — but because there was no one to ask, and there was no one to ask because I handled everything myself.
A whole paragraph came out at once. All this while, opening this file had meant starting with the question of what to write; today my hand moved before my thoughts did.
I raised the cursor to delete it — then left it alone.
I called home. I had no reason to. I hadn't known that was such a hard thing to do, and having done it, I still don't understand why it was hard.
Rainy climbed up onto my knees and settled in.
Three paragraphs now.
The phone rang.
I flipped the phone face-down and put the cursor at the start of the next line.
I never replied to last night's messages.
The Small Auditorium seats two hundred; if the front half fills up, you count everyone as having come.
Scrape, scrape. I arrived two hours before the event to find the chairs only half aligned. A few people at the back were dragging them into rows. Group 3 was on drinks — stack a box of paper cups beside the water purifier, fetch the ice, and that was it. Nothing else to do.
Haram asked, tearing into the box.
"Why's he acting like that over there?"
Out on the stage, Dogyeong was checking a microphone. He was wearing a staff vest, and the name tag hanging from his neck swung around every time he moved.
"What do you mean?"
"He looks happy."
"Does he?"
"Yeah. He's been holding that mic forever and won't let go."
Haram's chin lifted toward the stage, then dropped back down.
"That's the third time already."
Haram stopped mid-tear and looked back at the stage.
The ice came from the campus cafeteria. Haram gripped one handle and I took the other; two steps up the stairs, her side dipped.
"Whoa—"
"......"
"Oh—hold on."
The ice slid to one side of the tub and the handle slipped out of Haram's grip. As the tub dropped toward the stairs, her half of it lurched forward.
I let go of my handle and reached out. Her shoulder landed in my palm.
She was one step above me, so our eyes were nearly level. At that distance we each blinked about twice, and the whole time neither of us was breathing.
"......"
"You okay?"
"...Yeah."
Backing away, Haram retied her hair, and in the meantime a few cubes of ice rolled out across the floor.
"...Oh. The ice."
"So there is."
Only then did Haram laugh.
"What's funny?"
"Nothing. It's just your reflexes are insane."
"......"
"Do they teach you that at school?"
It wasn't taught. I had simply caught whatever Dogyeong dropped, over and over, until it stuck to my hands — and explaining that would take too long.
"It's my major."
"In what?"
"Catching things that fall."
Haram's laugh died, and she looked at me.
"But you held your breath just now."
"......"
"I saw that."
"Guess we'd better go get the ice again."
"I'll go."
"Let's go together. You'll spill it again."
"......"
"Kidding."
"I know."
Once we'd moved the tub, Dogyeong came over.
"Hey."
"Yeah."
"I got the go-ahead."
He said it while straightening the lanyard of his name tag with one hand — a lanyard that needed no straightening.
"I went to find the fourth-year who handled it last year. Waited in the department lounge all morning."
"......"
"He said they ran short last year. They expected two hundred people, prepared a hundred and fifty cups, and ran dry halfway through."
I nudged the box of paper cups with my foot, pushing it up against the water purifier.
"So I wrote that first. What ran short last year, and how we're handling it this year."
"Good."
"The senior said that was enough. In one go."
When he finished, he waited for a reaction. It was a place where something more might have come. Nothing did.
"......"
"You did well."
"Yeah."
Dogyeong paused a beat, then turned away. His stride toward the stage was faster than before, and partway there he straightened his name-tag lanyard one more time.
Going to last year's organizer, waiting in the lounge all morning, rewriting that first line — Dogyeong had done all of it. I had only pointed the direction.
All this time, whenever Dogyeong accomplished something, I had been there. It only counted as an accomplishment if someone was present to say he'd done well.
And still, he had come to hear it.