The Wall
What had truly made my heart drop was anything touching on my personal details — or Gomo's.
These people were excellent at digging up someone's private life. If they only ever tracked down the bad ones, maybe that would be fine. But that same skill could just as easily turn on me. On Gomo, too.
It was true that Gomo had her share of suspicious edges. Whatever she truly felt inside was something only she would know — and unless she let it show, or actually tried to hurt me, there was no way to find out. Still, I wanted to trust her. She was family, after all. Even after hearing that her younger brother was dead, she had still tried to be kind to me…
Fortunately, the viewers didn't seem to have listened that closely. My father's name had come up more than once, but when I hit Ctrl+F in the chat window and searched, there wasn't a single mention of it. I could only hope no one had committed it to memory and gone looking later. He had always called social media a waste of life and never used anything except CocoaTalk, so even people who wanted to dig into the past wouldn't be able to unearth much about him — or about me.
Once I'd checked that far, the tension that had been coiling through me loosened almost at once. And once I'd calmed down a little more, I realized Gomo still hadn't done anything to harm me. So I found enough room to breathe that I could actually ask the viewers.
"What do you all think about what Gomo suggested? Going to live at her place…"
A few of them brought up my disabilities and argued that I needed family. But most of them dredged up real cases and came down hard against going to Gomo's place.
Of course they would. No matter how much we shared the same bloodline stretching back through my grandparents, after kindergarten we had been nothing more than strangers whose contact had been completely cut off. Maybe Gomo hadn't even truly wanted me to come live with her. Maybe the offer had just been empty courtesy.
"Yeah… I think you're all right. Then how should I turn her down? She did mean well with everything she said…"
I still didn't want to coldly throw the offer back in her face. Even if I refused, I wanted to do it without leaving sharp edges. As I'd thought earlier — if relatives were ultimately strangers, then stacking up bad blood might mean someone showing up later with a knife. Extreme example, sure. But I'd lived through enough that I couldn't just dismiss it.
Thankfully, the viewers walked me through how to refuse in exhaustive detail. Some of the templates were so long and formal I wondered if they weren't a little much — but I could just pick out the useful phrases and build a message from those.
"Thank you so much. Now I don't even have to stress about how to turn her down."
The person whose draft had actually been chosen looked thoroughly horrified — but it wasn't as if I was going to stamp a viewer's username onto the message I sent Gomo. Honestly, did it even matter?
So right there in front of the viewers, I sat down and wrote Gomo a rejection text. I'd already been given her business card; all I had to do was send it to the number printed there. Of course I didn't send the formal version word for word. Just: thank you for the offer, but I'm doing fine on my own right now. There are plenty of people helping me, and the things I want to do are better done living here. I'm really grateful you cared enough to offer. Something like that.
She must still have had room to answer, because Gomo replied almost immediately.
Help with anything.
Those words left me feeling completely deflated. If she'd said she'd help within reason, I might have believed her. But that line was empty courtesy, plain as day to anyone looking. The old me might have been moved to tears by it. But I knew now how cold the world could get. So I just turned the message over in my mind with a bitter taste, and switched off the phone screen.
Besides — right now, on the other side of that monitor, there were people who liked me without conditions. A relationship that had formed in an internet space for no reason except fun, with no need to measure or calculate anything. Maybe this kind of relationship was better for me. Not because it was light. Just because there was no room to get my hopes up and then be disappointed. Exactly the distance between a streamer who played games on camera and the viewers who watched for entertainment. That was all it was.
There were people kind enough to donate, and people who offered useful advice like this — but a kind of line had been drawn. Stay in your own territory; just be good neighbors. A low wall of a line. Anyone who really wanted to could climb over it. I could climb over it the other way, too. Maybe that made us dangerous to each other — because if you decided to, the wall might as well not exist. And yet it was precisely because of that that choosing not to climb it meant something. If there had been no wall at all, the constant traffic of unthinking feet might have trampled our house into bare dirt. You thought they'd come in wearing indoor slippers — but they'd walked a mud road in them first. The way the family I'd believed was good had actually been a house of cards that would collapse the moment I so much as stumbled.
But because there was at least a low wall, people didn't cross it. And maybe that was how trust was born.
"Noeul. Is talking with the viewers fun?"
"Uh, well… yeah, it is. And I'm grateful, too. They enjoy watching me play, and they listen carefully when I talk about myself. And when I'm too focused on the game to pay attention for a bit, they start having fun conversations among themselves. Sometimes just watching that is entertaining on its own. Oh — Next-door Sister asked if streaming is fun."
In a way, they could have been annoyed that I was talking to Next-door Sister while they were right there watching. But maybe because she'd been coming around since the early days, the viewers seemed to treat her as just another piece of content. Some of them still wondered about her voice and her face — but she was shy about it, and I had no intention of shoving a mic at her or swinging the camera around.
"It's fine, right? Girls can sleep together. But if I say I'm going to bed early… is there a separate standard for that? My sleep schedule's a mess."
Even so, maybe the attention was starting to weigh on her. Next-door Sister quietly rose from her seat.
"Have fun with the stream. Unni's heading out."
"Ah — yes. You're going to work, right? Have a good day."
The moment Next-door Sister said she was leaving, the viewers switched topics with surgical precision. Unfortunately, the new topic happened to be my mother. The lightness their company had given me settled right back down.
Maybe she could read my mood. Next-door Sister, who had been about to leave the room, stopped mid-step.
"Hmm, I've still got a little time before work. I'll stay a bit longer without the viewers knowing. Hehe — I already said goodbye, so hanging around would be weird, right? I'll just hide over here."
Even though she wouldn't be caught on camera anyway, she slipped quietly back into the room and settled into the corner by the bed. I couldn't very well tell her to just sit on the bed, so I let out a heavy sigh and turned my eyes back to the chat.
"Yeah… I hadn't thought that far either. I don't really know what I should do."