The Film "Moon" (3/4)
The sudden turn of events left the audience wide-eyed.
The leads are already splitting up? They'd only just started growing closer…
The visuals had been stunning, but the story after that grand opening had been drifting toward something a little too quiet, a little too loose. Then the plot slammed forward without warning, and the audience leaned in again, hungry to know where a film this unpredictable would go next.
Under the merciless summer sun, Cha Su-hyeon ran himself ragged, his whole body soaked through with sweat.
"Yu-jeong! Hong Yu-jeong!"
He tore through the village searching for her — the girl who had vanished in the bare second he turned his head.
At first he thought she was hiding, playing a prank. The idea that someone could have snuck into the front yard of his house deep in the remote mountains and kidnapped her without a sound was absurd. He had looked away for only a few seconds — just long enough to fasten the necklace.
But after half a day of searching, Hong Yu-jeong was nowhere to be found.
"Wait. The necklace?"
The only thing different from before she disappeared was the necklace.
Su-hyeon immediately unclasped Hong Yu-jeong's pendant from around his own neck.
"…"
Nothing changed.
"No — even if something did change…"
He sprinted toward the front yard — the place where she had first collapsed, the place where she had vanished.
He rounded the corner at a dead run and burst into the yard, and sure enough, a familiar figure lay crumpled in the exact spot where he had first found her.
"Yu-jeong!"
He rushed over and gathered the fallen Hong Yu-jeong into his arms.
Her eyes fluttered open with effort.
"…Su-hyeon?"
"What happened?! You just disappeared — do you know how long I looked for you?!"
Su-hyeon carried the still-weak Hong Yu-jeong inside. While she rested and recovered her strength, they talked through everything each of them had experienced that day.
According to her, the moment Su-hyeon put on the necklace, she had opened her eyes in the future — which, for her, was the present. Only a few seconds had passed. She had glanced around, her vision had gone dark, and when she opened her eyes again she was back.
"So hours really went by here? For me it was barely a few blinks."
Just a little while ago they had been talking about making bibim-guksu for lunch…
Even though summer days ran long, the light outside the window was already tipping toward sunset. That meant at least six hours had passed.
Everything has a cause and an effect.
Where there is a cause, there is a corresponding effect. Of course the human mind cannot always grasp the whole chain — but the reverse holds true as well.
"Su-hyeon. Let's try putting the necklace on again."
"…What if something happens to you? You said that in the future you went back to, you don't even know if your fellow pilots are dead or unconscious."
They had only lived together for a little over two months, but in those few hours of searching the village after she vanished, Su-hyeon had realized just how precious Hong Yu-jeong had become to him.
Still — he was no woodcutter hiding a fairy's winged robe so she could never return to the heavens. She wanted this. He could not refuse her.
After two more attempts, they learned several things.
No matter how much time passed in the past, for Hong Yu-jeong — who had briefly returned to the future — only a few seconds ever elapsed.
And the lunar probe she had been aboard appeared to have crashed, then successfully fired its emergency landing engines and gone down into the ocean. Because the crash had occurred before the second-stage separation of the propulsion unit, the craft was heavy enough that it had likely settled all the way to the seafloor.
"We were on a trajectory toward the South Pacific when we went into freefall, so it's probably somewhere on the bottom of the South Pacific. Judging by the fact the probe hasn't been crushed by the pressure, it can't be at an extreme depth."
The difference between a spacecraft and a submarine is only a hair's breadth. Both require airtight isolation and oxygen supply; both must endure crushing external pressure and bitter cold.
The idea of plunging all the way to the ocean floor was terrifying — yet Hong Yu-jeong's expression had brightened. She was no longer a bird trapped in a cage, killing empty days. She had a goal again.
From there, the film accelerated.
Cha Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong began trying everything they could to change something in the past so that the future Hong Yu-jeong would be rescued.
First, to avoid touching the premise of the grandfather paradox, the future Hong Yu-jeong absolutely had to board that lunar probe. And after the crash, she had to be rescued.
"Otherwise the fact that she came here and met you, Su-hyeon, would never have happened — and every effort we're making right now to change the future would vanish with it."
To be rescued, she first had to crash. If she never crashed — or if the launch never happened at all — the Hong Yu-jeong who had met Cha Su-hyeon would cease to exist. That was the dilemma.
If anything they changed in the past somehow prevented Hong Yu-jeong from becoming an astronaut, or kept the lunar probe from crashing and sent it safely into space, then the event Hong Yu-jeong time-travels to the past itself would never have occurred. They would never have met. Their attempts to change the future would never have happened. And so the future would not change.
"This is too hard."
"That's why it's a paradox."
Their first idea was to use a slow mailbox — the kind that delivers a letter far into the future — and send a message to the future Korea Aerospace Research Institute. But the maximum delay the mailbox would accept was only one year.
"If you factor in when astronauts get selected, the letter would need to arrive at least seventeen years from now…"
The only person who could make that happen was Cha Su-hyeon himself, so he wrote a slow letter addressed to his future self.
But when Hong Yu-jeong returned through the necklace from the future, she shook her head.
"Nothing changed… Maybe something shifted while you were away in the military, or maybe you just… forgot about me somewhere in the middle?"
"I'm an orphan. I don't go to the military. And there's no way I would forget you."
Even if Su-hyeon had received the slow letter and carefully kept it for seventeen years before delivering it to KARI, no one was going to rewrite a national-scale exploration plan based on wild talk about time travel.
They tried countless other approaches after that. Every one of them failed to change the future.
And through it all, a strange feeling settled over both of them.
Even as they joined forces and threw themselves into altering the future, they gradually understood — not with their heads, but with their hearts — that success would mean Cha Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong had to say goodbye.
And as summers do, the two of them were slowly drawn toward each other. They hid those feelings as best they could.
Then one day, as usual, Hong Yu-jeong slid open the door of Yeongjin Super.
"Grandma."
"Hmm? Whose pretty granddaughter is this? I don't believe I've seen you before. Look how lovely you are."
"…What?"
Hong Yu-jeong tried talking with her a little longer, but the old woman showed no sign of recognizing her at all.
She rushed home and found Cha Su-hyeon.
"Su-hyeon!"
"Huh? Why the rush? What's wrong?"
When she told him what had just happened at the store, Su-hyeon tilted his head.
"Maybe Grandma's memory has been getting fuzzy? She's getting on in years, so it's possible… This is serious, though. I should tell the village chief."
Hong Yu-jeong nodded, worry written across her face. Aside from Su-hyeon, the grandmother was the person in the village she had met most often; a real fondness had grown between them.
But the grandmother was not the real problem.
"Teacher. Is that your girlfriend?"
"Huh?"
"The pretty lady next to you."
"…"
Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong both went wide-eyed as they stepped into the tutoring session they had prepared for as usual.
"Hye-su, what are you talking about?"
"Huh? You know my name?"
The tutoring had started around the beginning of summer break. Autumn was already settling in. They had met every week for a full three months — and the students no longer remembered Hong Yu-jeong.
The situation had become critical.
Cha Su-hyeon and Hong Yu-jeong both sensed, instinctively, what the cause of this effect must be.
Su-hyeon had always fretted over how pale Hong Yu-jeong grew each time she crossed through time. She had always waved it off — her body was fine, she said; she was full of energy; he shouldn't worry.
A brief silence fell. Then Hong Yu-jeong walked out.
Seeing her go, Su-hyeon asked the students to excuse him.
"All right — self-study for a bit."
He followed her out, but the rain was coming down hard, and she was already gone from sight.
He searched for a long time.
Soaked through, combing every path he could think of, Su-hyeon left the trail and pushed into a place that was not a path at all — a forest of apricot trees whose branches had twisted together into something like a cave.
At the far end of that wooden tunnel, a figure sat curled in on herself, knees drawn up.
"Yu-jeong!"
He went to her and took her rain-drenched shoulders. The skin under his fingertips was cold from the wet.
"…I guess I'm just going to keep being forgotten until I disappear. This isn't the world I belong to. Maybe that veil is there to lock out uninvited guests."
Hong Yu-jeong pointed toward the sea far below the cliff.
The rain had thrown up so much fog that the water itself was invisible — but Su-hyeon knew she was pointing at the blue veil he could not see.
"No. Yu-jeong. Why would you disappear? Even if everyone else forgets, I'll remember you to the end."
He looked at her face — white to the point of translucence.
Hong Yu-jeong's eyes, fixed on him, trembled violently.
Su-hyeon pulled her into his arms. The space between them closed. Their lips met.
And then Yeon-woo's voice — spare, restrained, stripped of excess emotion — carried the narration.
No — you fell from the moon, so you came down from higher than any summer rain.
In that summer I could do nothing but stand and take every drop of it, soaking through without end.
And before I knew it, umbrella-less and drenched, I was spreading outward without limit."
Their lips parted. He looked again at Hong Yu-jeong's face, pale as paper.
He was looking right at her — and still, somehow, he was already beginning to miss her.
As if they had known each other so long that the memory had gone hazy.
Or as if they had not yet met at all.
The certainty hit him hard: if things went on like this, Hong Yu-jeong would truly vanish.
In the same breath, Su-hyeon understood that his life was about to turn the page.
Only that next chapter was going to run a little longer than he had expected.
"…Hey, Yu-jeong. Listen. I thought of something more reliable than a slow mailbox. I'll come for you somehow. No matter how long it takes — I'll keep running until I get there."
He looked at her face one last time and finished.
"I'll find you."
Then Cha Su-hyeon unclasped the pendant from around Hong Yu-jeong's neck and fastened it around his own.
Flash—
The girl who had been right in front of him, right in his arms, was gone.
Every memory of her remained intact — but the image of her face grew fainter by the second.
And once more, the narration rose.
Hearing that narration, film critic Jin Jeong-cheol found his mouth falling open without meaning to.
It was the same narration that had played at the very start of the film — before the first image even appeared on screen.
The first time, Ryu Yeon-woo's voice had already sent a shiver through him. Hearing the identical lines again past the midpoint of the film was something else entirely.
At first I thought it was just atmosphere — a romantic framing device…
After living through their summer, hearing it again filled his chest with a soft, aching tenderness. He had become Cha Su-hyeon's summer without noticing.
And it was not only the critic who felt it.
Every person in the theater — fellow actors, reporters, film fans — watching the screen and listening to that voice felt the summer of those two people settle over them.
He had been alone his whole life, but today the feeling of being left utterly solitary in the world was sharper than ever.
Cha Su-hyeon stood for a long time in the place where Hong Yu-jeong had vanished, then sank down where he was.
He turned the memories over in his mind, one by one. Carefully. Afraid he might forget even a single one.
The twenty-year-old Cha Su-hyeon who had simply drifted wherever life took him fell away. In his place rose a young man whose eyes held a hard, settled resolve.
He touched the trace of her hanging at his throat, then walked down through the rain in silence — off the path, back onto the trail.
The children waiting for their tutoring session were gone; their parents must have come for them after their teacher failed to return without a word.
Su-hyeon sat on the empty porch of the house and watched raindrops slide off the eaves for a while. Then something occurred to him, and he turned his head sharply.
Where he looked, a copper wire ran through the gap in the door. On the small cabinet beneath it, a pair of paper cups sat neatly side by side, carefully wound with red thread.
"…I don't really know what to do first. But there's going to be a lot of work ahead."
Looking at the paper cups, Cha Su-hyeon toyed with the pendant at his neck.
He had no intention of ever taking this necklace off.
Not for twenty years.