Something More Important Than Money (1)
I had been a successful footballer.
I'd turned pro, made my living from the game, played for the national team, scored at a World Cup — and I was still playing past forty.
It was true that I'd only ever played in Saudi Arabia, but I'd never once felt like I was missing out. I got flak for never playing in Europe, sure, but I earned far more money than I ever earned insults.
An orphan without a penny to his name had become a footballer who made money other people envied. I figured that was enough. I couldn't ask for more.
So I decided to retire. The plan was to enjoy the rest of my life on what I'd already piled up.
And then, the very night I finished my retirement press conference, I lost consciousness as a violent pain tore through my chest.
[You have failed to win the Ballon d'Or!]
[Penalty triggered! You will regress to the past!]
Right before I blacked out, I could've sworn I saw something like a strange blue hologram floating in front of my eyes.
Anyway.
I dreamed. In the dream, I'd gone back to the past.
From a forty-year-old footballer living large in Saudi Arabia, to a parentless fifteen-year-old brat at an orphanage.
A godawful dream.
Except it wouldn't end.
I think I'm fucked.
Mornings at Haneul Sarang Orphanage were always chaos.
There were far too many children and far too few adults to keep them in line.
Of course, given that the orphanage was, in its own way, a strict hierarchy society (or rather, a society ruled by the delinquent older boys and girls), there was a certain amount of order among the kids — but only a certain amount.
And so today, too, the morning at Haneul Sarang Orphanage was a bedlam. Kids fought over the bathroom when they woke up and fought over the meager handful of sausages served at breakfast as they got ready for school.
All except one.
"Why's he like that first thing in the morning?"
"How should I know. He didn't even eat breakfast."
"You think he got hammered with the older guys yesterday?"
The third-year middle schoolers of Haneul Sarang Orphanage muttered among themselves as they watched their same-aged peer staring blankly up at the ceiling.
The kid who, for the crime of being decent at football, had won the director's favor and been granted the orphanage's sole permission to train with an athletic club. The kid who was so rarely seen — leaving for school before dawn every day and coming back late at night under the pretense of training — and today, on top of everything, he was acting strange.
He'd suddenly started asking everyone their names. Then what year it was. Then he'd checked the date and started cursing up a storm on his own.
And ever since, he'd been like this. Staring at the ceiling, utterly lost in a daze.
"Shouldn't we get a caregiver?"
"Leave him. Sounds like he had a good dream, that's all."
"He still has to get to school, though. Watch this."
In the end, one of the residents couldn't stand it anymore and stepped in. He shook the shoulder of the boy gazing vacantly upward.
"Hey, Kang Doin. Snap out of it and let's go to school. You've got training again today, don't you? ...Or are you sick or something?"
"I don't even know, fuck."
"What?"
"Seriously, fuck. Do you have any idea how much money I had saved up..."
"...?"
The stuffy smell of teenage boys, the brownish mold colonizing the corner of the ceiling, the faintly rusted bunk beds — everything about the scenery of Haneul Sarang Orphanage was exactly as it had always been, and everything about it hit me with a dreadful wave of nostalgia.
The nostalgia was because this was the home I grew up in. It was dreadful because every bad memory of my life had been made here.
I'd thought I would never have to lay eyes on this orphanage again once I became an adult.
'Hey! Get out of the bathroom already, you maniac!'
'How long does it take to take a dump alone?! My stomach is killing me!'
'School lunch today looks gross. Might as well just starve.'
'Ugh, I don't wanna go to school...'
As the time to leave for school drew near, the noise of elementary schoolers came spilling in from the corridor outside the room. The ruckus was so loud and frantic it reminded me of a street market.
I felt carsick. Which was absurd, since I hadn't moved an inch.
Heaving deep breaths to settle my churning stomach, I tried to gather myself. No matter how hard I tried to accept reality, the sense of injustice simply would not go away.
I had played professional football for over twenty years. The fortune and career I'd built through all of it — every last bit of it had vanished in the blink of an eye the moment I opened my eyes here.
How could I not feel cheated? Why was this happening to me, of all people?
"I could really use a cigarette..."
I patted down my pockets out of habit, but naturally all that came out was dust. Clicking my tongue, I flopped back onto the bed, and at some point the noise outside the room had gone quiet.
Had everyone left for school?
It had been about an hour since I'd tricked the caregiver into letting me skip school, claiming I felt sick.
The sheer absurdity of my situation left me bewildered and resentful, but at the very least, I had a firm grasp of exactly what situation I was in.
Regression, twenty-five years into the past.
It was a reality no one could have wished for, but moping alone about how unfair it was wouldn't change a single thing. Nobody knew that better than me — a man who'd lived his whole life an orphan and felt the world's unfairness with his own skin.
So what could I do? Life was never fair to begin with.
Which meant that, given how things stood, the rational move was to spend my time planning for the future instead of whining about it.
The one silver lining in all this misfortune was that forty years of lived experience remained intact inside my head.
"If I'd known this was coming, I'd have memorized the winning lottery numbers."
A sigh escaped me at the missed opportunity, but still — the real estate markets, the stocks, the investments of the coming decades were all filed away clearly in my memory. Give me a little seed money, and that knowledge would pay me back handsomely.
The problem, of course, was that right now I didn't even have that seed money.
A third-year middle school orphan living in an orphanage. That was my current station in life. Embarrassing as it was to admit, no one fit the old proverb about a dragon born in a ditch quite as well as I did.
And the me who had returned to the past was still down in that ditch.
I remembered the snowy winter days of high school, shuttling from one construction site to the next to scrape together the football club dues.
Cold, exhausting, bitter, miserable.
Damn it. Memories I never wanted to relive.
"Hah..."
Reclining on the bed with the bleak past replaying in my head, I squeezed my eyes shut. At this rate, it looked like I'd be doomed to repeat it all.
Judging by the calendar I'd checked earlier, I was in my third year of middle school. It was October, with winter just around the corner, and by my memory, the high school I'd be attending had already been decided at this point.
In other words, if things stayed on this track, I was about to live through the three most grueling years of my life all over again.
No way in hell was I doing that twice.
"...All right."
Having finished sorting through my thoughts, I bolted upright from the bed.
My immediate goal: build an environment where I could focus on football. With forty years of experience and memory behind me, that was far from impossible.
This was my second life, bought at the cost of every won and every achievement I'd ever accumulated. However little I'd asked for it, I had no intention of squandering the opportunity.
Which meant it was time to draw up a concrete plan.
Digging through the hazy memories in my head, I pulled out the battered old cell phone and started searching.
If my memory served, there was a project the football association was running around this time...
"...There it is."
At the words that appeared on the phone screen, I broke into a grin.
[Spain Study Abroad Project (2nd Cohort) — Now Accepting Applicants]