The Half That Remained
"Minho."
I ignored the voice beside me and opened the front door. Even as I fumbled a pair of slippers onto my feet, the blurry figure in my peripheral vision kept talking.
"Minho. I know you can hear me. Let's talk."
The voice was steady, the kind that wouldn't waver no matter what hardship came its way. Even the way it was trying so hard to keep its composure in the middle of this insane situation was exactly the same. The faint upward lilt at the end of each sentence was identical, too—it nearly wrenched a hollow laugh out of me.
I really have lost it, huh.
I dropped onto the sofa and dragged a hand down my face.
"I know you're scared. But honestly, I'm at a loss here too, Minho. Can you at least look at me?"
When I covered my eyes, my brother's voice settled against my ears even more vividly.
This is driving me crazy.
I felt like tearing my hair out. When I heaved a long sigh, a gentle question came from beside me, asking what was wrong.
"What's the matter? Are you hurt somewhere?"
Yes. I think I am. But I can't exactly go to a hospital.
What would I even say once I got there? That my dead brother is talking to me?
It's not sickness so much as madness, isn't it.
Meanwhile, my brother kept chattering away beside me. I couldn't bring myself to ignore the way his voice was slowly filling with anxiety.
"Hyung. Be quiet. You're loud."
The moment I spoke, surrendering to the situation, my brother finally relaxed and smiled.
"Sorry. You wouldn't say anything, so I was getting antsy. I'll be quiet now."
He mimed zipping his lips shut, and he looked so much like my brother it hurt. If I hadn't seen his body with my own eyes, I might genuinely have believed it was him.
My brother was dead.
I desperately wished for a sentence that contradicted that one, but regardless of my hopes, it was a fact I couldn't deny.
My brother was dead. Struck down by a car driven by a drunk man, gone in the most hollow, senseless way.
I was at school when I heard about the accident. My homeroom teacher burst through the door mid-class and hurried me out, and I followed without understanding why. My breath stopped the moment I heard what she had to say in the hallway. That suffocating feeling—like I could choke to death at any second—didn't leave even after I saw my parents sobbing in front of the hospital.
Why?
My head was filled with nothing but the question.
Why did my brother die?
The question was so fierce, so venomous, that I didn't even have the strength to resist it. It was like being trapped at the bottom of a deep, dark well I never wanted to climb out of.
A month passed after the funeral. Then two. The question remained, but all that came back to me was the same tired refrain: the living have to keep living.
After my parents coaxed me, I started going back to school. I ate when it was time to eat. I talked with my friends. I went to the bathroom at regular intervals.
Why?
Even half a year after my brother's death, the question mark refused to disappear.
Why am I hungry?
Why did I still feel hunger, still need the bathroom, still get sleepy? My brother was dead. Everything had changed. So why—
Why.
Why was my daily life exactly the same as before? Could it be that I wasn't actually grieving my brother's death at all? It had to be that, didn't it—because otherwise, there was no way I could go on living like this, so effortlessly, as if nothing had happened.
I was disgusted with myself.
"Alright, everyone—career interest surveys are due today. Don't forget, hand them in to the class president."
The homeroom teacher's voice blurred past my ears. On my desk sat a blank sheet of paper, nothing written on it at all. I stared at it with dead, unfeeling eyes, then shifted my gaze to the window.
It's bright.
The sharp sunlight hit my eyes and I closed them without meaning to. A warmth spread across my whole face.
"Minho, did you finish your survey?"
I opened my eyes at the class president's cautious voice. When I silently handed over the paper, he hesitated.
"Um, the teacher said we can't turn it in blank."
"...What did you write?"
"Huh? Me?"
The class president, whose face I knew but nothing else, fumbled before answering, "I'm... going to be a civil servant."
I wrote civil servant in the blank space and handed the paper back. He looked at me for a moment, then quickly turned away.
I quietly slumped over my desk.
I wish time would just stop like this.
Feeling the sunlight on my back, that was all I could think. But reality has never once cared what I wished for. The bell rang to signal the next class, and I had no choice but to sit up.
The endless repetition. The listlessness that seemed like it would never end. And then, one day, when I felt like I was about to suffocate under the weight of it all—
"...Hyung?"
When I came home, my brother was sitting on my bed.
At first, of course, I assumed it was a hallucination. I'd heard that people sometimes see them after losing someone close—visions born of a grief they can't accept. So I figured I was one of those cases. Though it did strike me as a little strange for one to appear only after half a year had passed.
Just ignore it.
I thought if I ignored it, it would go away. After the first day, when I'd accidentally acknowledged it, I played blind with total discipline—but the hallucination was stubborn.
"Minho! Look at me, come on. Hm?"
"..."
"I saw you flinch just now. Why are you pretending you don't!"
When he spoke to me, I acted deaf. When he hovered right in front of me, I acted blind.
I can't let myself get dragged to a psychiatric ward at this point.
But the hallucination turned out to be far more tenacious than I'd imagined, and after more than a week of stalemate, the battle was decided.
"What? It's already been half a year since I died?"
"Yeah."
I answered meekly, the loser of our little war. My brother scrunched his eyes in disbelief.
"That's weird. The second I came to, I ran straight home. Half a year? That doesn't make any sense."
"...Does it make sense that you're talking to me right now?"
"Ah. Fair point."
My brother rubbed his nose, looking embarrassed, and laughed. That laugh was so completely him that something in my chest twisted strangely.
We stayed up all night catching up. How our parents were holding up. How heartbroken his friends had been. I even showed him the letters the kids from the orphanage where he'd volunteered for years had written and mailed themselves—pages crammed with wobbly, crooked handwriting saying how much they missed him.
"Those little rascals. Look at them."
His reaction to the letters was exactly what I'd expected. He read them over and over, eyes brimming with tears, the pages spread out before him. I just quietly watched him do it.
I really must be insane, right?
Was it really him? I'd never seriously thought about an afterlife before, but I'd always allowed that ghosts might exist. If they existed, they existed—that had nothing to do with me. But now that things had turned out this way, it mattered a great deal.
Why do ghosts exist in the first place? Because they can't accept that they're dead?
Except my brother seemed to understand his own death just fine. I'd lived my whole life without religion, so I knew nothing. I cast around vaguely through movies and novels I'd seen, dredging up words like ascension, grudge, passing on.
If this was a hallucination, then I had gone properly insane. But if my brother had truly become a ghost, then I supposed I ought to help him move on.
Hm.
I turned it over in my head for a while, then nodded to myself.
Fine. I'll just be a lunatic.
The past half year had been excruciating—so much so that part of me had wanted to go mad just to escape it. I raised my hand and touched my brother's hair. He was a blurry figure with no real substance, so there was no sensation of touching anything, but my hand kept moving, stubborn anyway.
"Hyung."
"Yeah?"
"I missed you."
Moonlight slipped in through the window and wrapped faintly around him. He looked like he might scatter and dissolve at any moment, so I forced my eyes wide open. I was terrified that if I blinked, he wouldn't be there when I opened them again.
"I missed you too, Minho. So much."
That gentle voice—until half a year ago, I'd heard it so often it had almost been cloying.
"I'm sorry I left without even saying goodbye. I was just... so thrown, myself."
Still the same.
Whether hallucination or ghost, my brother was still gentle, still a little hopeless. He was the one who'd died unfairly, and I couldn't for the life of me understand what he was apologizing for.
I wanted to be angry at him, but strangely, no words would come out. Maybe from holding my eyes open so long, they were burning hot.
"Minho."
"..."
"Hey, what's wrong? Why are you crying...?"
My brother reached out and brushed at my eyes, his face full of worry. I couldn't feel his touch at all, but it felt warm enough that I could almost believe I had.
"It's okay. I'm sorry, Minho. Hm? Stop crying."
He whispered softly, radiating the helpless frustration of someone desperate to wipe away my tears but unable to. I cried in stifled sobs for a long while after that before I finally calmed down.
I still hadn't opened my eyes, so everything was still pitch dark. And the moment I registered how quiet the room had become, cold flooded through my entire body.
Why...
Why did I close my eyes? What if I open them and he's gone?
I'm such an idiot.
All because I couldn't control one stupid burst of tears, I'd thrown away my chance to see him. No—wait. He might still be here. He might be watching me right now, gauging my mood.
But had reality ever once gone the way I wanted? I was too afraid even to swallow, drowning in the dread. Trembling, I slowly opened my mouth.
"...Hyung."
The single second I spent waiting for an answer stretched into a year. Just as I found myself holding my breath—
"Yeah?"
At the voice that came immediately, as if it had been waiting, I snapped my eyes open.
"What's wrong? Want me to get you a tissue—ah, right, I can't do that... Then what can I do? Do you need anything?"
There he was, fussing and fretting. All the tension drained out of my body at once, and a laugh escaped me. He looked puzzled at the sight of me crying and laughing all by myself, but I didn't have an explanation to offer.
How was I supposed to tell him, Thank god I'm insane?
Strange as it is to say, my madness wasn't limited to that one day. My brother kept appearing after that, too.
Only I could see him. Only I could hear his voice. Spending every hour of every day at his side, I slowly began to become the person I'd been before he died. My parents and friends were bewildered by my sudden recovery, but they welcomed it like they'd been waiting for it all along.
"Minho, you need to bundle up more."
"You're nagging. It hurts my ears."
"How many times have you caught a cold because you ignored me? Go grab a cardigan. Now."
"Ugh, it's heavy, though..."
I managed to drag out a grumbling voice. Afraid my smiling face would give me away, I quickly ducked my head.
"Why do you never listen to your hyung?"
Oblivious to the expression I was wearing, my brother carried on lecturing me.
This is good.
Good wasn't nearly a big enough word for what I felt. It felt like I was finally breathing. Not just air passing in through my nose and out through my mouth, but truly, genuinely breathing.
If this was a feeling only madness could give me, then I wanted to be mad all three hundred and sixty-five days of the year.
"Minho. Have a good day at school."
"...You're not coming with me today?"
When I faltered, my brother let out a soft laugh.
"You want me to come along?"
"Then why'd you say it like that?"
"It's just a greeting. Once you leave this room, we can't really talk anymore."
My brother gave a bittersweet smile. Seeing it, I sobered at once.
I'd never once considered things from his side. The time I could actually spend talking with him was limited. I had school every weekday, and in a building crammed wall to wall with people, there was no such thing as being alone. I was with him all day long, technically—but because I couldn't risk other people looking at me like I was strange, all I ever did was silently receive his one-sided chatter.
And then I'd come home to my parents, and by the time dinner was over, it was well past eight o'clock at night. The hours my brother and I could talk freely ran from eight in the evening to eight in the morning—precisely half of each day.
Which meant that for all the rest of that time, my brother had been repeating his one-sided words to an empty room, alone.
Only now did I understand that.