A Near Miracle
Back at the office after lunch, I brewed myself a cup of coffee in the pantry and settled into my chair. When I checked the time, it was still only one in the afternoon.
Strangely enough, the hours weren't moving. Everyone else was already living their Tuesday, but for me, today was effectively a Monday. Who gets a case of the Mondays on a Tuesday?
Besides, last week's Monday-me had already knocked out all the weekly tasks in advance, so there was nothing pressing on my plate.
But the company knows everything. Like some kind of mind reader, work began flowing my way the moment I had a free breath to spare.
"Ahem. Manager Kim?"
"Yes, Team Leader Jeong."
"Could you take a look at this report for me?"
"Team Leader..."
I deliberately dropped my voice low on the reply, and Team Leader Jeong flinched visibly. We'd confirmed it again and again at the last team dinner—I was done picking up other people's slack.
"No, no, this isn't me dumping work on you. I've already written most of it, but this particular report has to go all the way up to the Deputy Director, so..."
"Hmm. All right. Send it over by email and I'll go through it to see if anything needs fixing."
"Really? Ha, thank goodness for you, Manager Kim. Honestly, the reports you've been putting out have raised the bar so high for everyone above me. You know it's bad when I'm the one begging for favors, right?"
"Understood. Please send it soon—I'll take a look and get back to you."
An hour later, I handed the revised report back to Team Leader Jeong.
He was a fastidious man by nature. It showed in the way he agonized over the lunch menu, and at his desk he was even worse. Every ounce of that meticulousness was baked into the report itself. There was honestly nothing wrong with it—except that it radiated the emotional sensibility of a bygone era.
The report was written at one hundred percent intensity, so I shaved maybe twenty percent of the strain off the prose. What emerged was far cleaner, and carried far more force.
When Team Leader Jeong read it, a subtle smile crept across his face. It was a satisfaction he rarely let show, but it was unmistakable this time—a quiet smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling faintly.
So this man is capable of making a face like that...
"Thank you, Manager Kim."
"Not at all. You're such a master of drafting that there was barely anything for me to touch."
"So Manager Kim knows how to flatter after all? Hahaha."
It wasn't flattery, though...
"A report like this will satisfy the Deputy Director for sure. Thanks to you, our team's credibility is only going to climb."
Team Leader Jeong slapped his palm down on the desk, unable to hide his excitement, and swept out of the office with the report in hand.
Right on his heels, Assistant Manager Park suddenly appeared at my desk. She was a new hire who'd joined straight out of university this year—young enough to feel like the baby sister of the family. There was something endearing about her, a certain green clumsiness, but this was still a workplace. A place where each of us was squarely responsible for our own work.
"Um, Manager Kim... would you maybe help me with something?"
I turned toward her monitor and found an Excel spreadsheet in complete disarray. Hundreds of cells, and no telling where the error had started. It was exactly the kind of situation where the old me would have told her to go back, dig through it, and figure it out herself.
Maybe it was the newfound breathing room, but I rose and settled into her chair without complaint.
"Let's see here..."
I sat down and tapped the keyboard, and formula errors began cascading across the screen one after another.
"Did you build this yesterday?"
"Yes... Strategic Planning requested it, so I rushed through it. I can't figure out where it went wrong."
"Hmm. The functions are duplicated. And the linked sheets are pointed to the wrong ranges."
Assistant Manager Park's eyes went wide as she stared at the monitor. The tangled mess of sheets smoothed itself out in seconds.
"Whoa... Manager Kim, that's incredible. Are you secretly a genius or something?"
The comment drew a laugh out of me before I could stop it. All I'd done was adjust a few formulas, yet she was looking at me as if I'd just solved some impossible equation.
"You just find the pattern and work from there. It's not hard."
"It is for me! I wandered around lost for over an hour, and you fixed it the second you touched it. Honestly..."
The pure, unfiltered admiration in her voice seeped into me, warm and pleasant. I turned away and closed the laptop, keeping it brief.
"Get a little more practice and things like this won't even register as work."
"Aww. Thank you so much..."
I went up to the rooftop and lit a cigarette. Youngsoo was already there, and he spoke up without looking over.
"Hey, what have you been up to lately?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
I paused mid-drag and shot the question back. Youngsoo cracked a faint smile.
"Well, Team Leader Jeong's been singing your praises all over the place. Heard it from a few different people, so I asked if it was actually you."
"Team Leader Jeong? Seriously?"
"Yeah. You suffered plenty because of that guy, remember? Turns out that wasn't how he really felt."
"......."
When smoke break was over, I headed back to the pantry for some coffee. Laughter from the women in the office drifted down the corridor ahead of me.
"Manager Kim is seriously good at his job, isn't he?"
"He solved in one try something I'd been agonizing over for a whole hour today."
Assistant Manager Park nodded along eagerly, jumping into the conversation.
"Thanks to Manager Kim, my work's been flowing so smoothly—and I've learned so much from watching him."
"I used to think he was impossible to approach."
"I guess you really never know a person until you've worked with them."
I didn't go in. I just walked past the pantry at an unhurried pace.
But in a corner of my heart, I felt an unexpected warmth spreading at the unsolicited praise. So this was what it was...
Small recognitions, small encouragement—they pile up, and little by little they become the strength you need to get through another day.
Why had it taken me this long to figure that out?
Thursday, after work.
I went to see the psychiatrist I'd been visiting every month. He held evening clinics on Thursdays, which was why I always came on this day of the week.
The room was quiet. On the table sat the results of my brainwave scan and a stack of questionnaires.
"Mr. Kim Dong-su, your results are in."
The doctor had been staring at his monitor for a long while before he finally looked up, as if he couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.
"Mr. Kim Dong-su... this is close to a miracle."
His voice was low, but the astonishment in it was unmistakable.
"At your last examination, your sympathetic nervous system was in a state of extreme overactivation. Your heart rate variability was in the warning zone, and your stress index was flirting with the ceiling. Honestly, we were at the point of needing to intensify your medication."
He paused and slid a fresh printout across the table toward me. Two graphs lay side by side. One traced an irregular, jagged waveform, marked underneath with a red warning label: SEVERE. The other drew a calm, even curve.
"But this test is completely normal. Heart rate, brainwaves, autonomic balance—everything is stable. It is exceedingly rare for someone suffering from serious panic symptoms to show this kind of turnaround all at once."
The doctor still looked baffled.
"Of course, it could be a temporary improvement. That's why we'll run another measurement in a few days. Even so... this is hard to explain. Medically, I mean."
I walked out of the hospital like that.
No prescription this time.
My mind floated somewhere between dazed and detached. But one thing was absolutely certain: the breath that had been clenched tight in my chest could finally, freely, come and go.