Notes Side by Side
The study was a little quieter than the living room.
Along the walls, textbooks on Korean medicine, medical volumes, and various specialized works stood neatly arranged. On the desk sat a laptop, writing tools, and a small lamp. A practice treatment bed occupied one side of the room, and beside it the Hero’s charts and notes lay carefully ordered.
When Ria crossed the threshold, it was not the spines of the books that first caught her eye, but the traces left on the desk.
The first time she had entered, only the difficult titles on the spines had been visible.
The specialized names written in Hangul were still unfamiliar. Those thick, rigid volumes formed a wall, like the knowledge of Earth she did not yet know.
Beside them were other traces as well.
The Hero’s worn pen resting on one corner of the desk.
A chart marked by frequent openings.
A sheet folded neatly atop the practice bed.
The wrist rest of the laptop, slightly worn where it had long pressed against the desk’s edge.
Among those objects, Ria thought of the nights the Hero had sat here alone.
Today, her own notebook would come to rest beside them.
The Hero pulled the chair in front of the desk.
At first he meant to place it opposite her.
Then he stopped.
Holding the chair as if measuring the remaining distance, he shifted it to the seat beside her.
Ria looked at him.
“You’re going to sit there?”
“Yeah.”
He spread the books side by side as he spoke.
“If we sit facing each other, I’d feel like a teacher.”
Ria smiled softly.
“And aren’t you?”
“No.”
His answer was firm.
Then he added, a little more gently,
“Today isn’t a day for learning something new that you don’t know.”
Ria watched him.
He opened a notebook.
At the top left he wrote Otherworld Standards, and at the top right Earth Standards. Between the two words he left an empty space.
“It’s a day for taking what you already know and putting it into words the people here can understand.”
Ria did not grasp it at once.
He set the pen down and looked at her.
“Let’s write it like a translation table.”
“A translation table?”
“Yeah.”
He pointed to the two empty columns.
“It’s not that you have so much you don’t know that you need to study, Ria. You already know a great deal. Life, healing, responsibility, community—things like that.”
She listened quietly.
He touched the blank space between the columns with the tip of his pen.
“Here they call those things by different names and handle them in a different order. You’re not throwing away what you know. You’re translating it so the people of this place can understand.”
Ria’s fingertips slowly loosened from the edge of the notebook.
“Then what I need to learn isn’t knowledge, but the standards.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded.
“The standards for finding answers.”
Ria gazed at the two columns.
Otherworld standards.
Earth standards.
Before those simple two lines, her hand moved toward the pen again.
She lifted it.
Just before the tip touched the paper she paused for the briefest moment. Only a little while ago that same hand had been crumpling the corner of a guide sheet. Now it rested over the blank space.
She carefully wrote the first character.
“Then… I think I can do it.”
The Hero’s eyes lingered a moment on her fingertips.
The hand that had trembled until moments ago was now ready to form letters. It still shook, very faintly, yet the tip of the pen stayed on the page.
He spoke quietly.
“Yeah. Let’s do it together.”
The first thing they opened was the standard for responding to emergencies.
Ria read the question slowly. It asked for the proper sequence of actions upon finding someone collapsed and unconscious on the street.
She thought for a moment, then said,
“If it were the place I came from, I would have checked breathing and bleeding first. And if divine power allowed, I would have eased the pain as well.”
There was no hesitation in the answer.
The Hero looked at her briefly.
Someone who had passed through battlefields, temples, and field hospitals was speaking first of how to hold on to a life.
“That isn’t wrong.”
He wrote slowly in the right-hand column.
Confirm surrounding safety.
Call 119.
Check consciousness.
Provide emergency care within the possible range.
“But here, more than whether you can do something, you first confirm whether it’s a situation in which you’re allowed to.”
Ria’s brow drew together the slightest bit.
“Procedure before ability.”
“It doesn’t mean procedure is more important than life.”
He spoke carefully so she would not misunderstand.
“Here, so that one person doesn’t carry every responsibility alone, the roles are divided. The one who rescues, the one who takes the call, the one who transports to the hospital, the one who treats. All separate.”
Ria turned the words over for a long while.
On the left of the notebook lay the way she knew; on the right, Earth’s still-unfamiliar order.
After a moment she said,
“Instead of one person working a miracle, many people share the responsibility.”
The tip of the Hero’s pen paused above the right-hand column.
A phrasing more exact than the one he had been reaching for had come from Ria.
“……Yeah. That puts it better.”
She wrote in the notebook.
Otherworld standards: Grasp life as quickly as possible.
Earth standards: Several people share the responsibility of grasping life.
Beneath that she added, in smaller letters,
Division of roles.
The Hero’s pen lagged once on the paper.
The world Ria had spoken of now rested on the left; the procedures he knew were attached on the right. Two lines that had once stood far apart now lay side by side on the same page.
Ria looked for a moment at the blank space between them.
And before moving on to the next question, she drew a single small arrow between the two columns.
Study continued like that, little by little.
In the section on identity and residence, Ria stared at the guide for a long time before speaking.
“If there is a marital relationship, a guarantor, and a fixed place of residence…… isn’t that regarded as belonging to a household?”
“Emotionally, yes.”
After saying so, he wrote several items in the Earth-standards column.
Marriage.
Address registration.
Residence status.
Completion of education.
Step-by-step evaluation.
“But administratively, each one is separate.”
Ria followed the characters one by one.
“Living under one roof and being recognized by this world are different things.”
“Yeah. That’s why we have to match them one at a time.”
At those words she fell quiet for a moment.
Living under one roof.
Being recognized by this world.
She gazed a long while at the two lines written on the page. The first came to her at once—eating together, sleeping together, sitting at the same table. The second remained cold and hard. Address, stay, education, evaluation.
She lifted the pen.
Living under one roof = relationship.
Being recognized by this world = procedure.
And after a brief hesitation she added one more line.
Both are necessary.
The Hero’s pen stopped for a moment beside that sentence.
Both are necessary.
The short, uncrooked letters remained quietly under the lamp’s light.
She set the tip of the pen as if to write something more beneath it, then paused. In the end she wrote nothing further. Only a single tiny dot was left under the sentence.
Setting the pen down, she said,
“It’s strange.”
“What is?”
“I thought I was studying for a test today…….”
She looked at the two columns on the notebook.
“It feels as though I’m learning the words you and I need in order to live together, Hero.”
He could not answer.
Her notebook and his lay side by side on the desk. The space between them had grown narrower than at the start.
Without a word he pushed his own notebook closer.
Its corner stopped just short of touching hers.
“Then we’re both studying.”
Ria looked at him.
“You as well, Hero?”
“Yeah.”
He picked up the pen.
“Because I’m learning the world you know.”
She regarded him for a moment.
Then she smiled, very small.
“Then we’re truly doing it together.”
“Yeah.”
He nodded.
“We’re doing it together.”
Even after that, progress did not move quickly.
They lingered long over each sentence.
When Ria first understood something in the language of the other world, the Hero attached the words of Earth.
When he explained a procedure, she re-ordered it through the lens of life and responsibility.
Both columns of the notebook filled little by little.
On the left appeared the words she had spoken first; on the right the Earth’s expressions he had supplied lined up beside them. Some lines connected at once; others stood empty for a long while before they were completed.
Beside words she did not know, Ria made small marks.
Next to those marks he wrote simpler phrasing.
The night deepened slowly.
The living-room lights were out; only the study lamp cast its yellow glow. Textbooks, guides, workbooks, and notebooks lay spread in disorder across the desk. Ria’s handwriting had grown smaller than at the beginning, and the motion of the hand that held the pen had slowed.
Lines that had begun straight tilted gradually downward with the passing hours.
Still she did not close the book easily.
“Ria, let’s stop here for today.”
The Hero said.
She lifted her head. Fatigue had settled around her eyes. Even so she looked at the notebook again.
“Just a little more.”
“You’ve done a lot.”
“It felt as though I just grasped something. If I stop now I think I’ll grow confused again…….”
At those words he could not press more firmly.
Her gaze remained fixed on the notebook.
As if she must not lose the sentence she had just written, her fingertips held the edge of the paper. She read once more the words in the Earth-standards column, then looked again at her own sentence on the left.
Her eyelids looked heavy, yet her eyes would not easily leave the page.
Quietly he turned a leaf.
They read a few more sentences.
They copied a few more lines.
In the end the tip of the pen stopped.
Ria had fallen asleep with her head on the desk.
The pen was still gripped in her hand.
On the notebook, otherworld standards and Earth standards stood side by side. Some lines were neat; the last had grown a little disordered with fatigue. The unfinished character slanted gently downward.
It took a brief moment before the Hero’s hand moved toward the blanket.
On her sleeping fingertips the marks of the pen still remained.
The faint impressions where her fingers had pressed were visible, and even in sleep the hand that held the pen did not easily loosen. He could not touch that hand at once; first he looked at the final line of the notebook.
Division of roles.
Both are necessary.
And beneath them, a slightly crooked last sentence remained.
He rose quietly and brought the blanket.
When he drew it over her shoulders she let out a very small breath. Even in sleep she would not release the pen, so he carefully eased it free.
It took time for her fingers to loosen.
When the pen came free her fingertips twitched faintly in the air. He waited until that hand settled comfortably on the desk once more, then laid the pen beside the notebook.
He did not close the book.
He did not insert a bookmark either.
Instead, beside the last line she had written, he made a single small mark—so that when she woke in the morning she would know at once where to continue.
And he left his own notebook exactly where it was, next to hers.
The two notebooks, side by side, remained quietly under the lamp’s light.
One held the standards of the other world; the other held fast to the words of Earth.
Between the two volumes lay a very narrow gap.
He did not touch that gap with his fingertips.
He sat on the edge of the practice bed at the side of the study, yet he could not fall asleep at once. His body was tired. His shoulders felt heavy, his eyes a little dry. Still the hand that would have switched off the lamp did not move easily.
Ria’s silver hair, resting on the desk, shone faintly.
Beneath the blanket her shoulders rose and fell in small motions. Her sleeping breath was soft, and the papers on the desk stirred, almost imperceptibly, in time with it.
His hand stopped before the two notebooks.
Inside them were problems he could not solve in her place.
The examination room she would one day have to enter alone also lay beyond those pages.
He did not hold the thought for long.
Instead he moved her pen a little closer on the desk—to a place her hand would find the moment she reached for it in the morning.
The lamp still lit the notebooks.
He did not turn it off.
So that when Ria woke, she could continue at once.
