Memory Recovery (2)
Memory Recovery (2)
Life is a continuous process of learning.
From the smallest lessons—how to eat, how to use the bathroom, how to speak words—we progress to higher manners, better posture, greater dignity.
No one knows anything from the start.
We build knowledge layer by layer, broaden our understanding, and grow wiser through the words and actions born from that understanding.
Learning requires experience. Experience requires events. Events require action.
That is why the word for child carries the meaning of immaturity, of foolishness.
They have acted less, experienced fewer events, lack experience, and have learned little.
Because their learning is scant, they do not know how to act, nor how to speak.
Han Jae-jung was one of those children. A child who had not lived even half of half a life.
A child who was brave despite being an orphan.
Han Jae-jung was placed in an environment perfectly suited to make him mistake himself for an adult.
He had no parents, no adults to emulate, and had to stand on his own.
His independence was stronger than his peers’.
It would be more accurate to say independence was all he had.
There was no one to depend on, no parent to fall back on.
That independence gave him an exceptional quality compared to others his age, and that exceptional quality led his friends to rely on him.
This did not teach him—it gave him a mistaken revelation.
I have to take responsibility.
Independence acquired with so little learning soon transformed into a sense of responsibility.
Someone who could barely take responsibility for himself began shouldering responsibility for others.
Responsibility became anxiety, and anxiety became recklessness.
That recklessness conjured easy conclusions to end his problems.
And it prevented him from foreseeing the aftermath.
It was the result of excluding himself from those he sought to protect.
The result of mistaking a mature child for an adult.
Carrying burdens beyond his physical and mental limits, he took responsibility while only pretending to be an adult.
And he crossed a river from which there was no return.
It was a complacent judgment.
In his state of mind, complacency had been almost inevitable.
He was still a child.
A child who, when a dating scandal erupted, experienced sustained psychological abuse from an anonymous mob.
He was arrogant, reckless, and anxious.
He thought it would be fine as long as he could extinguish the most urgent fire.
He was a fool.
He did not know the magnitude of human malice.
He did not know how fragile his own mind was.
He did not know how brutal the storms of reality could be.
Now he was paying dearly for that foolishness.
His ragged breathing was proof that the pain of a past he had known only intellectually had now become an experience. It was also proof that he was, at this very moment, in the midst of a harsh lesson.
“O-Oppa! C-calm... the, the bag. Where’s the bag?”
The passage of time is fair to all, but it does not bring the same healing to everyone.
Oblivion is a blessing. Time’s flow, like wind carrying away sand, slowly erodes accumulated pain. But the strength of that wind varies from person to person. For some, it howls; for others, it is a sluggish breeze. And sometimes, no matter how fiercely the wind blows, the sand will not shift.
Han Jae-jung’s case was special in another way: the sand that had been blown away and vanished now returned on a reversed wind.
Past experiences he had clearly forgotten were forcibly dredged up and tormented him.
It was one of the memories he had wanted, but it was not one he could welcome.
“Oppa! Look at me! Quick!”
Pink Deneb took Han Jae-jung’s face in her hands and forced his gaze to meet hers. Her jewel-like eyes reflected him clearly. His eyes, too, looked back at her with equal clarity.
The gaze that had been staring into the past slowly returned to the present.
“Can you hear me?! Huh?! No, you don’t have to nod. Seven seconds, breathe in for seven seconds! Got it? I’m counting now. One, two...”
Her fingers, starting from a fist, unfolded one by one. Following the movement, he breathed in. His violently spasming diaphragm expanded. The motion was noticeably more stable than moments before.
When all five fingers had spread open, she folded two back down.
“Now breathe out. Slowly again, for eleven seconds. Got it? One, two...”
Her hand returned to a fist. He exhaled slowly, matching the drawn breath to Pink Deneb’s voice and fingers. His chest, which had been swollen to its limit, slowly regained its original shape.
“...Eleven. Now breathe in again. For seven seconds. Just like before. All right?”
They repeated this several times. 7-11 Breathing. It was one of the coping techniques for hyperventilation.
His shoulders, which had been heaving up and down like boiling water, gradually returned to their normal state through the repeated breaths.
“Hah... hhuh...”
But the aftereffects lingered. Like someone who had just finished a marathon, he was drenched in sweat. His arms and legs trembled like aspen leaves, and he could not stand properly.
It was the consequence of having a nightmarish memory hammered into him all at once, like a lightning strike.
Right now, Han Jae-jung could not distinguish whether the liquid running down his face was sweat or tears. He was dizzy. He felt like he was losing his mind.
‘The completion of a world where no one gets hurt’—in adolescence, that kind of bullshit was a common enough impulse. But compared to the lightness of that choice, the price was devastatingly heavy.
‘You fucking idiot... No wonder you attempted suicide and vanished without a trace.’
He now understood perfectly why Han Jae-jung had resolved to die. He could empathize with it deeply. No, empathy was not enough. He had actually experienced it.
Moreover, he now had a clearer understanding of Han Jae-jung’s thoughts, feelings, and guilt regarding the other two people.
It was complicated. Feelings toward other people are never simple, but his case was even more so.
A benevolent love that could be seen as both romantic and paternal, camaraderie, admiration, an inferiority complex and a sense of utter defeat, friendship, a kind of superiority and elation intoxicated by his own kindness in caring for others, ennui, responsibility, regret, guilt.
A maelstrom of emotions battered him.
Memories contain not just scenes but feelings. By acquiring the memory of his resolve to leave the girl in front of him and the act of carrying it out, Han Jae-jung also learned the many emotions attached to that moment.
‘He was exhausted.’
Han Jae-jung had been exhausted standing beside radiant beings like magical girls. Ennui.
He was not tired of people. He was tired of the stares and the attention that came from being next to them.
The dating scandal had been nothing more than a trigger to leave. He felt certain that even without it, he would have vanished one day.
It was his innate nature to act immediately on any emotional disturbance. It was a behavior possible only because he had no parents to stop him. In that sense, it could be called a trait formed by his circumstances.
In fact, he had often run away from the orphanage. He attended school just enough to meet the attendance requirements and frequently skipped to wander elsewhere.
He would set out on those free-spirited journeys and, when the ennui faded one day, he would return.
The girls, knowing this side of his personality, must have been the reason they did not come looking for him for a while.
But he did not return.
“Oppa... are you okay?”
Pink Deneb asked, her voice full of worry. The hands holding his cheeks became a breakwater blocking the cold wind. At the same time, they served as a conduit for emotion. Her hands were trembling just as much as his.
“...Yeah, I’m okay.”
Guessing at her shock, Han Jae-jung tried to reassure her with a smile. It actually worked. A hint of relief settled on Pink Deneb’s face. She slumped down to sit just as he did.
“B-but... why were you here...?”
It was a legitimate question. It was also a difficult one. Han Jae-jung twisted his smile into a grimace and racked his brain as hard as he could for an excuse. He had just barely cleared away the suspicion that he was a monster; there was no need to revive it.
“That’s...”
The excuse he muttered out could not continue. The words behind it were blurred by a cloud of white vapor. Han Jae-jung doubted his own eyes. Tears were welling in Pink Deneb’s eyes.
“Don’t die....”
“...?”
The reply that came back was utterly unexpected. Now that he looked, the earlier question had not really been a question. She had already determined the answer for herself.
Pink Deneb threw her arms around his neck. The act itself was not so strange for a reunion, but the emotion behind it was deeply perplexing. Baffled by the torrent of heavy feeling, Han Jae-jung’s hands fluttered in the air, not knowing where to land.
“Oppa, don’t die... Hic, hhk, don’t die...”
As she pressed her face to his shoulder, a dampness soaked through. It was not from the cold sweat he had just shed. Pink Deneb was crying. Sometimes shock at seeing a close friend in pain can bring tears, but that explanation did not quite fit this situation.
This was a desperate wish that went beyond concern.
It was an act of protection, a lament for life itself, transcending a simple wish for good health.
‘Well, I almost got killed by Seol-hwa just now. If you’re going to scold someone about dying, maybe it’d be better to beg her to spare me, not me.’
But his company was too wrong for that kind of joke, and his condition was too poor.
“Don’t die... don’t die... I’ll be good... I’m sorry... I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you... I’m sorry I called you mister... I won’t swear anymore, I’ll live a good life...”
What was he supposed to do with this? He had no answer. The excuse he had painstakingly prepared was bleached white and washed away by her tears. At the sight of her desperate, infantile wailing—incongruous with her age but fitting her appearance—Han Jae-jung was speechless.
“You can’t kill yourself... please don’t die...”
With his memory restored, what surfaced next was a memory. Vaguely, Han Jae-jung recalled a time from her childhood when she had been a crybaby. Compared to then, her makeup was now heavier, her posture prouder, her words and actions free of hesitation. But seeing her cry now, he realized that the child she had been was not entirely gone.
“You can’t die...”
The wish was so fiercely insistent that Han Jae-jung even forgot the pain from just moments ago.
“Wh-why would I die! Ah-yoon, who do you think I am? Huh? I’m not going to die. It’s okay. I’m not going to.”
He still could not follow the entire situation, but Han Jae-jung decided to calm her down first.
His hands, which had been flailing awkwardly in the air, settled behind her back. He wrapped his arms around her small back and stroked her head as if soothing a child. His hands had been trembling like aspen leaves, but at some point, they had stopped shaking.
Relying on the hazy childhood memories that felt like peering through fog, he calmed her.
“I’m not going to die. Ah-yoon, calm down. Everything is going to be okay. Everything.”
He repeated it again and again. Slowly, just like the breathing exercise from moments before.
After shouting that he would not die seven times, and that it was okay eleven times.
Her back, which had been shaking terribly, slowly began to settle.