“You remember Jiheon, right? He got hurt pretty badly…… and he’s looking for you right now.”
It was a hot and humid July night. With the monsoon season that always started around this time added on, the days were so unbearable that your whole body would turn damp and sticky in no time if you didn’t turn on the air conditioner. Despite the sweltering weather, I silently stared at U Jaemin, who had dressed himself in a suit so suffocatingly stiff that he’d come all the way to the funeral hall. It was a reunion after eight years.
“……Why show up out of nowhere and bring up U Jiheon? Are you still playing his nanny?”
“It’s not like that. He’s grown up now too; he’s already twenty-seven.”
Seeing U Jaemin smile apologetically, words failed me. He and I had been college classmates, and there had even been a time when we were quite close. But for one reason or another, we had already lost contact for eight years. Yet this morning, I had received a call from an unknown number from U Jaemin. Honestly, I couldn’t help but be bewildered by the contact after so long. It was strange that he knew my changed phone number, and it felt abnormal that upon hearing the location of the funeral hall, he had found his way to me within an hour.
……And on top of that, U Jiheon.
Hearing that name I had long since forgotten, I was rendered speechless. *Do you remember?* Surely he hadn’t asked thinking I might not. How could I forget the name of the bastard who had once chased me around like a madman?
U Jiheon, four years younger than me, had been a high school student I tutored long ago. From when he was a seventeen-year-old first-year until the summer of his third year, I had taught him for a full two years, so even without *that* incident, I probably couldn’t have easily forgotten him. Moreover, U Jiheon was the only son and sole heir of the owner of Lian Industries, which led the fashion industry in South Korea. He was someone who had no business mixing with, nor any reason to associate with, an ordinary person like me.
He always used to say, as if it were a habit, that he never knew he would come to like men. But the same had been true for me. I had never imagined, not even in my wildest dreams, that I would receive that kind of persistent pursuit from a man, and from U Jiheon, a high school student at that. Well…… it was all in the past now.
My head grew muddled at the dizzying past that suddenly surfaced. What reason could U Jiheon possibly have to look for me now? Eight years had already passed between him and me. Even if the feelings he had harbored for me in the past had been love, they were so old that they had already weathered away without a trace. I couldn’t understand U Jaemin’s behavior in trying so hard to dredge up the past.
Unable to figure out what on earth I should say in response, I kept my mouth tightly shut, then turned my gaze blankly toward the inside of the funeral hall.
The empty memorial chamber, devoid of a single person, was steeped in utter silence. In the portrait, my mother, young and healthy in life, was smiling brightly. I silently gazed at my mother’s lively eyes, then soon lowered my gaze.
……It had been a sudden death. Even though the everyday life that had seemed like it would continue forever had been destroyed overnight, the world hadn’t changed in the slightest.
“……How did she pass away? Was it…… cancer after all?”
“Well…… something like that.”
U Jaemin, who had been staring vacantly at my mother’s photo following my gaze, belatedly asked about the deceased, perhaps feeling that he had talked too much about his own affairs since arriving at the funeral hall. Since my mother had been diagnosed with liver cancer right after I started college, it was natural for our relationship, frozen in that time, to assume my mother’s cause of death was cancer. I didn’t bother correcting his misunderstanding. More than that, I wanted to end this exhausting meeting quickly.
Since my mother, who had grown up in an orphanage, only had me as family, I had to finish the remaining funeral procedures alone. I hadn’t even decided whether to arrange a tree burial or place her remains in a columbarium. Just accepting the reality before my eyes was overwhelming enough. I had not the slightest intention of taking on past troubles on top of everything.
“I don’t know why you’re suddenly bringing up Jiheon to me, but I have no intention of meeting him again. That was ages ago, so what now……”
“Don’t be like that, Yun Seonga. Won’t you think of meeting him just once? Actually, my aunt and uncle said they were going to come see you, and I barely stopped them.”
“……What?”
For a moment, words failed me. The aunt and uncle he mentioned were U Jiheon’s parents. As someone who remembered how much they had despised me, I instead began to feel a foreboding sense of dread. It was strange that the very people who had trembled with fear that their only son might turn out gay were suddenly looking for me.
“Don’t tell me…… Jiheon, is he badly hurt?”
I asked cautiously, but U Jaemin only moved his lips, unable to continue easily. Thinking that U Jiheon might be seriously injured, his sudden visit began to make a little more sense. Could his life be in danger? That he wanted to see his first love one last time, or something like that…… Anxious from my own runaway imagination, words popped out of my mouth almost like an interrogation.
“Hey, why won’t you answer. How badly is he hurt?”
“……He fell from the company building.”
“……What? He works at a company? No, more importantly, what floor did he fall from?”
“The seventh floor.”
“…….”
My head went blank. Because, coincidentally, the apartment I lived in was on the seventh floor. I already knew someone who had successfully committed suicide by falling from a seventh-floor height. My heart sank.
“……Why? Did he fall while drinking? Or…… by accident?”
Upon hearing my words, U Jaemin answered without a moment’s hesitation.
“……He was trying to die.”
“……What?”
“Jiheon…… tried to kill himself.”
At the word *suicide*, spat out so resolutely from U Jaemin’s mouth, for a while I couldn’t think of anything.
***
Even though my mother died, daily life continued. In truth, since death visits everyone at least once, it wasn’t something that happened only to my mother. Everyone must be enduring life by repeating the cycle of forgetting and being forgotten.
But even as I thought that, I couldn’t return to the apartment I had lived in with my mother. That place held too many traces of the dead. With time, I would eventually grow accustomed to a life with my mother cut out of it, but…….
……I wasn’t confident yet.
After finishing the three-day funeral and placing my mother’s remains in a columbarium, I submitted my resignation to the company. There was no longer any need to scrape money together desperately. I wanted to transfer to a company with more time flexibility. I hadn’t yet thought about what would come after that.
Sitting in a quiet cafe during the weekday morning rush while everyone was busy commuting, writing my resume on my laptop, everything suddenly felt futile. I needed money to survive, and I had to work to earn money, but I found myself thinking, what meaning was there in struggling so frantically to live? Now there was no one for me to take care of, no family, no one waiting for me at home. It meant that even if I died on the street right now, there wouldn’t be anyone to hold a funeral for me.
After my mother’s death, I had been suffering from an overwhelming lethargy. Could I overcome this too? Yet as of now, I couldn’t even muster the will to try.
Around then, my cell phone, which had been dead silent all this time, rang. Checking the screen, it was U Jaemin. This past week, he had contacted me with truly persistent tenacity. To the point where I felt he wouldn’t even act like this if his own younger brother were hurt.
U Jaemin and U Jiheon, cousins with a four-year age gap, were guys who didn’t resemble each other in personality or appearance at all. Compared to U Jaemin, who had an amicable and gentle disposition, U Jiheon was truly a good-for-nothing young master. If I hadn’t taken the tutoring job for U Jiheon through U Jaemin’s introduction, there would have been no reason for me to get involved with that extraordinary family whatsoever.
I let out a shallow sigh and pressed the call button.
“……Are you really going to keep this up? I don’t know what you want to do about it after all this time…… Don’t you know it’s much better for both of us, him and me, to live without seeing each other?”
[……Where are you? Let’s just meet for a second, Yun Seonga.]
“……Sigh, you bastard, you’re impossible. That Jiheon was struggling enough to attempt suicide, I truly…… feel sorry about that. I’m worried that he got hurt badly too…… Before that incident, I cherished him like a younger brother as well. But even so, what would be solved by me meeting him? Are they telling us to date? Did his parents say so? Or did he look back now and realize getting rejected by a guy like me was so unfair and infuriating that he wants revenge?”
[…….]
There was no answer from the other end of the line for quite a while. My heart had been too confused since U Jaemin came to the funeral hall. U Jiheon, attempting suicide? The U Jiheon I knew was someone who would absolutely never do something like that. I couldn’t help but worry about what had happened in his life over the past eight years.