“…….”
“There’s a line of guys willing to offer themselves up, and yet I would stoop to someone like you……”
Haejeong trailed off mid-sentence with a sneer and then stopped abruptly. Without finishing what he was saying, he suddenly cursed to himself out of nowhere, kicked the office door open with a bang, and walked out. The crash of the door rattled Munyeong, but Haejeong left without looking back even once. Munyeong stared blankly at that furious retreating figure and felt something strange stir in him. It was almost as though Haejeong was… hurt. No, that couldn’t be it.
He was right, in the end. Someone like Haejeong, stooping to someone like me…. There was no way. And yet his actions and his words felt so at odds with each other that Munyeong was confused. He couldn’t understand why Haejeong looked hurt.
Munyeong shook his head sharply. Get a grip. Don’t get swept up in it. He pushed away the misreading that kept creeping back in and got on the elevator with heavy steps. There had been many hard days, but never one quite like today. Nothing was left behind but a barren emptiness after a storm had torn through. He was exhausted and hollow.
**
For the first time in his life, Munyeong called in sick. Section Chief Jo accepted it without a word of judgment, readily and without fuss. He even told Munyeong to get plenty of rest.
After that day’s shift ended, Munyeong spent the whole night suffering through it. Even the all-in-one cold medicine he bought from the pharmacy showed no sign of working quickly. He had chills running through his entire body like a bad case of the flu, and at the same time a fever climbing, leaving him in the strange experience of feeling cold and burning hot all at once. On top of that, his head throbbed so badly that his thoughts went hazy and he couldn’t do anything at all. It had been so long since he’d been this sick that Munyeong lay there trembling through the night, making sounds of pain.
That night he kept drifting in and out of sleep, and every time he fell under he dreamed. It was the dream about when he was abandoned. Munyeong had been abandoned at five years old. They say young children usually don’t remember anything from back then, but for some reason that one day had stayed with Munyeong in vivid detail. He couldn’t remember his mother’s face, of course. Only the words she had spoken to him then came back to him.
If you wait here, Mom will come back soon. His mother had said it while prying his hand — which had been clutching hers so tightly — loose. I’ll bring back the cotton candy you love. Alright? She wiped her eyes as she said it. He couldn’t read the meaning of those tears at the time, but little Im Munyeong had decided he absolutely had to wait right here for his mother. Because she looked so sad, and he thought he had to be good and do as she said.
But an hour passed, then half a day, then the dark of night — and his mother did not come back. Munyeong wandered around Seoul Station, slept among homeless men lying on flattened cardboard boxes, and waited for his mother the next day too. And the day after, and the day after that. Crouched among the homeless, he waited and waited.
Then one day, a neatly dressed older woman came to him with a male police officer.
Is this the child?
The woman asked the officer, who responded with an uncomfortable tone.
Yes. She left him in just the right spot to avoid the cameras. We asked the people around — apparently he’d been like this for four days already.
Munyeong kept his mouth shut tight and looked up at the adults.
Hey, little one.
The woman called to him softly.
Why are you sitting here like this?
The voice that asked so gently — as though carefully touching the heart of an abandoned child — was what finally made Munyeong’s tears fall, one after another. It was the first time he had cried in those four days of silent, wordless waiting.
Oh, sweetheart.
The woman held him close and soothed him. He only understood later, but she was a social worker who looked after abandoned children, and she had cared for him until a placement at a facility was arranged. She was a truly kind person — but little Munyeong had known even then. No matter how warm someone was to him, no matter how much they helped him, that person could never become his parent. Could never become his mother.
That he had lost his mother at five years old.
Tears slipped from the corners of sleeping Munyeong’s eyes. Delirious with a blazing fever, he murmured the same thing again and again, barely audible.
“Mom……”
It was sad — remembering the moment of being abandoned, and yet not being able to remember his mother’s face. A name he would have no occasion to speak aloud for the rest of his life, and yet in sleep, he repeated it without end.
**
Munyeong hated being sick. When he was sick he couldn’t earn money, and when he was sick his mother — locked away in some far corner of his memory — always surfaced, and that never left him in a good mood.
Still, sleeping with nothing to worry about seemed to have helped his condition a little. The raging fever had come down somewhat, and his body that had felt like it weighed a thousand pounds felt lighter. But he still had no energy, and his throat was very swollen, making it hard to get his voice out.
“Munyeong, your hyung is here!”
The following afternoon, Shin Juho walked through the door with both hands full of things. He must have rushed straight over the moment work ended after hearing Munyeong was sick.
“Look at your face, all puffy. You okay?”
Shin Juho asked with a worried look, turning Munyeong’s face this way and that to check on him. Munyeong smiled softly and nodded slowly.
“…Yeah. Getting a lot of sleep helped.”
“You haven’t eaten yet, right?”
“Yeah. Have you?”
“I ran straight here the second I got off work, so I haven’t either. Let’s eat together. I got porridge. There’s a place near your company that’s so good people queue up to get in.”
Shin Juho rustled through everything he’d brought and started taking things out. He had spent the night calling out for a mother who wasn’t there — but still, knowing there was at least one friend who came when he was sick made something warm bloom in his chest. Being alone was something he’d gotten used to, but it seemed there was no getting around the loneliness of being sick by yourself.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Stop saying stuff like that, it’s embarrassing.”
He even shuddered like it was genuinely revolting, his face scrunching in exaggerated distaste. Munyeong smiled faintly at the playful look. The quiet smile that had been drifting across his face slowly began to fade, and Munyeong let out a voice with a trace of something bitter in it.
“…I dreamed about my mom.”
“What?”
“Juho. Do you remember?”
“Remember what, out of nowhere?”
“Just…. The moment of being abandoned. Things like that.”
It had been such a long time since he’d had that dream, and now that it lingered before him, Munyeong found himself slipping into a strangely tender mood he couldn’t easily shake. Shin Juho, who had been in the middle of unpacking the containers he’d brought, paused for a moment and exhaled a quiet, heavy breath.
“I remember. I was only six, but it all came back to me anyway, weirdly enough.”
Shin Juho said it in the same casual tone as someone recounting what they had for dinner last night. Pulling out the porridge he’d bought, he started talking without fuss.
“My parents divorced, and my mom took my older brother and my dad kept me.”
“Yeah.”
Munyeong listened with careful attention, hearing this for the first time. He accepted the disposable spoon Juho handed him and sat quietly watching as Juho settled himself naturally into the seat across from him.
“My dad was a drunken piece of trash. Hit my mom, me, my brother all the time.”
“……I see.”
That kind of backstory was common enough inside the facility that Munyeong wasn’t surprised. He responded with calm steadiness.
“But my mom took only my brother with her. They said legally they had to split us, but… leaving me with that man was no different from throwing me away.”
Shin Juho scooped the porridge into the bowl and pushed it toward him.
“And when I was six, my dad beat me half to death and a neighbor found me…. The police ended up coming and everything. That’s how I got separated from him — and the staff member at the shelter looking after me asked: do you want to go back to your father, or go to a facility.”
“…….”
“You know what I said?”
Shin Juho was doing a pretty good job of acting like it didn’t affect him, but it was clear his eyes had gone darker than usual. Munyeong felt guilty for having dug at a wound without meaning to. Juho was generally bright both inside the facility and after — he hadn’t known he was carrying something this painful.
“What did you say?”
“I said I’d go to my mom.”
“Ah……”
“But the staff member looked at me in this really awkward way.”
“…….”
