We spread out the lantern on the ground and wrote our wishes. Gyu-ho seemed to be sure of what he was wishing for. Eternal love between Kumakichi and Usami, winning the lottery, conquering the universe . . . I thought about what to write at first but like Gyu-ho ended up writing whatever came to mind.
We finished up and handed over the lantern to the lady. She deftly handled the wires at the bottom to set it up with a tea light. I gave her a tiny wrapped chocolate that I’d had in my pocket for who knows how long, and she smiled at me like someone who had never known sadness in her life. A group of lanterns went up at the same time. We cheered as we gazed at the lanterns floating gently up into the sky. Everyone with their happy faces. As if our wishes had already been granted.
?
As I left the hotel, I began walking wherever my feet took me. The sun wasn’t up, but there were already pedestrians in business suits on their way to work. I would’ve looked the same whenever I had a writing deadline. Wearing a suit and sitting in a café near my office at dawn, crouched over the table and furiously composing or editing something.
It must’ve rained overnight, because the air smelled of dust. After about ten minutes of walking, I went into a convenience store. I wasn’t hungry but wanted to buy something and ended up with seaweed snacks that had Korean idols on the packaging and a two-for-one deal on strawberry milk. Plastic bag in hand, I continued my walk on this aimless journey. Past a wall was a narrow path just wide enough for one person to pass. Right inside the alley was the hole to a sewer with rats running around below. I tried to walk without looking down until I came to some sliding doors. They were metal and had windows like the kind I used to see on old rice cake shops or general stores. When I walked inside, I realized that I was not inside a shop but in a small courtyard with houses on both sides, their sliding doors wide open without even a screen against mosquitoes, the inhabitants and their lives completely visible. I worried about the bugs they must get inside. Suddenly curious, and despite knowing this was very rude, I peered inside the houses. The people seemed too busy to take notice of me. A man washed his face in front of a basin, a woman next to him rinsed some vegetables, an old man sat on the floor and shucked corn, and another woman sat in front of her dressing table and frantically toweled her hair. At the end of the courtyard was a house with an old mattress in the middle of it. Two children, around four or five years old, were jumping up and down on it. Every squeak of the spring made a nearby cat with milky film over its eyes flinch. Think of the dust. My feet stopped of their own accord. Even though they couldn’t possibly reach it, the children stretched their hands out to the ceiling, trying to tap it with every jump. I remembered what Gyu-ho said to me once.
—I want to ride a bang-bang.
—You mean a bong-bong pogo stick?
—They called them bong-bongs in your neighborhood?
—Yeah, they call them bang-bangs in Jeju?
—I don’t know about the whole island, but it was bang-bang where I lived.
—You used to see them everywhere.
Before I knew it, I was sitting on the edge of a stranger’s porch. The cat ran away. Noticing me, the children stopped their jumping. The slightly smaller child hid behind the bigger one. I took out the two bottles of strawberry milk from the plastic bag. I opened and sipped from one, then offered the other bottle to the kids. They didn’t approach me. Smiling, I put it down on the porch. As if watching the most fascinating sight in the world, the children watched me drink my milk. When I finished it, I asked the children if they’d seen the fireworks the other night. They didn’t seem to understand. I asked where their parents were, and there was similarly no answer.
—Where have they gone, leaving you all by yourselves?
I’d mumbled the words under my breath, but they suddenly made my nose smart from rising tears, which, surely, was some weird sign of growing old. I looked up at the sky to knock the threatening tears back. Droplets of water on the awning were about to fall. It must’ve rained in the night. Had the fireworks been canceled because of it?
Rain still falls during the late rainy season, as do tears even when it’s too late.
?
After breaking up with Gyu-ho, I kept having nightmares.
In my dreams, he and I are laughing and talking it up, and he tells me he loves me. But even in my dream, I know it isn’t Gyu-ho. The moment I go up to him and hear his breathing and hug his shoulders, he disappears. He scatters like sand or turns into dark liquid like sewage and flows away. I’ve no choice but to stand at arm’s length. Watching him, listening to his voice, wishing this time would last forever.
Waking up from such dreams, I’m drenched in sweat.
Lately I’ve felt like I’m crumbling away little by little. Like Gyu-ho in my memories, I am breaking down and scattering into ashes. The feeling is so clear to me that it’s hard to shake it off like I usually would.
Sometimes his very existence to me is the existence of love itself.
I think that for a while now, using the medium of writing, I’ve tried to prove over and over again in many other stories I’ve written that the relationship between Gyu-ho and me was something so special to us that no one could take it away from us, that it was 100 percent real. Using all kinds of other methods to create Gyu-ho and write him as other characters, I’ve tried to show the relationship we had and the time we spent together as complete as they were, but the more I try, the further I get from him and the emotions I had back then. My efforts become something fainter and more distanced from the truth. The made-up Gyu-ho in my writing got hurt or died many times, and is always resurrected, as if love saves his life—whereas the real Gyu-ho lives and breathes and keeps moving on. The greater the gap between the two becomes, the harder it gets to endure it. I’ve tried and tried for a long time, but it’s only made me realize more clearly than ever that all I have left is a handful of empty words scattering away and leaving me behind as I sit here, scribbling. My shoulders hunched forward, a deep frown on my face, the world so small that I can hear my own breathing.
?
The lantern we sent up that day did not go far. The moment it made it past the breakwaters, it caught fire and spewed black smoke over the water before crashing into some faraway waves. Some of the people around us started laughing. Smiling, the woman in the red lipstick commented that there must’ve been a hole somewhere in the paper. I looked back and forth between the other lanterns that were flying far away and the spot that ours had fallen into. I stared at it for a long time. The other people started to move on, going their own way. Gyu-ho also turned and walked away, but I couldn’t get myself to leave. It was unbelievable to me that my wish had fizzled.