It’s not so special for a child of that age to comfort someone with a drawing. But most children, when they want to comfort someone, draw that person smiling brightly or looking happy. In the hopes that they will become so.
But the child was capturing me exactly as I appeared in their eyes. It wasn’t a comfort that sugarcoated the situation, downplayed it, or patted me on the shoulder while injecting baseless optimism like ‘everything will be okay.’
So you were watching me this closely, my changes and my emotions, every single expression. And you were worried. It was a feeling I had long forgotten—that the beginning of comfort was interest and empathy.
In front of someone who already knew everything about me, and who did not try to view any of it with distortion, I had no need to hide myself or feign my emotions. That in itself was a comfort.
A child who speaks through pictures.
People born with the fate of having no choice but to speak through pictures.
When I received the child’s drawing of me, I once again clearly confirmed that it was my mission to let the world know their language.
I was already aware of the limits of my own talent for drawing, and I had no lingering attachment to it. Instead, I had been given a different role, and my top priority was to make it so that he, who was probably lying under the covers at home, could once again speak through his art in front of a canvas.
“Thank you, our artist.”
The child, finding the word ‘artist’ amusing, laughed and hunched their shoulders. They smiled easily and were moderately playful, but were truly a child of few words. Perhaps it was a natural phenomenon. The child must have had another language that was more comfortable for them.
About three months after that, my husband and I left for Hong Kong. I believed only in his talent, and he believed only in my passion. Just as with our marriage, we went against everyone’s opposition. Into an unknown world where we had no connections. Fearlessly.
Those were the days when it felt like everything would work out, when it seemed we could light the way with drive and passion alone.
○
Ms. Han lightly shook the can of the drink in her hand. Her gaze remained fixed on the river before us the entire time she continued her story. Perhaps she was superimposing the time that had passed onto the flowing river water.
“It didn’t work out in Hong Kong in the end, either. I got a job at a gallery and worked day and night, and he, who at first seemed to get a little stimulated and found his creative drive, soon started to drift again… We forced ourselves on each other… and only after we were both worn to shreds did we decide to go our separate ways. He went back to Korea, and I stayed in Hong Kong.”
Perhaps because a fair amount of time had passed, I couldn’t feel any unsettled agitation in Ms. Han’s voice over the scars that must have been clearly left on her ego after a draining fight with a loved one. She was simply calm. But she couldn’t do anything about the scratched-like marks I could feel in her gaze as she stared at the river’s flow.
It was on our way home, having left work at the same time for once. After getting out in the underground parking garage, Ms. Han suggested we go for a walk along the river, and we each picked out a drink at the convenience store and headed for the Han River.
It was a short walk from the apartment to the Han River trail, just through a small tunnel. The full-blown summer had yet to begin, so the riverside after sunset was plenty cool.
After a leisurely ten-minute walk along the bike path, we luckily found an empty bench, and that was where Ms. Han’s story began. She had probably suggested the walk in order to tell it.
It wasn’t a long story. Nor did she explain the process of her marriage and divorce in detail. But I could surmise that there were complex values intertwined in it that couldn’t simply be called a ‘failed marriage.’
He must have been the object of her love, romance, and marriage, as well as an understanding fellow human being and a partner with whom she had dreamed.
“I didn’t know… that you were married… or that you had separated.”
I muttered, fiddling with the can in my hands. Ms. Han smiled and ruffled my hair.
“Whether I was married or not, it’s not like that information is necessary for us to draw together… and your parents aren’t the type to… gossip about other people’s business. They probably wouldn’t have bothered telling a little kid like you.”
Then, with a light sigh, she took a sip of her drink.
“If you didn’t know I was married, it’s only natural you wouldn’t know I was divorced.”
As if to lighten the weight brought on by the mention of my parents, Ms. Han added that and smiled faintly at me, but I couldn’t smile back. It had been a really long time since I had heard someone talk about my parents, but that wasn’t the reason. Right now, I was thinking more about Ms. Han than about myself.
“Back then, I was truly desperate, and I was certain. Now I know how precarious the certainty a twenty-one-year-old has about life is, but… what can you do. That’s something you know after time has passed, and if there were only people who could skillfully suppress their present desires by calculating future regrets in advance, the world population would probably be only half of what it is now.”
Ms. Han shrugged and continued.
“My all-or-nothing personality was even worse back then. Because I was young. Everyone around me desperately tried to stop me, saying just dating without getting married would be enough… but it was a feeling that couldn’t be satisfied by just dating. I kept wanting a way to be more completely bound to him….”
Ms. Han’s words trailed off. Withdrawing her gaze from the river, she looked down at her lap and, gripping the can tightly, added.
“If he had been an omega, I could have gotten him pregnant. To the point I had thoughts like that.”
Then she turned to me and smiled. As if embarrassed and finding such past passion futile. The way one might laugh while reminiscing about the half-baked emotions of adolescence.
I had guessed to some extent from the conversations and subtle atmosphere among the members while living in Phantom, but as expected, Ms. Han was a female Alpha. If her partner were an omega, it was possible for her to get them pregnant regardless of their primary sex. But for Ms. Han to get pregnant, she had to be paired with a male Alpha. The reason people around them had opposed her and his marriage was probably not just because of their young age. I couldn’t help but think of Morae and Hyung.
“So I don’t regret the marriage itself. No matter how it ended, I know that at the time, it was a state where I couldn’t not do it. It’s true that marriage was as desperate as life and death back then, and if I hadn’t been able to get married then, with my personality, I probably would have kept regretting it. It was the same for him. We were certain, without a one percent deficit… that we could get married, live as a great painter and art dealer couple, as the best partners, as soulmates for life. Back then. When such clear certainty is occupying your entire mind, how can you postpone the decision?”
A young couple who, drawn strongly not only by romantic feelings but also to the other as a human being, went ahead with marriage against the opposition of those around them. It was a story similar to my mother and father’s. Though their endings were different.
Ms. Han’s couple, who clashed until there was nowhere left to go, then grew sick and tired of each other and ended it themselves, and my mother and father, who had an ideal relationship just as they had first dreamed of through each other, but had it violently snatched away by a sudden external accident, completely against their will.
It was a difficult question to easily say which couple’s ending was more tragic.
“But for people to understand each other… it turned out to be a much more arduous task than I thought. I understood why they call a human being a microcosm. It’s complex. But sometimes there’s no logic or reason to it. Of course it’s hard to understand. How can I, a stranger, understand the parts of him that he himself doesn’t know the reason for. It was the same for him with me.”
For me, who had never even dated, let alone been in love or married, it was a slightly difficult story. But I thought I could understand to some extent the frustration of not being able to read the intentions of a complex and difficult person.
“For him, for whom drawing was as natural as three meals a day, who couldn’t imagine himself not drawing… watching him gradually fall apart because of drawing… that seemed like a kind of love, too. Sometimes, a misguided love gnaws away at both people, right? Like the love he and I had. His love for painting, too, failed to expand or develop and instead dug inward, gnawing away at himself, eventually leading to the conclusion of… letting go of painting.”
A love that, being misguided, gnaws away at both the other person and oneself. But a love so intense that one cannot bear it without crashing into its object and consuming oneself until all energy is depleted.
Just because it ends in a breakup, can such an experience be defined simply as a failure? I didn’t know for sure, but it seemed that an emotion of that intensity wasn’t an experience everyone goes through.
I remembered what the CEO had said when he advised me on my relationship with Inwoo-hyung, that I seemed like the type to value a relationship where we slowly get to know each other and connect.
I myself didn’t yet know what kind of person I was when it came to dating and love. But very vaguely, I had a feeling that I might not be that kind of person. Perhaps I was the kind of person who could give myself away quite easily to a momentary curiosity or impulse.
But I didn’t think I was the kind of person who could muster the courage to clash in the face of an overwhelming emotion that threatened to swallow me whole, an emotion that was impossible not to follow, like Ms. Han, like my mother and father. The me of now didn’t seem to have that kind of courage.
“In Hong Kong, and after coming back to Seoul… the thought that became more and more firm as I watched many artists was… that even if you have talent, if you don’t have the mental strength to support and continue to develop that talent, you won’t get results. He definitely had innate talent, but he constantly doubted it, compared himself to others, and broke down in frustration.”
I lifted my head and looked at Ms. Han’s profile.
“A desperate, persistent, and consistent direction of wanting to keep drawing no matter what. You need that to break through a certain point and shine… and I had definitely seen that energy in the eleven-year-old Seo Yeehyeon.”
Ms. Han’s face slowly turned toward me.
“You can eat and breathe without drawing, yes, you can do all that. You won’t die. You know that’s not what I’m talking about, Yeehyeon. I just want you to think honestly about whether you need drawing to live not just as one of many people, but as the unique Seo Yeehyeon with your own individuality. At least you. Before it’s too late.”
To look at myself honestly. It was probably because I could no longer be honest in front of myself that I had stopped drawing. Because I had stuffed my heart, sealed my mouth, and closed my eyes. There was nothing more to say. No, I didn’t want to say anything. Rather, I wanted to hide many things.
As I listened to Ms. Han’s story, what pressed in on me from around my chest, demanding that I decide something, was strangely not drawing. It was something bigger that included drawing. A concept that didn’t quite resonate yet, but something like… life.
Ms. Han’s last words remained heavily in my heart, like a gentle but undeniable, solemn warning, like an unmoving boulder settling slowly at the bottom of the flowing river. Before it’s too late.
Leave a Reply