Aenigmatic Days

This is the after that he could never have imagined, not even in his wildest dreams.

“I’ll always…be by your side.” He barely manages to speak, lifting a hand to touch her cheek. “So don’t cry.”

“Then keep your promise.” Her demand is fierce through her tears, despite the growing slackness she feels in his limbs. She clenches her fingers harder into his shoulders, as though the force alone from the squeeze could anchor him more tightly to her. “Stay by my side, here. Right now. Don’t go.”

Kang Yeong Hwa turns sharply to him as he snatches the package is out of Yoon Je’s hands in the next second, whipping off its covering to reveal a miniature tree with red yew berries sprouted in full.

“They are pretty.” Yoon Je frowns, doubt furrowed into his brows. “But why would anyone send it here?”

“There’s a tag attached to it.” Kang Yeong Hwa is immediately at his side, gently tilting the small greeting card towards her to read the hastily-scrawled text. “A father always comes to find his son.”

“Give me some credit. I’ve seen how you look at him. You like him, but won’t say a word. And you deny it each time I say you’re dating him. It’s high time I stepped in.”

He starts from the beginning, telling her all that he remembers of her short lifespans and every single violent death she died, while he could only watch without being able to do anything. With every lifetime he speaks about, it gets harder and harder to talk around the immense sense of helplessness and loss and anger that rises from deep in his gut.

When he hits the 10th reincarnation, the lamps start their erratic flickering before plunging the whole house in darkness for a few seconds until he regains his fragile grip on his emotions. By the time he reaches her 18th life, his fingernails are pressing hard into his palms, leaving bloodied, crescent-shape marks on them.

Looking at him now is like looking at a memory, peeling an image from the past and overlaying it on the present. She wonders now how she could ever have seen him as an amalgamation of Han Jun Oh and Kim Do Ha, when the difference is as stark as night and day.

“I don’t know. Just a month ago, I was blissfully ignorant. Maybe I wouldn’t have cared,” she says, then empties her glass with a single swig. “But…but then, I would never have met you and gotten to know you.”

It's the last sentence that stops him short. Han Ri Ta had, in fact, recognised him in last moments of all her lives—every last one—as her soul had straddled the mysterious space between life and death.

“Han Jun Oh, what is real is in front of you and me,” she retorts, lifting a hand in front of him, wriggling her fingers for emphasis. “The things we can touch and feel. The people we speak to. The experiences we have.”

“And once those experiences are over, are they any less real than when you experienced them then?” He argues, stepping in closer to her, never breaking eye contact. “As for the things that you don’t see whether you’re awake or asleep, does this mean they don’t exist? Are they therefore any less real?”

A horrendous tightness is constricting her throat, her lungs, her stomach. What kind of a minefield she’ll be stepping into if she responds to these all-too rational probing questions? What is prompting him to doggedly pursue this line of inquiry?

“Stop. Just stop.”

“Your whole life, you have never shied away from the hard things. Why start now? You know you can’t avoid it forever.”

Giving into temptation would be so easy when the whole story readily lies on the tip of his tongue to be told. About them, about the seeds, about the shadows and curses that have followed an ill-fated relationship that was perhaps never meant to be.

But Kang Yeong Hwa would never take the words of a fickle and a supposedly terminally-ill actor seriously, much less believe them.

Or would she?

“It’s more than that. I’ve also been having dreams of Han Jun Oh.” Yeong Hwa regrets saying this as soon as it comes out of her mouth.

Unholy glee dawns on Unni’s face. “Your new potential client? He’s not the nation’s boyfriend for no reason. Every girl wants a piece of him. And not just the lower half.”

“What are you—it’s not like that!” She protests immediately and throws a cushion straight into Na Yeon’s face.

It is sheer good luck for Do Ha—and the terrible misfortune of Han Jun Oh—that this previously-dead body lives again.