skye ⭑

‘beginnings can not be changed; endings are always sad; i’d settle for a happy middle instead.’

the sky over namhae always looked like a bruised peach right before the sun dipped into the ocean.

“you’re late,” a voice said. juhoon was leaning against the rusted ice cream freezer outside the convenience store, his uniform vest hanging loosely off his shoulders. he didn’t look up from his phone, but he slid a wrapped melon popsicle across the plastic table toward you anyway.

you dropped your canvas bag onto the plastic chair, the straps heavy with books your mother had packed for you—baggage for a summer exile she called ‘reconnecting with your roots,’ which was really just code for ‘please stay in south korea while i finalize my third divorce’.

you couldn’t even remember the guy’s name. an aaron? a grayson? it didn’t matter. you were seventeen, stranded in a sleepy seaside town where the air tasted like salt and fish scales.

“the bicycle chain fell off again,” you complained, tearing the plastic wrapper open with your teeth.

juhoon finally looked up, his dark hair falling into his eyes, a faint, amused tug at the corner of his lips. “you really don’t know how to do anything, do you, canada?”

“i know how to do things,” you shot back, sitting down and taking a huge bite of the popsicle. “i just don’t know how to navigate rural roads on a machine built in the eighties.”

“it’s a good bike,” he said, finally pocketing his phone and crossing his arms. “you just have no rhythm. you pedal like you’re trying to kill the ground.”

that was the first week of june.

june was a month of friction and slow thaws. the convenience store was small, cramped, and smelled faintly of cardboard and dried squid. you spent the first two weeks overlapping shifts, sitting on mismatched plastic stools behind the counter, separated by a foot of empty space and a profound, awkward silence. you were the girl from toronto who spoke korean with a slight hesitation, and he was the boy from seoul who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.

the ice broke over a broken slushee machine, of all things. it had started leaking a bright blue, sticky syrup all over the floor, and you had both panicked, trying to block the blue tide with cheap paper towels that dissolved on contact. juhoon had slipped, his sneakers losing traction, and he’d gone down with a dull thud, his white t-shirt stained an absurd, electric shade of blueberry. you had frozen, terrified he’d be angry, but then he had looked up at you, looked down at his shirt, and let out a laugh so loud and genuine it echoed off the metal shelves. you had laughed so hard your stomach ached, sitting right there in the blue puddle next to him.

“don’t just look at me,” he gasped out between laughs, pointing a blue-stained finger at you. “help me up, canada. my pants are ruined!”

“you look like an avatar,” you wheezed, extending a hand. he took it, but instead of pulling himself up, he yanked you down into the sticky mess right along with him. “juhoon! no!”

“if i’m going down, you’re coming with me,” he grinned, his eyes crinkling at the corners. that was the first time you noticed how bright his eyes got when he genuinely smiled.

after that, june became a game of shared rule-breaking. you learned that the store owner rarely checked the inventory counts for the ice cream, so juhoon developed a system for stealing popsicles. he would wait until the afternoon rush of noisy beachgoers cleared out, look over his shoulder, and slide the freezer door open with a dramatic, exaggerated stealth.

“pick a flavor,” he’d whisper, as if he were heist-planning a bank robbery instead of taking a cheap ice lolly.

you’d always pick the melon ones, and you’d spend the next thirty minutes sitting on the concrete curb outside, the heat radiating off the asphalt, watching the occasional car pass by. 

you learned things about him in snippets. he was in namhae because his parents were fighting and his grandparents’ quiet house was supposed to keep him out of the crossfire. he hated the sound of the cicadas in the trees because they were too loud to let him sleep, but he loved the way the ocean sounded at three in the morning.

by the time july arrived, the space between your tiny chairs behind the register had entirely vanished.

july was a fever dream of salt water, sticky skin, and a quiet, consuming desperation. you didn’t just work together anymore; you existed together. the summer break was in full swing, but you didn’t care about the tourists. you cared about the way juhoon’s shoulder brushed against yours whenever you both reached for the same barcode scanner. you cared about the way he always took the heavier boxes of ramyeon crates so you wouldn’t have to carry them.

“hey,” he said one rainy afternoon, leaning his chin on his palm as he watched you struggle to tie up a garbage bag. “why do you always do that?”

“do what?”

“sigh like the world is ending every time you look at a trash can.”

“because it’s gross,” you muttered.

he chuckled, standing up and snatching the plastic ties from your hands. “move over. go sit down and listen to your weird western music. i’ll do it.”

“it’s not weird, it’s just english,” you said, but you sat on the counter anyway, swinging your legs.

he tied the bag with a quick, practiced knot and then leaned against the counter right next to your knees. he looked up at you, his expression softening in a way that made your throat go dry. “teach me an english word.”

“beautiful,” you whispered.

“byu-ti-ful,” he repeated, his accent clumsy and endearing. he reached out, his thumb gently brushing a stray lock of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your jawline. “what does it mean?”

“it means something that makes you happy just by looking at it.”

juhoon didn’t drop his hand. his gaze slid down to your lips and then back to your eyes. “then yeah. you’re byu-ti-ful.”

one night in mid-july, after closing the store at midnight, he didn’t head toward his grandparents’ house. instead, he untangled a pair of old, wired earphones from his pocket and held one out to you.

you walked side-by-side down the narrow, unlit road, the ocean a dark, breathing mass to your left. when your hands bumped together for the third time, he didn’t pull away. his fingers slid between yours, cautious at first, then tightening into a firm, warm hold. you spent that night sleeping on the sand, using your canvas bag as a shared pillow. you woke up at four in the morning to the sky turning a pale, ghostly blue, his arm heavy across your waist, his breath even against the back of your neck.

the kisses came naturally, like a language you both already knew but hadn’t spoken aloud yet. they tasted like the sea and the mint gum juhoon chewed constantly. you kissed behind the counter while a sudden summer thunderstorm rattled the glass windows; you kissed under the pier while fireworks from a local festival boomed overhead, painting his face in flashes of red and gold.

“i’ve gotten too used to you,” he murmured one afternoon in late july, his head resting in your lap as you sat on the floor of the stockroom. the air conditioner was broken, and you were both sweating. you were tracing the sharp line of his collarbone with your index finger. “if we stop talking after august, it’s going to be weird.”

“weird how?” you asked, your fingers moving up to tangle in his damp hair.

“i’ll just be lost,” he said simply, looking up at you with an intensity that made your chest ache. “i’ve spent every day of the last two months looking at you. if i cut contact, it’ll take forever to unlearn you. i don’t think i know how to be alone in seoul anymore.”

“then we won’t cut contact,” you said, leaning down to press your lips to his forehead.

“promise?” he asked, sitting up and holding out his pinky finger.

“promise,” you whispered, locking your smaller finger with his.

august was a countdown. you could feel the days slipping away like sand through your fingers. the playfulness of june and the intensity of july turned into a heavy, quiet clinginess in august. you held hands under the counter even when customers were standing right in front of you. you took photos on a cheap polaroid camera you bought at the stationary shop—blurred, overexposed images of him laughing with ice cream on his nose, of you squinting against the sun, of your shadows stretched out long on the sand.

“what are you going to do with those?” he asked one evening, pointing at the stack of polaroids slipping out of your pocket.

“keep them,” you said, sorting through them. “so when i’m back in toronto and freezing to death in the snow, i can look at them and remember that i spent a summer with a boy who ruins white t-shirts with blueberry syrup.”

juhoon smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes this time. he pulled you into his chest, wrapping his arms tightly around your waist, burying his face into the crook of your neck. “don’t forget me, canada. seriously. if you forget me, i’ll find a way to cross the ocean just to annoy you.”

“i couldn’t forget you if i tried, jju,” you whispered into his shoulder, tears threatening to spill.

“i’ll call you the second i get back to seoul,” he promised on your last night on the beach, his forehead pressed against yours. “i’ll buy an international calling card. i’ll write down your address. we’re going to make this work.”

“i know,” you said, though a horrible, heavy weight was settling into your stomach. “i know we will.”

“say it in english,” he demanded softly, his grip on your hands tightening. “tell me you love me in english.”

“i love you, jju,” you said, your voice breaking.

“i love you, canada,” he replied, his pronunciation perfect this time, right before he kissed you for what would be the very last time ever, the taste of salt and cold august wind lingering on his lips.

then… september arrived. he went back to seoul on a morning bus. you boarded a flight back to toronto the next afternoon.

the transition wasn’t a clean break; it was a slow, agonising fade. 

you texted him the moment you landed in canada. 

i’m home. the flight was long. 

i miss the beach already. 

i miss you.

no reply.

you texted him a week later.

school started today. it’s raining here. 

how is seoul? do you miss the slushee machine?

the messages stayed delivered, never read. after a month of silence, the texts became less frequent, until you stopped sending them altogether. you thought he had simply left the summer in namhae behind. he had gotten back to his real life, his real friends in seoul, and he had forgotten the girl from canada.

but you never did. he was your first love. 

you got older; you went to university; you lived a life. but you remembered that single summer more vividly than the entire decade that followed it.

when you met martin in toronto years later, it was completely different. he was like a warm hearth on a freezing winter day. he was kind, incredibly patient, and he loved you with a fierce, quiet devotion.

you had a quiet life together—a comfortable apartment in the city, shared coffee in the mornings, grocery trips on sunday afternoons. but the ghost of namhae always hung over you like a thin mist. martin noticed it, of course. he noticed how your eyes unfocused when the winter wind rattled the apartment windows, or how you always picked the melon-flavored treats at the asian supermarket, staring at the packaging just a second too long.

“you’re thinking about him again, aren’t you?” martin had asked softly one night, early into your marriage, as you both lay in bed. the city lights cast long shadows across the ceiling.

you had tensed, guilt twisting in your chest. “martin, i’m sorry. i’m here. i’m with you.”

martin had just smiled, a small, sad, incredibly gentle thing. he turned on his side and pulled you against his chest, tucking your head under his chin. “i know you are. and i love the parts of you that you give me. i’m okay with sharing your thoughts with a memory, as long as i get to hold you in the real world.”

he knew there was a ghost. he knew he was the second choice, the safe harbor after the shipwreck. but martin loved you so entirely that he swallowed his own pride, choosing to believe that his warmth would eventually melt the ice around your heart. he didn’t feel bad for loving a girl who was only three-quarters there. he just loved you harder to make up for the missing piece.

until the afternoon he found the box.

you were at work, and martin was looking for a spare camera lens in the back of the closet. instead, he found a small, dusty tin. inside were a handful of faded polaroids from that summer—the ones of you and juhoon on the beach, your fingers locked together, his bright, crinkled eyes staring back at the lens.

when you came home, martin was sitting at the kitchen table, the polaroids laid out in a neat, clinical row. the apartment was freezing; he hadn’t turned on the heating. he wasn’t angry; he just looked incredibly, profoundly hollow.

you froze in the doorway, your keys slipping from your fingers and clattering onto the floorboards. “martin…”

“i always knew there was a guy,” martin said, his voice terrifyingly quiet as he kept his eyes glued to a photo of you, laughing, covered in sand, with juhoon’s arm thrown over your shoulder. “i told myself it was just a teenage fling. some guy from a village who made you feel special for a month.”

“martin, please, it was just an old box—”

“but you never told me it was him,” martin interrupted, finally lifting his eyes. they were swimming with a sudden, sharp, catastrophic grief. “this is juhoon. kim juhoon.”

your breath hitched, the room suddenly tilting. “how do you… how do you know his name?”

“he was my childhood best friend,” martin whispered, his voice cracking down the middle. he reached out, his thumb trembling violently as he touched the faded edge of the photo. “we grew up in the same neighborhood in seoul before my family immigrated here. we wore the same middle school uniform. we promised to meet up again when we were older. he was… we were like brothers. i lost touch with his family years ago, but… god, it was him? all this time, the shadow i’ve been competing with… it was my best friend?”

you couldn’t breathe. the coincidence was too violent, too cruel to be real. “mars, i didn’t know. i swear to god i didn’t know.”

“i know you didn’t,” he choked out, a single tear spilling over his lashes. he looked at the photo of juhoon, then up at you, his face twisted in a horrible, agonising realization. “that’s what hurts the most. you didn’t do this on purpose… but you love him. you still love him, don’t you? i’ve been holding you for years, sleeping in the same bed, building a life with you, and the person you’re wishing for is the boy i used to share my toys with.”

“i love you, martin,” you cried, stepping forward, trying to reach for him.

he pulled back slightly, his chest heaving. “not like that. not the way you love him. you look at his faded, ten-year-old picture with more life in your eyes than you’ve ever looked at me with. i thought… i thought i was competing with a ghost i could beat. but how am i supposed to beat juhoon? how am i supposed to hate him for taking your heart when he’s the person i miss the most from home?”

the truth didn’t fully unravel until the following june.

a corporate project required you to travel to seoul for two weeks. martin came with you, the heavy, suffocating silence of juhoon still hanging between you both like an iron wall. he wouldn’t hold your hand on the plane. he wouldn’t look at you when you spoke. the kindness in him hadn’t died, but it had turned into a fragile, bleeding thing.

through old family connections, martin managed to track down juhoon’s grandparents’ contact information. he needed to see him. he needed to look his old friend in the eye and figure out how to live with the reality of their shared history.

you sat on the edge of the hotel bed in seoul, watching martin stand by the window, the phone pressed to his ear.

the conversation was short. martin barely spoke. he just listened, his posture slowly collapsing, his face draining of color until he looked like marble. when he hung up, his arm dropped limply to his side. he didn’t look at you; he just stared at his own reflection in the dark window glass.

“mars?” you asked, a sudden, cold dread pooling in your stomach. “what is it? did they say where he lives? can we go see him?”

“he’s dead,” martin said. the words came out flat, entirely devoid of life. “juhoon… died.”

the world didn’t stop spinning—oh, what a cruel fucking world—but your heart did. “what? no. no, he just… he didn’t reply to my texts. he went back to seoul. he’s probably married, he’s—”

“he died in september,” martin shouted, turning around, his voice breaking into a harsh sob. the anger and the grief finally collided inside him. “the same september you left namhae! he’s been dead this whole fucking time!”

you fell back onto the bed, the breath punched entirely out of your lungs. martin dropped to his knees right there by the window, burying his face in his hands as he wept. it was a dual mourning—he was weeping for his childhood friend who had been wiped off the earth a decade ago, and he was weeping for his marriage, because he knew, with absolute, terrifying certainty, that if you loved a ghost before, you would never, ever belong to the living now.

“he’s gone,” martin whispered through his tears, rocking back and forth on the floor. “he’s been gone the whole time we’ve been together. you thought he abandoned you, and i thought he stole you from me, and he was just… he was just dead.”

you found out the rest the next day from his grandmother, a frail woman who wept into her tea when she saw you standing on her doorstep in seoul, recognising the girl from the stories her grandson had muttered about during his last days in the countryside. martin stood behind you in the cramped living room, his shoulder tense, absorbing the loss of his friend—a boy he still considered his brother—his eyes fixed on the small memorial photo of juhoon on the shelf.

the story was painfully, brutally simple: that september, the day after juhoon arrived back in seoul, his phone had fallen out of his pocket on the subway, the screen shattering into useless black glass. he hadn’t known your email, and he hadn’t known your address in canada. but he had memorised your number. he had spent the entire summer repeating it like a mantra so he would never forget it.

he had walked to a phone store near the main transit station to buy a replacement. he had inserted the new sim card, booted up the screen, and opened the messaging app.

he typed in your canadian country code. the digits blurred together as he punched them in from memory. he typed out a message.

i’m back in seoul. 

i miss the ocean. 

i miss you, my beautiful angel.

he was standing right outside the glass storefront, his thumb hovering over the send button, looking down at the screen, completely consumed by the thought of you.

he never got the opportunity to click send.

a delivery truck, its brakes entirely failed, veered off the massive, chaotic seoul intersection and crashed directly through the storefront, striking him instantly. he died before the ambulance could even pull away from the curb.

that night, you and martin stood on a bridge overlooking the han river. the neon lights of seoul bled into the dark, rushing water below. the wind was warm, carrying the heavy scent of a city summer.

martin stood a few feet away from you, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. he looked much older—the boyish patience he had carried for years in canada had been replaced by a heavy, exhausted maturity.

“he was trying to call you,” martin said, his voice barely audible over the distant traffic. “he memorised your number. juhoon hated memorising things. we used to cheat on our history tests together because he couldn’t remember dates to save his life. but he memorised you.”

you couldn’t speak. the tears were silent, hot, and endless, tracking down your cheeks and dripping onto the concrete railing.

“i keep thinking,” martin continued, his voice trembling as he looked out over the river, “if his phone hadn’t broken… or if he had just clicked send a second faster… he would have found you. you guys would have figured it out. and i never would have met you at that coffee shop in toronto. you never would have looked at me.”

he turned his head to look at you, his eyes completely broken, filled with a quiet, devastating sadness. “i’m alive, and i’m right here, standing next to you. but i’ve never felt more invisible in my life. you’re looking at the city where he died, and you’re wishing it was him standing here instead of me. and the worst part is… i can’t even blame you. i miss him too.”

you reached out, your fingers trembling as you touched martin’s sleeve. “mars… i’m sorry. i’m so sorry.”

martin let out a small, breathless sob, looking down at your hand on his arm. he didn’t pull away, but he didn’t lean into it either. “i know you are. but apologies don’t fix a broken heart, yn. and they definitely don’t bring back the dead.”

there was a dead boy in seoul who had died entirely in love with a girl, a husband whose heart had been collateral damage to a summer he wasn’t even a part of, and the girl who had spent her whole life grieving a ghost, believing she was forgotten.

you closed your eyes, the heavy summer air of june pressing against your skin, identical to the heat of namhae all those years ago.

beginnings cannot be changed, you thought, as the neon lights of seoul blurred into a smear of red and gold. endings are always sad.

you would have settled for a happy middle. but the middle had ended a long time ago, on a beach you could never go back to, frozen in a summer that had cost everyone everything.

© hyuneskkami ❦

‘beginnings can not be changed; endings are always sad; i’d settle for a happy middle instead.’

the sky over namhae always looked like a bruised peach right before the sun dipped into the ocean.

“you’re late,” a voice said. juhoon was leaning against the rusted ice cream freezer outside the convenience store, his uniform vest hanging loosely off his shoulders. he didn’t look up from his phone, but he slid a wrapped melon popsicle across the plastic table toward you anyway.

you dropped your canvas bag onto the plastic chair, the straps heavy with books your mother had packed for you—baggage for a summer exile she called ‘reconnecting with your roots,’ which was really just code for ‘please stay in south korea while i finalize my third divorce’.

you couldn’t even remember the guy’s name. an aaron? a grayson? it didn’t matter. you were seventeen, stranded in a sleepy seaside town where the air tasted like salt and fish scales.

“the bicycle chain fell off again,” you complained, tearing the plastic wrapper open with your teeth.

juhoon finally looked up, his dark hair falling into his eyes, a faint, amused tug at the corner of his lips. “you really don’t know how to do anything, do you, canada?”

“i know how to do things,” you shot back, sitting down and taking a huge bite of the popsicle. “i just don’t know how to navigate rural roads on a machine built in the eighties.”

“it’s a good bike,” he said, finally pocketing his phone and crossing his arms. “you just have no rhythm. you pedal like you’re trying to kill the ground.”

that was the first week of june.

june was a month of friction and slow thaws. the convenience store was small, cramped, and smelled faintly of cardboard and dried squid. you spent the first two weeks overlapping shifts, sitting on mismatched plastic stools behind the counter, separated by a foot of empty space and a profound, awkward silence. you were the girl from toronto who spoke korean with a slight hesitation, and he was the boy from seoul who looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth.

the ice broke over a broken slushee machine, of all things. it had started leaking a bright blue, sticky syrup all over the floor, and you had both panicked, trying to block the blue tide with cheap paper towels that dissolved on contact. juhoon had slipped, his sneakers losing traction, and he’d gone down with a dull thud, his white t-shirt stained an absurd, electric shade of blueberry. you had frozen, terrified he’d be angry, but then he had looked up at you, looked down at his shirt, and let out a laugh so loud and genuine it echoed off the metal shelves. you had laughed so hard your stomach ached, sitting right there in the blue puddle next to him.

“don’t just look at me,” he gasped out between laughs, pointing a blue-stained finger at you. “help me up, canada. my pants are ruined!”

“you look like an avatar,” you wheezed, extending a hand. he took it, but instead of pulling himself up, he yanked you down into the sticky mess right along with him. “juhoon! no!”

“if i’m going down, you’re coming with me,” he grinned, his eyes crinkling at the corners. that was the first time you noticed how bright his eyes got when he genuinely smiled.

after that, june became a game of shared rule-breaking. you learned that the store owner rarely checked the inventory counts for the ice cream, so juhoon developed a system for stealing popsicles. he would wait until the afternoon rush of noisy beachgoers cleared out, look over his shoulder, and slide the freezer door open with a dramatic, exaggerated stealth.

“pick a flavor,” he’d whisper, as if he were heist-planning a bank robbery instead of taking a cheap ice lolly.

you’d always pick the melon ones, and you’d spend the next thirty minutes sitting on the concrete curb outside, the heat radiating off the asphalt, watching the occasional car pass by. 

you learned things about him in snippets. he was in namhae because his parents were fighting and his grandparents’ quiet house was supposed to keep him out of the crossfire. he hated the sound of the cicadas in the trees because they were too loud to let him sleep, but he loved the way the ocean sounded at three in the morning.

by the time july arrived, the space between your tiny chairs behind the register had entirely vanished.

july was a fever dream of salt water, sticky skin, and a quiet, consuming desperation. you didn’t just work together anymore; you existed together. the summer break was in full swing, but you didn’t care about the tourists. you cared about the way juhoon’s shoulder brushed against yours whenever you both reached for the same barcode scanner. you cared about the way he always took the heavier boxes of ramyeon crates so you wouldn’t have to carry them.

“hey,” he said one rainy afternoon, leaning his chin on his palm as he watched you struggle to tie up a garbage bag. “why do you always do that?”

“do what?”

“sigh like the world is ending every time you look at a trash can.”

“because it’s gross,” you muttered.

he chuckled, standing up and snatching the plastic ties from your hands. “move over. go sit down and listen to your weird western music. i’ll do it.”

“it’s not weird, it’s just english,” you said, but you sat on the counter anyway, swinging your legs.

he tied the bag with a quick, practiced knot and then leaned against the counter right next to your knees. he looked up at you, his expression softening in a way that made your throat go dry. “teach me an english word.”

“beautiful,” you whispered.

“byu-ti-ful,” he repeated, his accent clumsy and endearing. he reached out, his thumb gently brushing a stray lock of hair behind your ear, his fingers lingering against your jawline. “what does it mean?”

“it means something that makes you happy just by looking at it.”

juhoon didn’t drop his hand. his gaze slid down to your lips and then back to your eyes. “then yeah. you’re byu-ti-ful.”

one night in mid-july, after closing the store at midnight, he didn’t head toward his grandparents’ house. instead, he untangled a pair of old, wired earphones from his pocket and held one out to you.

you walked side-by-side down the narrow, unlit road, the ocean a dark, breathing mass to your left. when your hands bumped together for the third time, he didn’t pull away. his fingers slid between yours, cautious at first, then tightening into a firm, warm hold. you spent that night sleeping on the sand, using your canvas bag as a shared pillow. you woke up at four in the morning to the sky turning a pale, ghostly blue, his arm heavy across your waist, his breath even against the back of your neck.

the kisses came naturally, like a language you both already knew but hadn’t spoken aloud yet. they tasted like the sea and the mint gum juhoon chewed constantly. you kissed behind the counter while a sudden summer thunderstorm rattled the glass windows; you kissed under the pier while fireworks from a local festival boomed overhead, painting his face in flashes of red and gold.

“i’ve gotten too used to you,” he murmured one afternoon in late july, his head resting in your lap as you sat on the floor of the stockroom. the air conditioner was broken, and you were both sweating. you were tracing the sharp line of his collarbone with your index finger. “if we stop talking after august, it’s going to be weird.”

“weird how?” you asked, your fingers moving up to tangle in his damp hair.

“i’ll just be lost,” he said simply, looking up at you with an intensity that made your chest ache. “i’ve spent every day of the last two months looking at you. if i cut contact, it’ll take forever to unlearn you. i don’t think i know how to be alone in seoul anymore.”

“then we won’t cut contact,” you said, leaning down to press your lips to his forehead.

“promise?” he asked, sitting up and holding out his pinky finger.

“promise,” you whispered, locking your smaller finger with his.

august was a countdown. you could feel the days slipping away like sand through your fingers. the playfulness of june and the intensity of july turned into a heavy, quiet clinginess in august. you held hands under the counter even when customers were standing right in front of you. you took photos on a cheap polaroid camera you bought at the stationary shop—blurred, overexposed images of him laughing with ice cream on his nose, of you squinting against the sun, of your shadows stretched out long on the sand.

“what are you going to do with those?” he asked one evening, pointing at the stack of polaroids slipping out of your pocket.

“keep them,” you said, sorting through them. “so when i’m back in toronto and freezing to death in the snow, i can look at them and remember that i spent a summer with a boy who ruins white t-shirts with blueberry syrup.”

juhoon smiled, but it didn’t reach his eyes this time. he pulled you into his chest, wrapping his arms tightly around your waist, burying his face into the crook of your neck. “don’t forget me, canada. seriously. if you forget me, i’ll find a way to cross the ocean just to annoy you.”

“i couldn’t forget you if i tried, jju,” you whispered into his shoulder, tears threatening to spill.

“i’ll call you the second i get back to seoul,” he promised on your last night on the beach, his forehead pressed against yours. “i’ll buy an international calling card. i’ll write down your address. we’re going to make this work.”

“i know,” you said, though a horrible, heavy weight was settling into your stomach. “i know we will.”

“say it in english,” he demanded softly, his grip on your hands tightening. “tell me you love me in english.”

“i love you, jju,” you said, your voice breaking.

“i love you, canada,” he replied, his pronunciation perfect this time, right before he kissed you for what would be the very last time ever, the taste of salt and cold august wind lingering on his lips.

then… september arrived. he went back to seoul on a morning bus. you boarded a flight back to toronto the next afternoon.

the transition wasn’t a clean break; it was a slow, agonising fade. 

you texted him the moment you landed in canada. 

i’m home. the flight was long. 

i miss the beach already. 

i miss you.

no reply.

you texted him a week later.

school started today. it’s raining here. 

how is seoul? do you miss the slushee machine?

the messages stayed delivered, never read. after a month of silence, the texts became less frequent, until you stopped sending them altogether. you thought he had simply left the summer in namhae behind. he had gotten back to his real life, his real friends in seoul, and he had forgotten the girl from canada.

but you never did. he was your first love. 

you got older; you went to university; you lived a life. but you remembered that single summer more vividly than the entire decade that followed it.

when you met martin in toronto years later, it was completely different. he was like a warm hearth on a freezing winter day. he was kind, incredibly patient, and he loved you with a fierce, quiet devotion.

you had a quiet life together—a comfortable apartment in the city, shared coffee in the mornings, grocery trips on sunday afternoons. but the ghost of namhae always hung over you like a thin mist. martin noticed it, of course. he noticed how your eyes unfocused when the winter wind rattled the apartment windows, or how you always picked the melon-flavored treats at the asian supermarket, staring at the packaging just a second too long.

“you’re thinking about him again, aren’t you?” martin had asked softly one night, early into your marriage, as you both lay in bed. the city lights cast long shadows across the ceiling.

you had tensed, guilt twisting in your chest. “martin, i’m sorry. i’m here. i’m with you.”

martin had just smiled, a small, sad, incredibly gentle thing. he turned on his side and pulled you against his chest, tucking your head under his chin. “i know you are. and i love the parts of you that you give me. i’m okay with sharing your thoughts with a memory, as long as i get to hold you in the real world.”

he knew there was a ghost. he knew he was the second choice, the safe harbor after the shipwreck. but martin loved you so entirely that he swallowed his own pride, choosing to believe that his warmth would eventually melt the ice around your heart. he didn’t feel bad for loving a girl who was only three-quarters there. he just loved you harder to make up for the missing piece.

until the afternoon he found the box.

you were at work, and martin was looking for a spare camera lens in the back of the closet. instead, he found a small, dusty tin. inside were a handful of faded polaroids from that summer—the ones of you and juhoon on the beach, your fingers locked together, his bright, crinkled eyes staring back at the lens.

when you came home, martin was sitting at the kitchen table, the polaroids laid out in a neat, clinical row. the apartment was freezing; he hadn’t turned on the heating. he wasn’t angry; he just looked incredibly, profoundly hollow.

you froze in the doorway, your keys slipping from your fingers and clattering onto the floorboards. “martin…”

“i always knew there was a guy,” martin said, his voice terrifyingly quiet as he kept his eyes glued to a photo of you, laughing, covered in sand, with juhoon’s arm thrown over your shoulder. “i told myself it was just a teenage fling. some guy from a village who made you feel special for a month.”

“martin, please, it was just an old box—”

“but you never told me it was him,” martin interrupted, finally lifting his eyes. they were swimming with a sudden, sharp, catastrophic grief. “this is juhoon. kim juhoon.”

your breath hitched, the room suddenly tilting. “how do you… how do you know his name?”

“he was my childhood best friend,” martin whispered, his voice cracking down the middle. he reached out, his thumb trembling violently as he touched the faded edge of the photo. “we grew up in the same neighborhood in seoul before my family immigrated here. we wore the same middle school uniform. we promised to meet up again when we were older. he was… we were like brothers. i lost touch with his family years ago, but… god, it was him? all this time, the shadow i’ve been competing with… it was my best friend?”

you couldn’t breathe. the coincidence was too violent, too cruel to be real. “mars, i didn’t know. i swear to god i didn’t know.”

“i know you didn’t,” he choked out, a single tear spilling over his lashes. he looked at the photo of juhoon, then up at you, his face twisted in a horrible, agonising realization. “that’s what hurts the most. you didn’t do this on purpose… but you love him. you still love him, don’t you? i’ve been holding you for years, sleeping in the same bed, building a life with you, and the person you’re wishing for is the boy i used to share my toys with.”

“i love you, martin,” you cried, stepping forward, trying to reach for him.

he pulled back slightly, his chest heaving. “not like that. not the way you love him. you look at his faded, ten-year-old picture with more life in your eyes than you’ve ever looked at me with. i thought… i thought i was competing with a ghost i could beat. but how am i supposed to beat juhoon? how am i supposed to hate him for taking your heart when he’s the person i miss the most from home?”

the truth didn’t fully unravel until the following june.

a corporate project required you to travel to seoul for two weeks. martin came with you, the heavy, suffocating silence of juhoon still hanging between you both like an iron wall. he wouldn’t hold your hand on the plane. he wouldn’t look at you when you spoke. the kindness in him hadn’t died, but it had turned into a fragile, bleeding thing.

through old family connections, martin managed to track down juhoon’s grandparents’ contact information. he needed to see him. he needed to look his old friend in the eye and figure out how to live with the reality of their shared history.

you sat on the edge of the hotel bed in seoul, watching martin stand by the window, the phone pressed to his ear.

the conversation was short. martin barely spoke. he just listened, his posture slowly collapsing, his face draining of color until he looked like marble. when he hung up, his arm dropped limply to his side. he didn’t look at you; he just stared at his own reflection in the dark window glass.

“mars?” you asked, a sudden, cold dread pooling in your stomach. “what is it? did they say where he lives? can we go see him?”

“he’s dead,” martin said. the words came out flat, entirely devoid of life. “juhoon… died.”

the world didn’t stop spinning—oh, what a cruel fucking world—but your heart did. “what? no. no, he just… he didn’t reply to my texts. he went back to seoul. he’s probably married, he’s—”

“he died in september,” martin shouted, turning around, his voice breaking into a harsh sob. the anger and the grief finally collided inside him. “the same september you left namhae! he’s been dead this whole fucking time!”

you fell back onto the bed, the breath punched entirely out of your lungs. martin dropped to his knees right there by the window, burying his face in his hands as he wept. it was a dual mourning—he was weeping for his childhood friend who had been wiped off the earth a decade ago, and he was weeping for his marriage, because he knew, with absolute, terrifying certainty, that if you loved a ghost before, you would never, ever belong to the living now.

“he’s gone,” martin whispered through his tears, rocking back and forth on the floor. “he’s been gone the whole time we’ve been together. you thought he abandoned you, and i thought he stole you from me, and he was just… he was just dead.”

you found out the rest the next day from his grandmother, a frail woman who wept into her tea when she saw you standing on her doorstep in seoul, recognising the girl from the stories her grandson had muttered about during his last days in the countryside. martin stood behind you in the cramped living room, his shoulder tense, absorbing the loss of his friend—a boy he still considered his brother—his eyes fixed on the small memorial photo of juhoon on the shelf.

the story was painfully, brutally simple: that september, the day after juhoon arrived back in seoul, his phone had fallen out of his pocket on the subway, the screen shattering into useless black glass. he hadn’t known your email, and he hadn’t known your address in canada. but he had memorised your number. he had spent the entire summer repeating it like a mantra so he would never forget it.

he had walked to a phone store near the main transit station to buy a replacement. he had inserted the new sim card, booted up the screen, and opened the messaging app.

he typed in your canadian country code. the digits blurred together as he punched them in from memory. he typed out a message.

i’m back in seoul. 

i miss the ocean. 

i miss you, my beautiful angel.

he was standing right outside the glass storefront, his thumb hovering over the send button, looking down at the screen, completely consumed by the thought of you.

he never got the opportunity to click send.

a delivery truck, its brakes entirely failed, veered off the massive, chaotic seoul intersection and crashed directly through the storefront, striking him instantly. he died before the ambulance could even pull away from the curb.

that night, you and martin stood on a bridge overlooking the han river. the neon lights of seoul bled into the dark, rushing water below. the wind was warm, carrying the heavy scent of a city summer.

martin stood a few feet away from you, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. he looked much older—the boyish patience he had carried for years in canada had been replaced by a heavy, exhausted maturity.

“he was trying to call you,” martin said, his voice barely audible over the distant traffic. “he memorised your number. juhoon hated memorising things. we used to cheat on our history tests together because he couldn’t remember dates to save his life. but he memorised you.”

you couldn’t speak. the tears were silent, hot, and endless, tracking down your cheeks and dripping onto the concrete railing.

“i keep thinking,” martin continued, his voice trembling as he looked out over the river, “if his phone hadn’t broken… or if he had just clicked send a second faster… he would have found you. you guys would have figured it out. and i never would have met you at that coffee shop in toronto. you never would have looked at me.”

he turned his head to look at you, his eyes completely broken, filled with a quiet, devastating sadness. “i’m alive, and i’m right here, standing next to you. but i’ve never felt more invisible in my life. you’re looking at the city where he died, and you’re wishing it was him standing here instead of me. and the worst part is… i can’t even blame you. i miss him too.”

you reached out, your fingers trembling as you touched martin’s sleeve. “mars… i’m sorry. i’m so sorry.”

martin let out a small, breathless sob, looking down at your hand on his arm. he didn’t pull away, but he didn’t lean into it either. “i know you are. but apologies don’t fix a broken heart, yn. and they definitely don’t bring back the dead.”

there was a dead boy in seoul who had died entirely in love with a girl, a husband whose heart had been collateral damage to a summer he wasn’t even a part of, and the girl who had spent her whole life grieving a ghost, believing she was forgotten.

you closed your eyes, the heavy summer air of june pressing against your skin, identical to the heat of namhae all those years ago.

beginnings cannot be changed, you thought, as the neon lights of seoul blurred into a smear of red and gold. endings are always sad.

you would have settled for a happy middle. but the middle had ended a long time ago, on a beach you could never go back to, frozen in a summer that had cost everyone everything.

© hyuneskkami ❦