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159. Minseo’s Side Story

Minseo was a quiet student.

Perhaps it was due to the transfer when he was younger; he used to be a lively child when he lived in Ansan during elementary school.

“Just take the subway for four stops. We’ll be moving next month, son. Can you manage commuting by subway until then?”

They were lucky to have gotten an apartment through allocation. His parents were delighted.

But Minseo, now a first-year middle schooler, couldn’t share in that joy. It was a decision made by his parents that it would be better to move before the start of the second semester rather than midway through it.

It wasn’t even a question of whether he was transferring or not, but rather when he would be going.

– Clatter, clatter, clatter.

It was his first time riding the subway. Just the other day, his parents had given him a ride when he went to greet his teacher.

However, his parents couldn’t help him commute every day, so Minseo found himself boarding the unfamiliar subway all alone.

During rush hour, the subway was overcrowded. Yet everything seemed fascinating to Minseo, who held onto the smooth pole and looked around. He now had stories to tell his neighborhood friends, who had promised to keep in touch even after he transferred.

He got off at his stop. Even though he had only traveled four stops, the place he arrived at was completely different from where he lived. A sophisticated city calmly absorbed the curious gaze of the middle schooler.

He took a bus and continued for another ten minutes.

On the bus were students in unfamiliar uniforms. Minseo adjusted his stiff school uniform. Still, it felt awkward.

When he finally arrived at the middle school, he had plenty of time to spare thanks to his early departure.

Unsure of where to go, Minseo headed to the teacher’s office. After a brief wait for the absent teacher, he heard a casual greeting, “You’re here.” Thus began the trembling new semester for a 14-year-old middle schooler.

*

“Eat quickly; you’ll be late.”

“…Okay.”

They moved. The apartment they relocated to was close to school, promising a five-minute walk from the front door to the classroom.

However, Minseo hesitated, dragging his feet out that short commuting route.

There were no friends to meet at school.

It wasn’t the fault of the teacher who introduced the latecomer carelessly, nor the classmates who had already bonded during the first semester, nor was it Minseo’s fault.

If Minseo had made a mistake, it was that he did not watch TV and thus could not name any celebrities his peers talked about. If there was a fault with his classmates, it was that they had already become friends during the first semester, knowing which kindergarten each of them had attended. If it was the teacher’s fault, it was putting Minseo in the very back row, in an empty seat without a partner.

How had I become friends with my neighborhood friends?

Minseo couldn’t remember. It was simply as if they had been friends since birth.

They played in the apartment playground, caught insects, occasionally played with fire, and explored the abandoned railroad tracks together.

This place was different. Even though it was only a few stops away, their way of playing was completely foreign to him.

No.

Perhaps it was similar. It could be that, upon becoming middle schoolers, they no longer roamed the undeveloped mountains and fields and instead started visiting PC rooms or karaoke joints.

While Minseo rode the subway for a long commute, they were already a few steps ahead.

The first time Minseo made a friend who could be called his own was when he became a high schooler. Students from the same neighborhood but different middle schools mixed together. For Minseo, it was a great opportunity.

Yet making friends was still not an easy task.

In Minseo’s home, the TV was barely turned on. It was only turned on by his father to watch the news. At home, the TV was little more than a decoration.

Because of that, Minseo found it difficult to converse with friends. In truth, Minseo didn’t really put in much effort to remember the names of celebrities either.

He just wasn’t interested. Celebrities were just other people. People’s private lives, the things they said, and their pointless funny stories didn’t catch his attention. Moreover, gathering such trivialities just to make friends felt like a blow to his pride.

While he scoffed at the gossiping peers, feeling envious all the while, Minseo quietly read books.

His school years, which could have been brilliant, faded away like the mildew-laden books in the library.

Perhaps thanks to reading a lot, his grades weren’t bad. After one year of resitting exams, Minseo entered university.

He had no aspirations of what he wanted to learn in university. He entered a department suited for his grades and began his college life.

“This is boring.”

The saying that becoming a college student solves everything was a huge lie.

Nothing was solved. The professors negated everything he had learned throughout his life, and assignments piled up like mountains every class. Group projects demanded extreme patience and offered a chance to reconsider human relationships.

And after graduation, he would have to start the busy and harsh social life that would make even this college life feel like paradise.

Minseo continued his busy yet free college life. But he was still young. Despite acting as if he had gained a profound understanding of life, there was a bubbling youth inside of him.

On his way back after finishing the midterm exams of the first semester, he stumbled upon a poster for a theater club and turned back.

Credits, TOEIC/TOEFL scores, internships available since freshman year, proof of a pleasant personality through volunteer activities, state qualifications needed to avoid feeling inadequate, and anecdotes from part-time jobs to spice up his boring life filled only with studying…

There were many things to handle, but Minseo joined the theater club, which he thought of as “a gathering of drunkards who just drink instead of studying” — a club that wouldn’t help him in the slightest with employment.

There, he met Chaehwa.

Though they were the same age, she was a year ahead. With flowing black hair, she laughed without hiding her mouth and would shake her shoulders in front of chicken, exclaiming, “Chicken chicken, it’s chicken!”

Could it be that he fell for that sight?

It was merely fondness. Minseo thought that the real reason he started to like her was different.

Chaehwa, who loved theater, often practiced her lines alone in the rehearsal room.

A “soliloquy” in a play was when a character loudly expressed their thoughts to the audience, but because it was meant to be unheard by other characters, if someone interrupted with, “What are you saying all by yourself?” she would wrinkle her nose in displeasure.

However, when she was practicing her lines, she would beam if someone delivered their next line. That’s probably where his attraction began.

Needing to earn a scholarship, Chaehwa would sit in a corner of the stage and study, but would say, “Women have many secrets. I do too. The reason is that I want to appear even a little mysterious to you.”

One day, Minseo returned the lines.

“Men wait. For the moment you take off your veil. Don’t think I’ll be disappointed. I’ll be just as happy as when you accepted me.”

“Eh? The lines are different!”

“I just… changed it my way.”

“Really? But if the male lead says that, what happens to the plot?”

“Uh…? I guess it heads toward a happy ending? Look, the original story is about misunderstandings piling up, leading to unfulfilled love. But if you say it this way, I think the female lead wouldn’t have discarded the letter. If the male lead had read that letter, he would have probably given up the overseas ship. Then…”

In the quiet rehearsal room, the sound of a pen scratch filled the air. Chaehwa burst into laughter, “What is this! It’s not even funny. What will happen to all the foreshadowing laid out until now?” she scoffed at Minseo’s hastily cobbled scenario. Yet, from that moment, the two quickly grew closer.

Before summer break came, Minseo confessed to Chaehwa in the empty rehearsal room. This time, Chaehwa smiled silently, her bright smile unhidden.

Thus began their innocent relationship.

They went on a quick trip using the money they saved from working part-time, spent the stressful midterms and finals together in the rehearsal room.

During winter break, they temporarily stepped away from the university club and gained experience at a theater troupe in Daehakro. Although they did not step onto the stage, they worked as staff, experiencing various aspects of theater: lights, costumes, stage set-up, promotion, theater rentals, and emergency casting…

Then, summons from the military arrived for Minseo.

Right after finishing the first semester of his second year, Minseo headed off to the army.

The night before he left his one-year-old studio, Minseo and Chaehwa stayed up together. “I’ll wait, firmly wearing my rubber shoes.” As she said this, he hugged her, and Chaehwa kept her promise.

When Minseo returned from his service, Chaehwa was in her fourth year, on the verge of graduation. After taking a year off to learn acting, she was striving to become an actress.

But being a theater actor didn’t pay well. A salary of 700,000 won. Chaehwa, who graduated from the department of costume design, said she could earn a few more thousand won monthly managing stage costumes, but both knew, as they understood, it made no real difference in money.

In a relationship solidified by promises of the future, support and advice were realistic. Minseo suggested that it might be better to keep theater as a hobby. One day, after a repetitive circular conversation that left them both exhausted, he snapped at Chaehwa.

This was around the time when he was in his fourth year, starting to feel the pressure of job seeking. His words were far from sophisticated like theater lines.

“Why are you doing this? Aren’t you worried about making a living? How can you live doing only what you like? You can’t even pay rent as a theater actor.”

“Are you telling me to do something I don’t want to do for the rest of my life? I can’t do that. And honestly, you don’t want to be a civil servant either! You keep saying you want to work at the theater. Remember, you said you wanted to be a playwright!”

A playwright.

What a joke. Even if Shakespeare were reborn, he would starve in this era. Or he might become a great film director.

Realizing how much they had changed, they agreed to stop talking about this issue.

Minseo continued studying to become a civil servant. Chaehwa made her efforts to stand on stage, and they occasionally laughed as they shared how tough life was.

Then Chaehwa broke down.

She blamed herself for being unable to pay even a penny toward her father’s hospital bills after he passed away from a sudden stroke. Unable to focus on acting, she spent her days in sorrow.

Around that time, Minseo gradually started breaking down too. The 7th-grade civil servant exam. Was it this hard, not even a 5th-grade exam? Despairingly, he locked himself inside his studio.

They couldn’t provide support for each other. At least, particularly, he couldn’t be a pillar for Chaehwa.

Still, Chaehwa tried to rise despite her sorrow and pushed through, yet her boyfriend, who seemed to want the world to crumble, constantly complained and eroded her will. He studied as much as he could before throwing it all away.

Then one day, Chaehwa spoke. Her flowing hair was tied back, and she wore a neat semi-formal outfit.

– “Let’s take some time apart for a while.”

– “It’s for us. I’ll also focus on working on myself. Let’s give it our all.”

The news of an unspoken breakup mixed with the shame of my own failures twisted within me, and I spat out words I didn’t even know where they came from.

Chaehwa didn’t cry nor did she curse her pathetic boyfriend.

“I believe in you.”

She said that and left.

*

Minseo—no, Leo—stared blankly at the woman before him.

Flowing black hair and dark eyes. Though narrow, her shoulders stood upright, and her petite figure, alongside…

The spotlight shining down on the stage.

She was not Chaehwa. The sharp memories merely brushed past Minseo, leaving his mind in a daze.

He needed to go back.

To escape this hell, somehow, any way, to reach Chaehwa.

Minseo clutched the spirit of Leo de Yeriel.