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It is the month right in between their birthdays that Dokja realizes Joonghyuk doesn’t sleep through the night anymore. He learns this after staying up late to meet a deadline; out of consideration for his cohabitant, Dokja keeps the lights off as he finally drags himself to his bed. In the darkness, Dokja’s hearing grows keener – it is a habit learned from younger days – and he realizes when he passes by Joonghyuk’s room that the way that Joonghyuk breathes is unnatural. He inhales for eight seconds, holds his breath for two more, and exhales. There is some depth to the exhalation, as if it comes from the diaphragm. Then the cycle repeats.
Dokja doesn’t think anything of it. Some nights are simply like that, after all. He forgets it happened when he closes his eyes and his head hits the pillow. But when the same thing happens a few days later, he remembers it isn’t the first time.
They go shopping together the day after Dokja has noted this recurrence for the fifth time in two weeks. It is early morning and they are the youngest ones in the store. Joonghyuk looks about as beautiful as he usually does; that is to say, if he is sleep deprived, then even fatigue must think that tarnishing Yoo Joonghyuk’s face is something unforgivable.
He waits until they are close to the store’s selection of coffee so that he has a convenient excuse if his questioning goes somewhere unexpected. Then he asks, “Aren’t you tired?”
Dokja says it as if he’s asking about how early it is, although he knows Joonghyuk will read into it. There have been many times that Yoo Joonghyuk has refused to answer when Kim Dokja questions him, but never before has Dokja ever heard Joonghyuk lie to him. Dokja can sense in that strangled moment of silence that Joonghyuk takes to consider his answer that this fact is about to be conscribed to the past.
Finally, Joonghyuk sighs in a way that suggests he finds this conversation trite. “I’m not tired,” he says.
Right in front of his eyes, Yoo Joonghyuk has become a person who lies. Dokja finds the situation difficult to stomach; the taste of black coffee would sweeten his mouth. He searches for something to say in return, but nothing comes to mind that also wants to be spoken out loud. Finally, he replies, “Oh, okay.” It’s not okay, of course, but what else can he say?
Yoo Joonghyuk is now a person who can lie. Kim Dokja is a liar. Obviously, there’s a big difference.
Dokja admired the Yoo Joonghyuk who never lies. Only the strong can live like that, facing always towards the truth. Or rather than admiration, perhaps it was envy – even more likely, it was both at once. They are often two sides of the same coin, or two different ways of interpreting the same ambiguous emotion. It is precisely because Dokja’s feelings are caught in between something as pure as admiration and something as tainted as jealousy that he can’t stop himself from dwelling upon the fact that Joonghyuk apparently found it preferable to destroy the past him who spoke no lies rather than to indirectly admit the truth.
“Yoo Joonghyuk lied to me,” he says.
The statement is completely unprovoked and Han Sooyoung is understandably unimpressed. Flippantly, she replies, “So what.”
Dokja is the type to get fixated. He knows this about himself, and he knows that Sooyoung knows it about him as well, so he doesn’t have to admit out loud that he’s been thinking for days about Yoo Joonghyuk lying for this fact to be mutually understood. Anyway – Dokja is paying for their drinks at this unnecessarily upscale café even though Sooyoung makes much more money than him, so he feels he’s bought the rights to have her listen to him for a while.
“He’s never lied before,” Dokja says.
“There are two problems with that statement,” Sooyoung replies. She pauses to take a sip of her cappuccino, then continues: “First off, it’s not as if Yoo Joonghyuk has ever been known to be a fount of truth.”
That is accurate because Yoo Joonghyuk withholds ruthlessly. He doesn’t have a reputation for telling truths, if only because he doesn’t have a reputation for telling much of anything in general. Dokja nods shallowly, but then he says, “I mean, almost nobody is.”
“Right, and that’s the point. Most people don’t fall into extremes – wouldn’t you agree?” Sooyoung asks.
They have had different versions of this conversation over and over again. It essentially boils down to a difference in personal philosophies. Dokja is aware that in Han Sooyoung’s purview of the world, most people live in a gray zone. It is difficult to truly be a good person, but it is similarly difficult to truly be a bad person. So she believes that most people are not good but neither bad; they exist in a state of ambiguity, sometimes leaning one way and sometimes the other. She will copy the same argument she always makes and insert different words in place of “good” and “bad”.
Or she would, but Dokja preempts her by changing the topic. “That’s not what I wanted to talk about,” he replies. He pauses deliberately, and then says, “I mean, it’s Yoo Joonghyuk, so… you know.”
“Let’s move to the patio seating,” Sooyoung replies. “I need a cigarette if we’re to continue this conversation.”
After they sit down outside, she takes her time lighting a cigarette. Kim Dokja has never chastised her to stop smoking; if anything, he thinks she looks quite charming when she brings a cigarette up to her lips and glances down to watch the end of the cigarette as she lights it. She is objectively a gorgeous person; it is in Kim Dokja’s subjective opinion that at the moments when the flame from her lighter catches that the classical nature of her beauty peaks. There is something almost cinematic about the Han Sooyoung who exists in that heartbeat. He feels like he is watching somebody perform as the lead actress in a play: Han Sooyoung as any and every beautiful woman, unnamed, timeless.
“What did he lie about?” she asks.
“I asked him if he was tired, and he said no,” Dokja answers, “but I know he hasn’t been sleeping.”
Sooyoung frowns and aggressively taps a few ashes into the tray in front of her. “Yoo Joonghyuk isn’t sleeping, and you’re fixating on him telling a little white lie?” she replies.
“No, I mean – it’s the whole situation altogether, I guess,” Dokja says.
“Why are you being so incoherent? It’s not like you to be this thoroughly unable to explain yourself,” she tells him. Then she answers her own question; dryly, she says, “It’s Yoo Joonghyuk, I know.”
Dokja smiles wanly. Sooyoung takes a long drag of her cigarette.
“Do you remember that story that the two of you made together when we were still students?” he asks.
“God,” Sooyoung says, “how I wish I could forget. What utter trash – but the parts that made it trashy were his fault, not mine. What about it?”
“The “Yoo Joonghyuk” in the story… he’s not the same as the Yoo Joonghyuk in real life, right?” Dokja replies.
“I guess it depends on who you’re asking. Do you want my answer as Han Sooyoung, professional writer? Or do you want it as the Han Sooyoung who knows you both in real life?” Sooyoung says. “Or maybe you just want me to answer with what will make you feel better.”
Kim Dokja does not feel upset at how bluntly those three options were stated, nor does he feel offended at what the last one implies about his character. He replies, “The one you want to give is fine.”
So she answers his question. He doesn’t know which Han Sooyoung gives the answer, but he knows that it’s the answer that reassures him the most.
Then Sooyoung adds, “You should tell him you know he’s not sleeping. No, even better – you should tell him that you’re worried about him.”
She sighs and then brings the cigarette back up to her lips. After she exhales, she puts out the cigarette and gets up abruptly. “Almost time for you to meet with your editor?” Dokja asks.
“Yeah,” she answers.
It’s not. She told him her schedule earlier; there’s still an hour left.
Dokja just smiles and tells her to take care getting home. He doesn’t realize until after she’s already down the street that she never elaborated on the second problem with his assertation.
Kim Dokja finds that Han Sooyoung is beautiful when she smokes. But he thinks that if Yoo Joonghyuk were ever to smoke, he would probably find it unbearably sensual. Watching Sooyoung smoke elicits a sense of appreciation from Dokja; he can only imagine that watching Joonghyuk smoke would stoke his lust. A lit cigarette brings out the classical features in Han Sooyoung’s face, but what would a lit cigarette do for Yoo Joonghyuk’s elegant fingers, the curve of his full lips, the darkness in his eyes? Dokja doesn’t even want to try imagining it – it is too dangerous.
For one thing, it wouldn’t do for him to get worked up over something that’s never going to happen. Yoo Joonghyuk is extreme when it comes to what he allows into his body. For example, he almost exclusively eats food he cooks for himself. There are a few people and even fewer restaurants he trusts enough to make food if he’s unable to do it himself, but he’d sooner eat raw bean sprouts from the refrigerator than allow Kim Dokja to cook him anything more advanced than seasoned spinach. Dokja knows because he’s done it before.
Maybe such pickiness pays off, though; the saying you are what you eat comes to mind. Yoo Joonghyuk’s beauty is also extreme. He could easily use it as a weapon if he were more conscious of his own good looks. Even though Joonghyuk is one of the younger players in the pro gaming circuit, it is in equal parts due to his rare level of talent as well as the fact that he is heads and above more attractive than anybody else on his team that he has an unusually generous contract.
Dokja wishes sometimes that Joonghyuk could be more cognizant that he is extraordinarily beautiful. Most of the time, though, he likes that Joonghyuk is so genuinely unaware of it. Yoo Joonghyuk doesn’t care about others’ looks nor his own; he prefers to judge on character and accomplishment. But perhaps that as well is a luxury of being a strong person.
A few days afterwards, Joonghyuk leaves for an intensive training session with the rest of his team. He’ll stay at the company dorm for two weeks living and breathing his profession. His teammates will have an extra week, but because of Joonghyuk’s overwhelming skill and his personal circumstances, his company is generous with Joonghyuk’s time in exchange for having high expectations on his performance.
Normally, Joonghyuk doesn’t request preferential treatment, but the last week of training coincides with the beginning of his younger sister’s summer break. She lives with their adoptive parents, because their neighborhood is a better environment for children than where Dokja and Joonghyuk rent an apartment. Although he’s aware that it isn’t a replacement for his presence, Joonghyuk takes responsibility for his absence by diligently sending them money every month, then saves even more in secret to pay for Mia’s future expenses.
“She wants to go on a trip with me,” Joonghyuk had told Dokja, “so I’m taking her to see the ocean.”
Dokja had later learned that by seeing the ocean, Joonghyuk meant that they were going to Jeju Island. That’s nice, Dokja had thought; he’s never gone far from Seoul before. But then he imagined looking out at the ocean and thought that it would probably be terrifying, so amended his thought accordingly: Or maybe not really.
There is no fanfare the night before the training camp starts. Both of them go about their day as usual. In the evening, both of them sit on opposite ends of their living room sofa and read different things. After Dokja finishes catching up with all the web novels he’s following, he glances over at Joonghyuk. He moves closer and peeks at Joonghyuk’s tablet screen. Surprisingly, he recognizes the text: Joonghyuk is reading The Art of War.
Just then, Joonghyuk gets a message notification from Lee Seolhwa. The text is brief, so Dokja accidentally reads the entire thing: Take care. A distraction might be good. Tell me if it becomes difficult.
Dokja smiles and leans in. He places a hand on Joonghyuk’s thigh and says, “You are truly a precious person.”
In response, Joonghyuk closes his eyes and sighs. “Stop it,” he replies, so Dokja gets up to change into his pajamas and goes to bed. When he wakes up in the morning, he finds that Joonghyuk has left breakfast prepared at the kitchen table and already gone.
Kim Dokja works as a freelance editor. A kind way of describing how he came to such an occupation would be to say that he’d found that a traditional office job hadn’t suited him. The truth is closer to the converse: he doesn’t suit a traditional office job. His wages are barely enough, but they’re enough – and he finds the work quite tolerable, which is a blessing he cannot allow himself to understate.
While he mostly serves as a copy editor for small businesses, he has started carving a niche clientele of writers attempting to self-publish, which means that only a fraction of them ever sell more than a handful of copies. He likes working with this type of writer, though, and he finds a whimsicality in the fact that he might be the only one other than his clients’ close friends and family to ever read their stories. It inevitably reminds him of the story Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk wrote together when all three of them were younger. It had featured “Yoo Joongyuk” as the protagonist in a world where Earth had been overtaken by supernatural creatures and forced to reenact stories for some ill-defined but vaguely apocalyptic in-universe reason. All of the stories were taken from mythology or classical literature, so characters who were able to discern what tale was being reconstructed were at a great advantage.
The reason was obvious in reality, though. They were all novels that Kim Dokja had read and talked with either Han Sooyoung or Yoo Joonghyuk about. This guaranteed that the sole reader of their story would always know just a little more than the characters within the pages, up to and including the main character “Yoo Joonghyuk”. In that sense, he was also always more powerful than anybody in the story.
Whenever the two of them wrote “Yoo Joonghyuk” into a corner there was no getting out of without a deus ex machina of painful proportions, or the two of them disagreed so strongly on where to continue going, they would simply terminate the current arc, kill off “Yoo Joonghyuk”, and send him back to the beginning for another round with different stories, tactics, struggles, and rewards. After a few months, they retroactively decided to claim this was due to an innate trait that the character “Yoo Joonghyuk” had: he could return to the “point of origin” upon death.
The ideas and the plot came from the two of them together, while Han Sooyoung handled the task of writing. Dokja isn’t sure how much time they must have put into this endeavor, but they wrote hundreds of pages over the years – maybe thousands – it is difficult to estimate because the chapters were written sometimes on paper and at other times on the computer, depending on what was most convenient at the moment. Updates started coming haphazardly when the three of them were attending different colleges and then job searching, but they always came.
So when he reads the stories his clients have crafted, Dokja tries to hold the emotions that he’d felt reading Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk’s story close to his heart. None of them have touched the story in any meaningful way for almost two and a half years, but Dokja still thinks of it often. That story lived for him, and he lived for that story. As such, his attachment to it is something that can never truly go away.
The apartment is quiet without Joonghyuk. That’s not because Joonghyuk makes a lot of noise – it’s quiet because Dokja has no reason to fill the silence when Joonghyuk isn’t there.
The first night Joonghyuk is gone, Dokja wonders before going to bed whether or not Joonghyuk might be able to sleep better at his company’s dorm. Then he ponders if he should make Joonghyuk take sleeping pills or supplements if the problem remains when Joonghyuk gets back. Joonghyuk probably wouldn’t willingly take over-the-counter medicines, but Dokja thinks he could convince Joonghyuk to try melatonin or valerian root by talking up how natural and healthy they are. If it comes down to it, maybe he could sneakily dissolve the supplements into Joonghyuk’s water, because Joonghyuk drinks at least two full glasses between dinner and midnight every night.
A very rational part of him asks himself: Why am I thinking about how to drug Yoo Joonghyuk without his knowledge? That’s almost a crime. Aren’t there so many better ways to go about this? Didn’t Han Sooyoung tell you exactly what you should do?
Plagued with such thoughts, Kim Dokja doesn’t sleep through the night either.
The next morning, Yoo Joonghyuk sends him a message, which is more like a detailed inventory and list of instructions. He summarizes everything in the fridge, suggests an order to cook and eat everything, tells Dokja to go grocery shopping in exactly six days, and reminds him of when certain chores need to be done to keep the apartment suitably clean in Joonghyuk’s absence. Dokja reads the whole thing from beginning to end twice after he’s eaten breakfast and already ruined Joonghyuk’s suggestions. After he gets to the last line – And use your common sense, or whatever’s left of it, you fool – he laughs tremulously and lifts his phone up towards his face.
Dokja presses his lips gently to the top of the screen and closes his eyes for a moment. He breathes out slowly, and when he begins to inhale again, he places his phone down on the table. Quietly, he says, “Joonghyuk-ah, I really do love you.”
This is nothing new. Kim Dokja has loved Yoo Joonghyuk for a long time – practically since he has known who Yoo Joonghyuk is. There are subsets of that during time when Kim Dokja has also been in love with Yoo Joonghyuk, but he’s always at least sincerely loved “Yoo Joonghyuk”. He loves the strong “Yoo Joonghyuk”, who does not lie and faces always the truth. He loves the beautiful Yoo Joonghyuk who judges others based on their characters and not their appearances. He loves the “Yoo Joonghyuk” who would look so wrenchingly erotic smoking a cigarette but who doesn’t indulge himself in unhealthy habits.
Yes. Kim Dokja loves “Yoo Joonghyuk”. And that is why Yoo Joonghyuk is having such a difficult time. Don’t ■■ get it? ■■ really don’t know why he doesn’t sleep through the night, or why he doesn’t say anything to Kim Dokja about it? Do ■■ truly not understand what it is that ■■ should do?
Still no answer? Let us continue, then.
Anyway, the days pass. Except for that first night alone, Kim Dokja sleeps fairly well. He tries his best to mind Yoo Joonghyuk’s words, but he isn’t much of a cook, so he gives into sloth and buys ready-made meals from the supermarket every day for dinner. Some of the riper fruits in the refrigerator begin to rot; he doesn’t notice until spoil begins to set in. With a minor amount of guilt, he throws them into the kitchen trash can and doesn’t replace them.
There is a saying that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. If that is true, then Yoo Joonghyuk is borderline insane. He has either an unusually strong willingness to dedicate himself to a task or a strange sense of pride that demands mastery. For example, if he had become a pianist, then he wouldn’t have minded playing the same sheet of music 1,000 times in a row if at the end of those 1,000 repetitions he felt that he had perfected his interpretation. He wouldn’t get bored of listening to the same notes again and again – he would be able to concentrate and play deliberately every single time. When he dedicates himself to improving for the sake of showing results, Yoo Joonghyuk can make himself endure almost anything.
Yoo Joonghyuk was recruited to become a pro gamer after showing stupendous performance in casual play. His actions per minute hovers at just above the professional average, but more than that, his sense of efficiency is almost unscrupulously brutal. He had been taking advantage of a small programming idiosyncrasy that involved canceling and repeating certain actions within demanding and unintuitive timing windows to reduce the frames needed to execute them. It’s something that a player might do once on accident without even noticing – but Yoo Joonghyuk not only noticed it, he recreated the accident and turned it into a weapon that allowed him to effectively move 1.5 times faster than all his opponents.
After one of his matches was featured in an amateur competition, the game producers released an announcement that the exploit was considered unintentional and would be patched out as soon as possible. In the following five days, Joonghyuk received dozens of contract offers.
He picked the one that didn’t require him to live in a dorm and had the most generous time-off policy, as well as certain clauses that would allow him to exercise a considerable amount of flexibility to act independently in any cases not explicitly covered by the document. Nobody asked him why he passed up contracts that would pay him more – some would even make him a top earner as an e-athlete – but if somebody had, he probably would have said something like this: “There are people I have to take care of. This arrangement will let me do that.”
If only life were like a game – then perhaps Yoo Joonghyuk would live differently, valuing only improvement, efficiency, and results. But he is Yoo Joonghyuk, who lives in reality.
Halfway through the training camp, Joonghyuk returns home without advance notice. The first thing Dokja thinks when Joonghyuk steps inside is that he’d forgotten to take the garbage out earlier, so the rotting peaches are still in the kitchen trash can.
“The manager is happy with our progress and said we could take the night off,” Joonghyuk explains without prompting, as he takes off his shoes.
“Oh,” Dokja says. “Welcome back. Have you eaten dinner?”
He feels like he should keep Joonghyuk away from the kitchen. Although he didn’t feel bad throwing out the fruit, he doesn’t want Joonghyuk to see the proof that he disregarded the words that Joonghyuk had written for his sake.
“No, I’ll cook,” Joonghyuk says.
Dokja quickly gets up to prevent him from walking into the kitchen and says, “You’ve been working hard – you should take a break. I’ll order in from that place you’re okay with, you know… the one around the corner. It won’t take long.”
“I’m not tired,” Joonghyuk replies, “and you know I prefer to – ”
He stops talking when Dokja reaches out and puts his hand on Joonghyuk’s left arm. Dokja holds Joonghyuk there firmly; he can feel the musculature of Joonghyuk’s upper arm against his fingertips. Calmly, Dokja tells him, “Just let me treat you every once in a while, Yoo Joonghyuk. Given how generous you’ve been about splitting the rent… well, even I’ll start to feel bad, you know?”
Joonghyuk gives him a look that Dokja can’t quite decipher, although he doesn’t think Joonghyuk has any specific suspicions in mind. Finally, Joonghyuk brings his right hand up to his face and closes his eyes as he pinches the bridge of his nose. He exhales audibly – it is almost, but not quite a sigh – before he meets Dokja’s gaze again.
“Alright,” Joonghyuk finally says, tone carefully neutral. “Let me change clothes first, though. We can walk there together.”
Dokja pats Joonghyuk’s arm once before letting go. He doesn’t smile because he knows it will make Joonghyuk think that something’s amiss – he simply waits for Joonghyuk to go to his room before he calmly grabs his keys, goes to the kitchen, ties up the trash bag, and then brings it to the front door. Joonghyuk comes back out just as Dokja’s finished putting his shoes on.
“I’ll go ahead and take out the trash. Let’s meet at the front door?” Dokja says.
“Fine,” Joonghyuk answers. Just like that, Dokja is able to escape his guilt.
The story that Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk created together was informally titled Ways of Survival, which simultaneously had little to do with the plot yet was a bit too on-the-nose.
From Kim Dokja’s understanding of their creative process, Han Sooyoung would make scenarios, Yoo Joonghyuk would treat them as puzzles to be solved and explain how he’d get through them, and then Han Sooyoung would adapt the answers into a narrative form. “Yoo Joonghyuk” often failed to accomplish much due to miscommunications between Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk. Sometimes Yoo Joonghyuk would incorrectly interpret the set-up that he had been given, and at other times Han Sooyoung would realize Yoo Joonghyuk had found a loophole she hadn’t anticipated. So “Yoo Joonghyuk” had to endure hundreds upon hundreds of different hardships and made progress almost exclusively through trial by error.
It was such a juvenile way of crafting a story. Han Sooyoung was a fledgling writer back then; she lacked the craftsmanship and experience to anticipate what potential readers would think about the scenarios she created. Meanwhile, Yoo Joonghyuk could stubbornly challenge the same scenario over and over again because it wasn’t his reality – to him, it must have been like the games that he now plays for a living.
On the other hand, “Yoo Joonghyuk” would come across as some kind of idiot – masochistic, even, for not knowing when to give up and cut his losses. That is how the story became Ways of Survival; it was a tongue-in-cheek jab from Han Sooyoung about how rare it was that “Yoo Joonghyuk” actually managed to survive anything he hadn’t previously encountered.
But Kim Dokja didn’t see “Yoo Joonghyuk” like that at all. It must have been a product of the environment he was living in at the time, but Kim Dokja saw that idiotic, borderline masochistic “Yoo Joonghyuk” try and try again – trying despite the fact that the goals he needed to accomplish were all but impossible – and that gave Kim Dokja something that allowed him to continue trying as well. Maybe it was courage or faith. But maybe it was a sense of superiority – many peoples’ prides, after all, are founded upon a feeling that they are better than somebody else. Only ■■ would know the answer to that. Either way, it is clear that story was Kim Dokja’s Ways of Survival.
Dokja buys a few bottles of flavored soju on the way back from getting dinner – if it were anybody else, he’d cheap out, but it’s Yoo Joonghyuk whom he wants to drink with. Joonghyuk rarely drinks, with some exceptions made only for high-quality alcohol and the right company. He plies Joonghyuk to drink because he hopes that some alcohol will make it easier for him to fall asleep. It is a plan unlikely to work: Joonghyuk can hold his drink better than Dokja.
In the end, it’s Joonghyuk who has to carry Dokja to his bed and lay him down. Dokja falls asleep almost right away, but that was his backup plan anyway. This way, he won’t be able to check whether Joonghyuk stayed awake or not. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss.
Joonghyuk is gone when Dokja wakes up; as before, he’s left breakfast prepared. Unlike the last time, though, Joonghyuk leaves his instructions written on a piece of paper torn from his planner – Dokja recognizes the lining as the planner was a gift from his younger sister, so Joonghyuk loyally uses it almost every day. Dokja reads through it as he eats, but he spends more time admiring Joonghyuk’s handwriting than letting the words sink into his memory. There is something of Yoo Joonghyuk’s personality in the steady, long strokes that he uses when writing with a pen.
After detailing a suggested shopping list and an updated chore schedule, there is a peculiar sentence near the bottom of the note: Also, if you’re interested, let’s go together next time.
Dokja doesn’t know what that means or where even to begin figuring it out. He assumes it can’t be anything too urgent, though, because all of their financial and living agreements have been written up and documented clearly – so he decides not to dwell upon it.
Let us consider Yoo Joonghyuk’s circumstances. This is a topic that ■■ don’t seem to think about very much, but we won’t digress into the possible reasons that might be. It wouldn’t be very flattering for ■■, after all.
Yoo Joonghyuk was abandoned by an unknown person at a hospital and diagnosed with severe childhood memory loss around the age of thirteen. The obvious armchair diagnosis is that he may have suffered a traumatic experience which caused him to repress his own memories, but there is very little in his medical records, personality development, or subsequent behavior that could be used as evidence either for or against that theory. It is perhaps more telling that Yoo Joonghyuk had no legal records and his parents couldn’t be identified, let alone found – even still, those facts don’t tell a full story.
He received full-time institutional care for a year before he was legally adopted by one of his hospital caretakers. It seems that the caretaker and his partner were unable to have children, and they had grown fond of Yoo Joonghyuk. At any rate, it was a very fortunate thing for Yoo Joonghyuk, as they enrolled him in the school at which he met Han Sooyoung.
That’s right – Han Sooyoung and Yoo Joonghyuk knew each other long before Kim Dokja came into the picture. Both of them suffered from the same kinds of problems at school; they were respected due to their good looks and their strong academic performance, but politely ostracized by their peers because of their personal circumstances. The matter of Han Sooyoung’s illegitimacy was all but an open secret, and there was a rumor that Yoo Joonghyuk had been brought into the country illegally as a child. Through shared experiences, they formed an awkward sort of alliance that later evolved into something resembling friendship. At least, they were close enough that they could confide to each other their situations and trust that these details would stay private.
Do ■o remember how Kim Dokja met the two of them?
Well, it isn’t very important for this discussion anyway.
Just before Yoo Joonghyuk graduated from high school, his younger sister – then a baby – turned up at his adoptive parents’ doorstep. A blood relationship was verified through DNA testing, and she was also adopted into the family. He felt guilty about it. He worried that the people he had come to love and respect as parents had been obliged to take in, feed, and raise another child that they wouldn’t have adopted if they’d had more choice in the matter. They had encouraged him to enroll into the best college that Joonghyuk had gotten into, even though the expenses would strain their paychecks. He knew they wanted to retire after he finished college and got a job, but Yoo Mia’s sudden appearance meant that they’d have to continue working.
Therefore, at the still tender age of seventeen, Yoo Joonghyuk had resolved to support his family. He would make sure that his parents could retire and pay for everything Yoo Mia needed to grow up well. During his college years, he studied hard, worked several part-time jobs, and created Ways of Survival all at once – and he made it all look so effortless for him, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t have been. This is the Yoo Joonghyuk who lives in reality. ■■ should know better than anybody else that he is but a human being.
I’m sure ■■ recall that he managed to land a job at that big-shot trading group. He wasn’t happy when he told his friends about it – he’d only felt slightly relieved. He’d allowed Han Sooyoung and Kim Dokja treat him to dinner that night because he understood it would make them happy to congratulate him properly. After Han Sooyoung left to finish writing a chapter for her deadline the next day, Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk took the subway to Hangang Park, where they kissed for the first time.
■■ thought I didn’t know about that? Well, I do. In fact, I know most of the things that Kim Dokja and Yoo Joonghyuk have or haven’t done with each other over the years. The only reason I can’t say that I know all of those things is because I’m somebody Yoo Joonghyuk will lie to.
It was after Kim Dokja came back from his military service and started working that Yoo Joonghyuk participated in that amateur gaming competition. It was a lucky chance that let him leave a job that required him to live, breathe, and sleep in his work without severely damaging his financial situation. That’s right – it only now occurs to me that y■ never fully witnessed what Yoo Joonghyuk was like at that time. Maybe that’s why ■■ just don’t seem to get it.
It should be emphasized again how fortuitous it was that he managed to switch professions. He could still save money for Yoo Mia and not work himself to the bone. At the same time, gaming is something he’d done as a hobby for years casually, without investing much effort into it. At least, compared to the hours he spent working, it was barely a second thought at the back of his mind. Yes, it’s true that he took advantage of that glitch, but it wasn’t something he developed or practiced much. Kim Dokja is the one who actually found the glitch; because he’d been unable to make use of it, he passed it onto Yoo Joonghyuk.
Through a coincidence, Yoo Joonghyuk found himself in a better situation than the one he had exhausted himself for years to take hold of. He knew he should have felt grateful. Instead, he wondered what the point of it all is. He worked hard. But to what end? It wasn’t his hard work that paid off. It was his fortune for being born with a pretty face along with his luck that serendipity had finally been on his side.
If only Yoo Joonghyuk were that “Yoo Joonghyuk”. If he were, then he could go back and do it all over again – he would do better, and everybody would be better off. He wouldn’t waste his time or his effort. He wouldn’t let his parents pay for his school expenses.
He knows he shouldn’t think like this. He knows that once somebody starts thinking thoughts like that, there will be no end to it. He knows that if things continue like this, then he will sink further and further into the depths within, and the pressure will crush the life out of him like how ships implode when they sink into the ocean depths. Life will leave him, but he won’t die – his heart will keep beating and his skin will still be warm. He will be neither “dead” nor “alive”; he will be stuck in-between. He knows how difficult it will be to extract himself from that state once he’s sunk into it, but it’s hard to stop the sinking on his own.
He knows, he knows, he knows, he knows – yet still ■■ choose to remain ignorant. Here’s something else that Yoo Joonghyuk probably knows: it isn’t that Kim Dokja doesn’t care for him anymore. It is precisely because Kim Dokja cares that he cannot act. He’s scared of doing the wrong thing. He’s scared to misplace that “Yoo Joonghyuk” into the Yoo Joonghyuk who lives in reality.
But things have gone on like this for long enough. So let me ask once more: Do ■■ truly not understand what it is that you should do?
When Yoo Joonghyuk told Kim Dokja that he was going with his younger sister on a short vacation to Jeju Island, he had said, “She wants to go on a trip with me, so I’m taking her to see the ocean.”
He had also added, after a pause, “Are you interested?”
“Of course I’m interested,” Dokja had replied. “We’re living together, so I want to know when you will and won’t be around.”
“Okay,” Joonghyuk said. The conversation ended there.
After the training session ends, Joonghyuk goes straight to pick up his younger sister. He’d already packed his things to stay at the company dorm temporarily, so the only reasons he’d have to go back to his apartment would be if he’d forgotten something or to see Kim Dokja’s face. He sends Dokja a message when the two of them arrive safely to their hotel.
When Dokja gets the message, he’s having dinner with Han Sooyoung. He reads the message and smiles before locking his phone and placing it on the table face-up, so that he can see any other messages if they come in. Sooyoung sighs and shakes her head in exasperation when Dokja tells her that Joonghyuk’s landed in Jeju Island.
“I could tell that much by the look on your face,” she says bluntly. “You only smile like that when you’re thinking about Yoo Joonghyuk.”
Dokja doesn’t refute it. Instead, he replies, “So, why did you invite me out?”
“I can’t just enjoy a person’s company for what it is?” Sooyoung says.
“No,” Dokja answers.
Sooyoung casually steals one of Dokja’s side dishes away. It would be revenge if it weren’t an obvious set-up; as he’d already guessed her intention was to find an excuse to take his food, Dokja simply lets it happen.
“I’ve something to give you, Kim Dokja,” she says. “You still like that story that Yoo Joonghyuk and I made, right?”
“You wrote more of it?” he asks.
“That question can’t be answered with a yes or a no,” she replies after a pause, “but it’s a story about Yoo Joonghyuk that I wrote for you.”
Their eyes meet. Sooyoung holds Dokja’s gaze steadily. He understands in the way she looks at him that there’s no point in playing coy – she won’t ask him if he wants to read it, nor will she allow him to coax the question out of her. He nods and says, “I’d like to read it.”
She takes out her phone and sends Dokja a text file. Then she gets up and says, “Go home and read it, Kim Dokja. If you don’t know what to do after that, well – don’t call me. I’ve done enough, I think.”
So Kim Dokja goes home and sits down on the living room sofa. He cannot help but feel Yoo Joonghyuk’s absence as he unlocks his phone and opens the file. Usually, Joonghyuk would be sitting an arm’s length away as he reads. But tonight, he reads alone.
Will y■ understand it better if I put it like this – in the form of a story? It’s the same way that the two of us communicated with ■■ when we were younger, after all: we wrote Kim Dokja’s Ways of Survival, and Kim Dokja was the sole reader of our story. But I worry that the point is still lost on ■u. Maybe part of it is my fault for letting things go on like this for so long, knowing how yo■ relied on our story. That’s why this is the last time I’ll write for the sake of Kim Dokja’s Ways of Survival.
So let’s not talk about the metaphor of the rotting peaches in the trash can, the symbolism of the ocean, the difference between something never having been and something gone missing that once was. And as for the words left unwritten – the words left unspoken – let’s just leave them at that.
Instead, I’ll give you the summary of this story: Kim Dokja is a fool. Why are you still reading? Do you need me to say it again? Kim Dokja, you are a fool. The rest of the story is now up to you.