Work Text:
The lifespan of a star is determined by its mass.
The greater its mass is, the shorter the star lives.
I.
Stars are born out of dust and chaos.
The smoke from his cigarette billows into the somber atmosphere, up and up until it obscures his view of the starry night sky.
"You smoke? Since when?" His hyung stares at him, bewildered.
He puffs at the lit stick in his hand one more time, his thoughts bleeding into the haze that slowly, gradually engulfs him. Abeonim, the hospital, his priesthood dreams, his vanishing youth—they hover overhead; some spiral down into the concrete floor as ashes.
"You're a doctor—you shouldn't be smoking. Jesus!" Hyung suddenly seems very much like the priest that he is, Jeongwon notes, with the habit he's wearing and all, as he sermons his younger brother about the irony of his vice and profession. He stays still, listening to his hyung’s voice as approaching footsteps rush in through the metal rods that lined the outdoor shed in that area of the hospital they are in. Soon enough, mom appears, a man in suit closely following behind.
"Eomma, Andrea smokes!" The priestly elder brother has returned to being just a hyung who snitches on his dongsaeng to their mother.
Rosa just smirks. "I taught him twenty years ago."
There was a motherly contempt laced with her declaration, and it does not escape Jeongwon's notice. He lightly taps on what remains of his cigarette stick with his thumb, and more ashes crumble to the ground.
...
Twenty years ago, Jeongwon finally decided to speak out the desires of his conflicted soul to his mother.
"Eomma… I want to follow hyung–" He couldn’t even finish saying it. Mom had asked him to get the lighter inside before he could.
Jeongwon obediently scrambled towards their kitchen to look for it among the cupboards. When he returned outside, lighter in hand, mom was still occupied with pottering around her assemblage of flower pots in their brick-tiled porch.
Rosa had an inkling already of what was going on; Jeongwon is her son after all. Her sweet, adorable maknae —she was hoping he would listen. He would have to. Among all her children, Jeongwon was the only one she thought she could get to actually listen to her.
“Eomma, I wish to follow my hyungs in the seminary,” he finally declared, trailing behind his mom.
Rosa stopped in her tracks and fumbled a small rectangular cardboard box from her dress pocket. Taking out two sticks from it, she handed one to a perplexed Jeongwon. “You hold it lightly between two fingers,” she said, demonstrating it with her own hand.
“Eomma…” Jeongwon could sense, from his mother’s austere look as she grabbed the lighter from his hands, that she was trying to stall the conversation.
Mother lit her stick and motioned her son to follow suit.
“Jeongwon-ah, finish your studies first," she takes a quick puff of her cigarette. “After that, I’ll allow you to be who you want to be. For now, be a doctor.”
Jeongwon heaved a sigh. Studying medicine would take him so many years. It would take up a whole lot of his youth. He was already twenty and still in his first year as a pre-med student… by the time he would become a full-fledged doctor—? Jeongwon felt anguish, the years ahead already crashing down on him.
But Jeongwon was also fastidious, and he would hold on to what his eomma said then for the years to come: he just needed to be a doctor first, and then he could be a priest. And he would be, he promised himself.
Jeongwon reluctantly brought the cigarette to his mouth and breathed it in, the slew of chemicals mixing into the turbulence inside him. He watched as eomma flicked off the ash from her own stick, its glimmer now extinguished, its dust scattering over the soil of her potted plants. “It’s good for them,” she muttered.
It is turbulence from deep within that gives birth to stars. When a cloud of dust becomes turbulent enough, it collapses… And then it ignites; at the heart of it, a star is born.
II.
When Professor Ahn Jeongwon lost a patient for the first time four years ago, Father Ahn was the first person he confided to. Although he had wept and blamed God before him for several minutes inside the confessional, he had admitted he liked confiding to just-his-hyung better over bottles of soju at the fried chicken place on the police station alley, where there were no latticed wooden partitions, no inhibitions that held him back from revealing his sorrows.
"I just don’t think I can do this anymore, I can’t continue being a doctor… I told you I was going to be a priest instead, and you told me I could, didn't you? I'll quit my job tomorrow, hyung…" He'd managed to say in between sobbing.
"Andrea, if that's how you would still feel in the future, I'll let you quit by then. For now, let's hang in there for one more year, shall we?", his brother had told him that first night. And he would tell the same to him every year, every time Jeongwon found himself again on that same edge.
Just as how a star needs the certain pressure that keeps it from collapsing under its own weight, the same energy by which it continues to shine — Jeongwon has his hyung.
And Junwan too. His housemate for several years, his ‘soulmate’, as he likes to call him.
A few more years back, when they had just been instated as residents at Kangwoon, Jeongwon had never thought that his aloof friend from medical school would become one of the forces who’d keep him on his feet. They weren’t as close back then as they are now—unlike Jeongwon and his sentimental nature, Junwan had known from the start not to invest himself too deeply in matters relating to patients, and to stay within the matter-of-fact distance when it comes to treating them.
When Jeongwon went home to their shared apartment one night after being reprimanded by one of their seniors for being ‘unnecessarily emotional’ over a patient’s regressing health, Junwan had heard his sobbing from the other room, which he later described to Jeongwon as a sound that ‘tried so hard to be discreet but could be heard anyway’ and ‘is too pitiful to not be bothered about’ that the next morning, Jeongwon was surprised to find a bowl of his favorite non-spicy tteokboki on their dining table.
It seemed to have worked during that first time, Junwan thought, and so every time he felt like his miserly roommate badly needed some uplifting, he would leave all kinds of delights on their table without word. He’d done it so many times until the point when he and Jeongwon had become so irrevocably close already that Junwan would label it as Jeongwon just mooching off him all those years.
III.
In general, the greater the star’s mass is, the shorter it lives. But the most massive of stars could live up to billions of years.
Jeongwon’s dream of becoming a priest had persisted from his teenage years and throughout his medical schooling and training. Now at forty, Prof. Ahn still has this thought—albeit kept at the back of his mind most of the time—what with the new and bustling environment that Yulje has which keeps him occupied day and night.
There has been one more thought that’s not of priesthood nor his patients, incessantly finding its way into his daily internal monologues, ever since he and his close friends moved to the hospital his father had once managed. The thought involved his doe-eyed, bespectacled resident, with her almost always unkempt ponytail and curious brows and lips, and whose no-nonsense work ethic is kindred to his so-called soulmate’s, yet which he decidedly dismissed as ‘not his cup of tea’.
“Dr. Jang, do you know what’s the only thing that we, doctors, can tell our patients with certainty?” He had confronted her once in one of their stints in the ER, in a manner he swore he tried so hard to not sound as condescending as he already actually was. “It’s ‘We will do our best.’”
She had lifted her head to look at him, with compelling eyes that bore through his, before he had decided to leave her there to mull over what he'd told her. Or was him leaving also because he had realized he could not stand being there, in her piquant presence, any longer?
‘We will do our best’—Jeongwon had said, and yet he had been immediately slapped back with the sight of her removing a swarm of maggots from a patient’s leg, with the methodical way of her gloved hands, and that ever-present steadfast look in her eyes.
‘We will do our best’—and yet it dawns now on Jeongwon how hypocritical it was of him to say those words when he, himself, has been having an affair with his priesthood fantasies when he’s already committed to his current vocation.
The tell-tale signs of the beginning of a star's death: the star starts to collapse under its own weight, its heart becoming hotter and larger, outpouring, until it can no longer withstand itself.
...
“You like Dr. Jang, don’t you?” Ikjun eyes Jeongwon with such certainty that Jeongwon himself starts to doubt the authenticity of his own convictions. “To the point that makes you question if you still want to be a priest.”
Jeongwon looks at Ikjun quietly, scrutinizing not his friend’s smug smile, but his sorry state reflected in his friend’s eyes. Jeongwon lets out a chortle before deciding to take a seat on the wooden bench, a reprieve from the pressing weight on his chest.
With his friend’s nonresponse, Ikjun proceeds to enumerate the good things about Dr. Jang Gyeoul: how hardworking she is, how praise-worthy her work is, how she never complains, et cetera, et cetera… Jeongwon is paying attention not so much to what his friend is saying, but to the level of accuracy in almost everything this intellectual friend of his has ever said. And just when Jeongwon decides to tune in to what his own heart is saying, Ikjun’s phone rings, snapping him off from his introspection.
“Jeongwon, I’m sure He will understand. When your brain and heart are saying two different things, your heart is the one you should believe in.” Ikjun makes sure to tell Jeongwon before leaving him on his own.
As the sound of his friend’s footsteps dissipate among the metal rods lining the outdoor shed, Jeongwon realizes the silence isn’t any better atmosphere for him to figure out...things.
He puts the cigarette stick on his hand in between his lips, an act he has been used to doing, yet for the first time in twenty years, he feels hesitant to flick his lighter on, suddenly scared that he might have been doing it wrong all along.
It takes him several moments before he finally lights it, breathes it in… and exhales. He directs his gaze upwards, hoping to find comfort in the stars, but the smoke from his cigarette once again muddles his view of the night sky.
IV.
When stars die, we wouldn’t even notice. Their lives are on a far greater time plane than that of a single human being on earth.
On nights like this, 41-year-old Ahn Jeongwon, now Brother Andrea, finds solitude in watching the bustling cityscape from the open window in his room, away from the hustle of his new life in Naples.
As the evening settles over the lake and the roofs of the rows of houses and buildings ahead, Jeongwon feels the piled up weight of his six months in the seminary loom over him. The weekdays when he'd saturated himself with Italian vocabolario and the postulates of St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, and the like… The weekends when he had occupied himself with listening to his clerical brothers teach catechism to street kids at nearby chapels… These monotonies of his present make all the vibrancies of Seoul seem as if they were just figments of a past life he had lived.
“Andrea, how do you like it here so far?” Jeongwon remembers when his favorite Fr. Luigi had asked him one time.
It almost feels like another life, he had almost answered, but of course he had instead let out a smile, one that could be vaguely translated to ‘I am fine, thank you’, which, these days, he realizes isn’t always true about him.
“At least I have this sight to behold here,” he mutters to himself as he revels in the clearest star-studded sky he has ever seen in his life.
Jeongwon remembers looking at a similar sky with such marvel in his eyes back when he was a child in Yangpyeong. He remembers the first time he’d heard of the story of God creating the stars to light the night alongside the moon, and of the three wise men who followed a special star and were led to the holy infant…
Jeongwon has a special star too, he thinks. The one he had looked up to in the night sky ever since his teenage years, the one he had followed here all the way from Seoul.
But there was no ‘child in the manger’ in Naples—or Jeongwon just hasn’t found him yet here—for all he could think of is the child he had so delightfully carried in his arms one night in Yulje’s PCU back in Seoul. And instead of the woman about to give birth looking for a place to stay in Bethlehem, the woman center of his devotion whenever he prays the holy rosary that adorns his wrist—Jeongwon finds his mind wandering off to the woman who had waited outside his office, the woman he had hesitated to let in to his sphere, the woman from whom he had reluctantly turned away…
The laws that encompass space are far from the ones here on earth. Light travels at a distance and speed quite unfathomable to a human’s naked notion. So when stars die, we would hardly ever notice, and we’d be only left second-guessing whether the star we are looking at in the night sky has already died—it most probably is. For what we see is only what it used to be.
So all these years—since when?—had he been seeing the light of a dead star, long extinguished, yet seemingly still in its appointed place in the heavens?
“Say, do you think I’m serving the Lord better now that I’m here?”
Songhwa, or any of his friends, or hyung, or his mother need not answer his question anymore the next time he phones them or they phone him. What they would say hardly matters now, for the answer that took too long to travel from the distant stars has reached him, finally.