What kind of novels have I written so far?
Looking back, there weren’t many happy stories. I couldn’t help it. For me, novels were an escape and an outlet.
There isn’t much difference. The essence of a novel is originally like that.
So my novels were like the anatomy of my wounds. Hence, there could be no happy stories.
Because of that, the idea of a story filled with love was so unfamiliar and lonely.
Just because I haven’t received it doesn’t mean I can’t write about it. A novelist is an imaginer; if I don’t know, I just need to imagine it.
However, if that imagination is too disconnected from reality, it eventually becomes like that.
I was lonely, and I hated you for envying you.
Even the characters in the novels I wrote.
You must be quite different from the writers who love the protagonists in my novels.
So I didn’t imagine. What I write is always pain, not happiness, and the ones within those stories were only me.
Thus, I could not love, but I could avoid hatred.
Does Sen have to be happy?
I hadn’t thought about that.
I just wanted to give Sen a way to choose her own fate.
Happiness was a sweet illusion.
Even so,
What I hope for is.
“Thank you for your advice. I’ll consider it. But I don’t think I’ll head in that direction.”
“Is that so?”
“You’d want to be happy. Writing such a story might not be a bad idea. But the happiness in that story seems, in the end, like the happiness of domesticated livestock. Freedom and happiness could surely coexist beautifully, but this isn’t such an easy world. If I have to choose one, I will.”
What to choose?
…The choice.
Even if the result destroys myself.
“I never intended to write a novel in the form of a romance fantasy from the beginning. It wasn’t something I considered a web novel in the first place. I just wanted to hear advice from a different perspective. Thanks to that, I feel like I’ve grasped something a bit.”
“I’m glad it was helpful.”
Han-bom, who had been talking smoothly, reverted back to her original demeanor as soon as the confident topic of conversation ended. Suddenly, I was left wondering about that appearance.
“By the way, with you knowing so well, why… is it that you’re writing a novel?”
“That’s… it’s a somewhat different story, heh heh…”
Her scratching her head seemed naive. Despite her appearance not looking youthful at all due to some kind of grandeur, watching that foolish demeanor made me not believe she was older than me.
“Analyzing something you see is completely different from embodying and handling it. Anyone can analyze how a novel is constructed and what intention it possesses while looking at it.”
I wouldn’t have thought so.
“But if you were asked to write it yourself, the story becomes completely different, right? No matter how poor the writing appears, it carries its own struggles. ‘Wow, I could write this too. I could write it better than this.’ In reality, that’s never the case. It’s like a continuation of that feeling. It’s a story I’ve written with my own logic and structure, but the readers don’t know what’s in my head. I didn’t know that.”
Being a writer is ultimately a job that requires understanding humans.
You can’t understand humans just by locking yourself in a small room and reading books.
“It’s not easy.”
“That’s the nature of the job.”
Sen’s story, I’m sorry to say, couldn’t become a romance fantasy.
I was a fool, unable to pretend to be happy.
Trials, conflicts, pain, contemplation, reflection.
And when this world tells Sen that she is unnecessary,
I wanted to write a story where at that moment, someone tells her that she is needed.
That choice will be yours.
On the way back, it was snowing. As the snow began to fall, it felt warmer than before.
I stepped heavily on the white ground.
Then I took a step back.
My footprints remained in front of me.
The loneliness had diminished a little.
~
At the end of September, unseasonably early snow fell. With the cold of October, I returned after finishing the contract. A month has passed since then. November was already coming to an end.
Soon, it would be half a year.
Without needing to specify what time it was, everyone probably already knew. So much had transpired. It was a time that was so dense that it was hard to even call it half a year in my life.
Suddenly, I checked my contacts.
Unlike half a year ago, a considerable number of contacts had been added.
Of course, by general standards, it wasn’t a lot, but it was surprisingly many by my standards. Moreover, the fact that a significant portion of them were women was shockingly noticeable.
In the past, I didn’t think of myself as someone who harbored hatred simply for the fact that someone was a woman. I hated only those who truly deserved to be hated. That was a justified animosity.
I didn’t expect anything from women. I didn’t believe in them. I didn’t build relationships. It was a story that started from a deeply personal grievance, but I didn’t think it was entirely wrong even now.
Maybe it was simply a matter of probability. Men were also humans, which meant that they could also be ugly creatures. My aversion to women stemmed from the belief that, statistically speaking, it was easier to be betrayed by women than by men.
Good women? Surely they exist. However, I thought that they would not exist for me.
Even now, my thoughts haven’t changed. Feelings that have matured over 20 years cannot simply vanish in an instant. So the phone numbers filled with contacts were evidence of my beliefs and foolishness.
Still holding onto such beliefs, unable to refuse those approaching me—how foolish and weak I felt.
And so I occasionally became anxious.
Worried that the day would come when my beliefs would materialize.
…My phone vibrated.
Well, not all the new contacts were women. There were indeed a few men, albeit fewer in number. One had already lost contact, but that wasn’t his fault.
The vibration was a message from Jae-Ah, concerning future tutoring schedules.
We decided to resume tutoring from this week. Once I had picked up the pen again, I could no longer just put it off. However… the message from Jae-Ah contained unexpected information.
[I think it will be a bit difficult in three weeks][There’s an event or something.]
[Event?]
[There’s such a thing.]
Well, it wasn’t something I should particularly care about. There seemed to be something going on with her. There was no need to pry into it. The reason I was surprised wasn’t that but the story that followed.
[And my sister wants to meet you.]
[…Which sister?]
[It’s obviously the only one that my brother does not know!]
I couldn’t help but be taken aback at the unexpected mention of Seo Eun-a wanting to meet me.
[Why does she want to meet me?]
[She has something she wants to ask about your novel?]
[What does the professor think?]
[I don’t think she told Dad separately.]
I felt a slight headache.
I didn’t hold any ill feelings towards Seo Eun-a. But when she suggested meeting again, I felt it would be a hassle. Especially considering the nature of what she writes…
The issue was that Seo Eun-a was the professor’s daughter. It seemed she hadn’t mentioned it to her father yet, but somehow, if I refused, I felt she might directly speak to Professor Seo.
[Just let her know I’m okay with it.]
[I’m not an owl, so I’ll give you my number, so just contact her yourself.]
That joke might be a little out of sync with the generation. With a big, dry sigh, I dialed the phone number Jae-Ah provided. The wait wasn’t long, and soon I heard a familiar voice flow out of the phone.
“Hello.”
“…It’s me.”
“Are you scamming me?”
The idea of me scamming anyone is a rather antiquated tactic. She should surely have figured out that I was me by now, yet insisting on this was just a bad personality.
“I heard from Jae-Ah.”
“Yeah, I suppose so. What is it?”
“What do you want to ask?”
“It’s nothing special.”
Nothing special, huh.
“Can you tell me your home address?”
That didn’t sound like something trivial at all.
“…Why do you want my home address?”
“I think it’d be better to talk in person rather than over the phone or text. Just consider it a continuation of the conversation we had last time.”
“…You want to get tutored again?”
“I’m not sure if that conversation can be called tutoring, but if I had to express it…”
“I won’t do it for free.”
“For the cost of clothes.”
Ah.
“You took a lot from me.”
“…I didn’t take it.”
“Whatever.”
I let out a long sigh. She would probably hear it, but I was doing it on purpose. Fortunately, she didn’t say anything about this. As Seo Eun-a had said, I had indeed received help with her clothes. Seo Eun-a didn’t know it, but because that was the case, I couldn’t refuse. I didn’t want to flatly refuse, either. Though I didn’t wish for it, I was someone who couldn’t live in debt.
So this conversation was just a trivial pick at me. It was meaningless.
“…Aren’t you preparing for the college entrance exam?”
“Are you stupid?”
“…Why?”
“Look at the calendar once in a while.”
At those words, I checked the date again.
Ah.
“The college entrance exam ended ages ago last week.”
I ended up sounding foolish after unnecessarily nitpicking. It wasn’t odd for me not to know the date of the entrance exam, as I had neither the reason nor the luxury to care about it, but even I thought that question sounded a bit silly.
Eventually, I provided my address and set a date. Anyway, since I didn’t have any special plans for the time being, it wasn’t a difficult thing.
Meetings with the publisher continued, but since the first one had been in person, all subsequent ones were done via video call. So, apart from tutoring with Jae-Ah, I had practically nothing on my public schedule, and the remaining time was only for writing or occasional meetings with others.
In fact, the only people who would bother to come visit my home were Hwa-won and Muk Ha-neul, and Ham Yejin.
Ah, there was something I had forgotten.
I started receiving psychological counseling last week. I had undergone various tests at the place Ham Yejin recommended, and I would be meeting with the counselor once a week. So far, I had only met with her once.
The counselor was a woman of an age where she was slowly starting to feel like a middle-aged lady, and in the first meeting, she didn’t tell me anything particularly profound. In fact, I didn’t think she would say anything significant in the future either. That’s purely because they were topics that I didn’t want to bring up myself.
According to Ham Yejin, she hadn’t told the counselor about the events that had happened to me. She said that it was solely my freedom to speak about those.
So this counselor knows nothing beyond what is generally public knowledge.
Especially with her being a woman.
They probably chose a female counselor in anticipation that I would speak about my experiences, but since I had no intention of sharing those, in the end, I thought it felt mismatched to have a female counselor.
In any case, this is how my recent life had been.
It was peaceful.
It felt like the ordinary days had returned. My life had certainly not been a normal one, but perhaps the current lifestyle was getting a bit closer to the essence of normalcy.
Today, which was no different from yesterday, and a tomorrow that seemed to be no different from today went on. A mundane, ordinary, yet comfortable and friendly monotony.
But ultimately, we have to perform our lives on the stage of life.
And the curtain call has yet to rise, so it was now time for new actors to appear. Maybe even the audience.
“Ah.”
That day, as I went out early in the morning to take out the trash, I encountered a female high school student again.
“Hello…”
“Hi.”
Her name, it was Im Mi-ra, right?
She was the high school girl who had called the police to save me before. And there she was, dressed in a long padded coat, complete with a hat, scarf, earmuffs, and gloves, fully equipped.
If she hadn’t initiated the greeting, I probably wouldn’t have noticed her.
An awkward stand-off ensued for a moment.
I felt like I should say something, but words wouldn’t come to me. Looking back, it seemed I hadn’t properly expressed my gratitude when we last met. I should have conveyed my thanks properly, but I couldn’t think of what to say.
“Um, thanks for helping me back then.”
“Ah, yes….”
The conversation came to a halt there. Shouldn’t there be a more appropriate reaction? The girl’s face seemed a bit drained of energy.
If the girl had just moved on from there, that would have been the end of it, but for some reason, she kept her feet planted.
What was she waiting for? What should I say?
I had no idea. The standoff continued, and I thought I should say something, anything. So I recalled my conversation with Seo Eun-a from the day before. And I made the worst choice I could pick there.
“Uh, so, how did the… entrance exam go?”
At my words, the high school girl’s expression went blank, as if she had been hit with a hammer, then suddenly contorted like a broken doll. And then,
“Waaah!!!”
She began to wail.
