STORY
“Say hello. From now on, he is your family.”
With that one sentence, everything began again.
I had come to the dinner after Mom said she wanted to introduce the man she would remarry.
There, I faced him again.
The person who had been closest to me as a child,
the kind older boy who had always stayed beside me like family,
Ha Do-yul.
His study abroad in America had been sudden, and it lasted longer than I expected.
After ten years, he was no longer the person I remembered.
When he heard the word family, he frowned and avoided my eyes.
His attitude made it seem as if this seat, and my very existence, made him uncomfortable.
But my opinion did not matter.
After Dad’s business failure destroyed the ground beneath our lives,
this remarriage was not a choice but our “only salvation”.
And so, I transferred back into the same school as him,
Hanguk High School, senior year.
After so much time, we were tangled together again.
In an odd distance that was neither friendship nor strangers,
we were placed in the same space.