It was the first day of December. The weather was cold as usual – enough to you to shiver even if you wear thick coat.

Suzy slowly opened her eyes. She dazed for awhile, slowly woke up from her bed and yawns. As she had already done days before, she needed to go to college in this cold day.

She toasted a bread and put on some jam on it. They’d already been her breakfast from ages – since her mother passed away – and she didn’t seem to dislike it.

After she finished her breakfast, she prepared her bag, inserted her books, and checked her wallet. She stared at her wallet for a while, seeing her mother’s photo. It’s the only one photo of her mother she has. Her father had got rid of them because she kept crying while looking at her photos.

To Suzy, her mother was everything. Her best friend, her teacher, and the one she ever loved entirely. She was only five when her mother passed away. She wouldn’t remember everything, but she remembered how her mother told her that she gave Suzy a long-term homework – to be happy even if her mother isn’t with her. Suzy remembers clearly how her mother eyes looked like when she told Suzy that she was dying and she wanted Suzy to be happy without her.

After her mother left, her father brought her to his hometown to life with her grandmother, because her father is a lawyer who was really busy to take care of a daughter himself. Suzy, who hadn’t even seen her grandmother before, cried in the snow as soon as her father left. She hated the fact that her mother had passed away. She hated the fact that she must lived in a new place that she hadn’t been before. She hated the fact that her father left her. She hated the fact that it was snowing.

After looking at her for a quiet long time, a boy who is some year older than Suzy , came to her and gave his hand to her, wanting her to stand up and stop crying. Suzy looked at his warm eyes, and he asked whether she felt cold after sitting in the snow for a long time. She felt that his eyes that were staring at her were so warm, like he had known Suzy for a long time.

The boy and Suzy became closer, and Suzy always called her oppa, without consciously know his real name. That oppa became her new best friend, replacing her mother. He called her “Gyeo-wool”, meaning Winter, because he first saw her in winter.  He took care of Suzy like she was his real sister. He saved Suzy when she was once lost in the forest. He saved her when she was nearly streamed away in the river. He always found her whenever she got lost. And for Suzy, she really admired him as an older brother.

But, two years later, when Suzy was seven, his father took her to go abroad with him. She needed to be parted with her oppa. She didn’t even said goodbye to him because his father’s departure was too sudden and they needed to go to airport with hurry. In her hurry, she left him a white scarf which her mother knitted it herself, together with a message:

Wait for me and wear this, so that I can find you, Oppa.

After she put on her coat and scarf, a white scarf she stepped out from her apartment and take a walk to go to her college. It was so cold that she shivered for a while, and took a bus to her college. Suzy is now a student majoring in classical music, and her speciality is piano. Her mother’s wish was for Suzy to be a pianist, as it was her mother’s dream when she was a child and she wanted Suzy to achieve that dream instead of her.

It was cold in the bus, and it took about 30 minutes for her to go to her college.  It was a busy morning, and that day can be considered as a sunny day. Suzy sit on an empty seat, and then an old woman came and she gave the old woman a seat.

“How pretty you are. Your face is pretty, and your personality too,” the old woman said.

“Ah, thank you, grandmother,” Suzy said.

“I think you are called ‘Gyeo-wool’, right? Because your face is white and your heart is soft like a snow,”

Suzy stayed silent for a while. Gyeo-wool. It was how her brother called her. Gyeo-wool. She missed it.

When she was dazing in the bus, she suddenly spotted a man with the same scarf with her walking away across the road. She was surprised and told the bus driver hurriedly to stop the bus. She immediately ran across the road and tried to come after that white scarf man.

She stopped him, and called him, “O… Oppa?”

The white scarf young man seemed a bit confused and he said, “Gyeo... Wool?”

"In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invisible summer"