The birthday boy bounced into his living room, shrieking with pure joy as his father chased him around the room, giggling hysterically as his father’s fingertips tickled his sides, his mother watching from the doorway of a hallway that connected the living room to the kitchen, her arms crossed lightly over her chest. A small smile was on her lips as she watched father and son roll around together on the carpeted floor, laughing and giggling, basking in the glory of each other.

“Boys, boys, calm down now. It’s time we went out,” She called, instantly catching her son’s attention. She knew she would, and with a broad smile, she pushed herself off the doorframe and held her arms open for her son to run into them. She stumbled backwards as her son clung to her legs, her hands gently patting the small space in between his shoulder blades.

“Mumma, I’m five now!” He pulled back and held up four fingers, and with a short burst of laughter, his mother put up the fifth finger and gently laced their fingers together, squeezing his hand lightly. “Mumma, where are we going?”

“Hyunwoonie, we’re going to go watch the sunset,” She said softly, her eyes sparkling as they held her son’s gaze. Hyunwoo, the five year old, gazed up at his mother with nothing but pure love radiating from his eyes. His father watched from behind him, smiling softly at the brilliant mother and son relationship they had.

“Let’s go, Mumma!” He shrieked, and then he tugged on her hand. They stumbled forward, giggling softly, and as they passed the table, Hyunwoo’s mother reached out and grabbed her coat from the back of a chair. She tugged her hand free from Hyunwoo’s vice grip, gently opening the door, slipping one arm into a sleeve.

She turned, walking backwards as she approached the stairs leading towards the outer door. There was a small flight of stairs, maybe seven or eight, and it wasn’t too much of a hassle to walk down them. But his mother wanted to keep her eyes on her son, so she walked backwards to watch Hyunwoo as he followed her. But there was one thing that no one, father, mother, or son noticed: there, at the top of the stairs, was a small puddle. Water had been dripping from a leak in the ceiling, created a small puddle at the top of the stairs, and no one really took notice of it, because their focus was on the birthday boy.

But the birthday boy noticed... A second too late. He watched his mother step back and turn: she knew the stairs were there, so she had prepared herself to walk down them properly, but she wasn’t prepared for a puddle to make her slip. She was struggling to get her arm in the other sleeve when she felt the floor slip from under her foot, the stairs growing closer as she slowly shut her eyes.

She never felt the impact, never heard her son scream, never saw her husband pull the birthday boy away from the stairs. She never saw her son crying at the top of the stairs, screaming for his mother to get up from the bottom of the stairs, struggling against his father’s grip on his upper arms. But Hyunwoo saw it. He watched his mother tumble to her death, heard her neck snap as she fell down the simple seven or eight steps, saw her twisted limbs on the floor. Of course, all of this was through blurry vision and in slow motion. 

Hyunwoo and his father moved from the house a little later on, after the funeral for his mother. From the day he turned five, he clung to his father’s side, always hiding just behind his leg, his eyes wide and fearful. He never walked up stairs, never walked down them, and never once stepped in a puddle. The only thing that ran through his mind was that it was his fault that his mother was dead. It was his fault that she slipped and fell. If he hadn’t taken up all of her attention, she would’ve noticed the puddle, wouldn’t have slipped, and wouldn’t have fallen to her death.

Hyunwoo caught his dad crying, though he tried to hide it. Hyunwoo often found him in the office of their new home, clutching a picture of his dead wife to his chest, crying silently as he stared off into the distance, somewhere far away; even if Hyunwoo followed his father’s gaze, he couldn’t see what his father saw. So after a while, he began climbing into his father’s lap, curling up in a small ball on his lap, his ear resting against his father’s chest, and he began to listen. He gently soothed his father with words like “mumma wouldn’t want you to cry all the time” and “it’s okay daddy, mumma’s happy now” and sometimes even “mumma died because of me, daddy, not you”. All of these made his father cry harder, but soon they became happier tears, and then the tears would be gone.

He never liked his birthday. Well, he liked it up until he was five. His birthday then became a funeral day, a day of mourning. No one ever celebrated his birthday, they mourned the death of his mother. Hyunwoo began burying his own feelings underneath everything, taking on the role of the little boy with maturity beyond his years. He began to listen to the people around him, walking around and noticing the lingering sadness in people’s eyes, noticing little things that indicated grief. And he began to solve problems, bring happiness into the situation, and all along he kept to himself the feelings he truly felt. The anger, the hurt, the sadness; it was all buried away, never to be seen.

Hyunwoo never spoke of his birthday to anyone. Once he was of age, he moved away from his father, taking the last piece of his mother away from him, sending him into a deep depression. Just as he turned the age of twenty, his father passed away from a heart attack one fateful night. 

It didn’t help, either, that that night was Hyunwoo’s twentieth birthday.

Ever since his mother’s death, Hyunwoo never watched the sunset, nor the sunrise. He made sure he was inside, away from all windows, avoiding the first and last of the sun’s rays of the day. His mother said that they were going to see the sunset together, something that was a gift for him, for his fifth birthday, but it never happened. He wanted it to: but he would only do it with his mother. And now his mother, and his father at that, were gone. Gone from the world, gone from his heart, gone. All because of me.

So he began collecting tears, listening to the sad stories of people’s lives, solving their problems with little bits of advice he had taught himself as he grew up. He understood losses. He understood heartbreaks. But most of all, he understood the people affected by those things, because he was one of them himself. Hyunwoo masked his hurt and pain with helping others, getting them through their tough times, although he never had it himself. He had to learn by himself, and he knew how hard and painful it was to be that person who knew nothing. So, in order to save people from even more of a heartbreak, he became the Tear Collector, and he became a hero.

⎛ end ⎠