After reading the letter, I felt a weird sensation, like something big was silently parading through my mind. My head and heart stirred, but the rest of me was like a hard, dry stone. I was completely numb. I just re-read the words over and over again.

A few minutes passed, Dahyun finally spoke up and asked, “Who was he writing to?”

“I don’t know,” was all I could tell her.

I didn’t know.

I didn’t know who that letter was meant for, or why my brother took his own life. I didn’t know why everybody told me otherwise. I didn’t know whether my accident came first, or his suicide did. I didn’t even know who my brother was.

I didn’t freaking know.

I was confused, puzzled. I breathed in a lungful of fresh air and tried to gain control, but the frustration of it all was so overpowering that tears almost came to my eyes.

“I’m going to jog,” I said. “Go inside now. It’s freaking cold out here.”

Dahyun hugged me before I left.

For a long moment, she silently rubbed my back as she held me. The night was cold, but her skin felt warm. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, being embraced by the girl that I liked, I focused on these thoughts of mine. And in the midst of our silence, something passed between us.

. . .

The sky was a couple of shades lighter than before. The ocean was visible.

Every time the soles of my running shoes crushed a pebble on the road, the sound was amplified. I kept running for what seemed like hours, and while I ran, the same thoughts kept going round and round in my head.

Memory is a strange thing. In the midst of running, I suddenly remembered something about my brother.

I think I was ten back then. I recalled watching the storm from the window inside his room. There were kids outside playing in the rain, chasing each other, shouting things and jumping on puddles caused by the rain. Nothing special happened, but I remembered it well. I also remember, as a ten year old, being hit with jealousy while I watched those kids. I wanted to play as well.

“Can we go outside?” I asked as I turned to him. He was writing some sort of letter on his computer desk.

From that memory alone, I could just about see the face of my brother. The shape of his nose that resembled my father’s. The mole on the bottom of his right eye. The way he looked at me right then, as if he was examining an unfamiliar object.

A blank.

Then what happened?

Did we go outside in the rain or did we stay inside? I couldn’t remember anymore. The memory came to an abrupt halt at that point, but the strange thing was that I could still see his face clearly, still staring back at me.

And that’s when I came to a realisation.

Perhaps my memories were supposed to come back to me one by one. Maybe they weren’t meant to come back to me all at once like I thought they would.

I closed my eyes and spent a long time replaying that piece of memory inside my head.  

Finally, after one deep breath, I continued running.

. . .

I arrived home just before breakfast. Chanwoo and Tzuyu were helping my mother set up the table, my father was outside watching the ocean, but Dahyun was nowhere to be found. I greeted everyone with a simple good morning and headed upstairs to take a shower.

“June, come ‘ere,” Dahyun suddenly whispered, the tip of her head poking out of my brother’s room.

That same, familiar scent greeted me when I entered the room. The windows were wide open, and the white curtains swayed with every wail of the morning breeze. The weather was wonderful outside. After standing there for a few seconds, she shot me a look and jerked her head to face the bookshelf.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What if it isn’t just one book?” she started off. “What if everything here contains something inside, too?”

Then, I grabbed the nearest book I could reach, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, and sure enough a letter fell out. I grabbed the next book, and another one fell out. I looked at Dahyun, and she stared back at me. Her eyes lit up, and I felt something brew up in my heart—excitement.

Within the space of thirty seconds, we opened all the books on the shelf and collected the letters inside them. Some books were empty, but we still gathered a handful nevertheless.

I observed the envelopes one by one, and realized that they were all written by the same person.

“We’ll read the letters tonight,” Dahyun said. “Let’s have breakfast with everyone first, hm?”

I nodded.

. . .

What I want the most is to write and live comfortably. I think once that happens, everything else will follow and fall into place. I’ll find a lover, marry that person, move out of the city, have kids, write some more, and then retire. I don’t want to be a famous writer, or become a rich person, or do anything that will make a mark in this world.
I just dream of being ordinary. (Coming from someone like me, isn’t that scary?)
I can’t write to you for a while since exams are nearing. But please do keep writing to me. I’ll read every letter that you send, even if I can’t send one back. The stories you tell about that little town fascinates me more than anything.
And one more thing, Jinhwan.
I think I’ve fallen for a girl. Like you, her favourite season is autumn. She likes gazing at the sky even when it’s cloudless. She listens to The Smashing Pumpkins. She’s very pretty, and she’s so honest that sometimes her words are able to cut through me.
But I’ll save this story for the next letter.

Your friend from Seoul,

Yunhyeong

. . .

On the evening of that same day, Chanwoo and I went to the shop to fetch some ingredients for my mom. Since it was a cold winter, she wanted to make manduguk for the four of us.

Compared to the compressed layout of Seoul, our hometown was small and the buildings were spread out, which meant everything was further away than it should be. The nearest shop that sold the ingredients that we needed was about a twenty-minute walk away from our house. I put on a jumper and a waterproof windbreaker. Outside the air was cold and dry, like it was about to snow anytime soon.

“June, does it snow a lot here?” Chanwoo asked with a foggy breath, hands in his coat pockets. We were following an empty road.

I gave him a nod. “Compared to Seoul it snows a lot. Sometimes the snow can fall without stopping.”

“Do you like it when it snows?”

“I don’t mind. I used to love it when I was little, though.”

“It’s the same for me,” he said, smiling. “It’s beautiful but don’t you reckon it’s too much of a burden sometimes? The roads become icy, causes cars and people to collide, and it’s way too cold.” And then he muttered, “It’s weird because it’s one of Tzuyu’s favourite things in the world.”

I chuckled in return. “How do you even know that?”

Chanwoo’s eyes widened and his face suddenly turned red. It was as if he didn’t mean to say those words out loud. “Her relatives back in Taiwan always wanted to see the snow. So every time it snows here, it reminds her of her family back home. She told me about it one time. She hasn’t told you?”

“I’m not sure. But why did you go red back there?” I teased. “Do you like her or something?”

He paused, before turning his head to look at me, and I could’ve sworn I saw the answer in his eyes already. “I like her, June,” Chanwoo confessed. “I really do.”

We walked in silence for some time. I didn’t think he’d give in so easily, so I didn’t know what to say. Funnily enough, it wasn’t awkward between me and him. The silence was not awful. I was simply taken aback by his honesty.

“When did you know?” I finally asked.

He didn’t even hesitate. “When I realized that I cared more about her happiness than my own.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“I’m sure she already knows,” Chanwoo replied. “Tzuyu has to go back home next summer. If I confess to her and it turns out she likes me back, it’ll be a hard on her because she has to leave me. If I confess to her and it turns out she doesn’t like me, she’ll just feel bad about rejecting me.” Chanwoo looked down, and smiled bitterly at the pavement. He scratched the back of his neck and gave me a huge grin. “Don’t feel bad for me, though. Being able to love someone like her is more than enough.”

I never stopped to think that, out of all of us, perhaps Chanwoo was the most mature one. Sure, every now and then we’d crack jokes about his action figure collection, and we’d always poke fun at his childish gags. Hanbin, Jiwon and I always treated him as if he was a little brother. Someone who was oblivious to what the real world contained.

But when he said those words, I felt like there was a whole new world in him that I didn’t know anything about.

I could only change the topic. “I’m surprised how you admitted it so easily. I thought I would have had to knock the answers out of you for at least a week or something.”

“I’m not as stubborn as you, June,” he laughed. “You haven’t even confessed to that girl yourself, even though you show it with every action. What’s stopping you?”

“I want to be absolutely sure before I say those words. I don’t want an inch of hesitation in my body when I confess to her. I want to be willing to give her my all. At this stage, I’m not there yet and Mina understands that.”

Chanwoo scoffed, and I simply glanced over at him.

“That’s hilarious,” he pointed out. “I wasn’t talking about Mina.”

. . .

in this rain // 

junhoe is such a frustating character to write haha