Myungsoo

∞

April nights are cold. Myungsoo wraps his arms tighter around his frame, the scrunching of the windbreaker’s cloth punctuating the silence as he slowly makes his way down from his office. It was 8:13 PM and he can already feel a headache pounding away as he reaches the lobby. He had wanted to get home earlier but his boss had sent him more documents to review and he couldn’t say no — not without being asked if his job wasn’t the most important thing to him. Howon was probably grouchy by now.

Outside the building, it was dark, dim light feeding from a solitary post. It was one of those Busan nights, and even though he’s been living here for the past four years, it still felt a little alien to him. Seoul was different. It was teeming with life, even latest at night, and yes, Busan had a nightlife and Busan was quite festive but here, in a quiet district, all the difference felt too real to him.

A wooden bench sparks his notice and he saunters to it, the empty road swallowing into the darkness as he waits for a taxi to pass by. He plops on the bench and stands back up when he feels something foreign press against his rear. In the darkness, it was unclear but when Myungsoo feels a hand out, his fingers grasp a book.

He wasn’t able to make out the finer details in the darkness, so he moves back near the lamp post. He can hear faint chatter from the lobby drifting into the street as he gets into the light, and the book turns out to be a journal.

It’s small, a red cover greeting him, “Journal” written out in embossed English. It looks well-worn, as if the owner had been constantly using it, and for a moment, Myungsoo frowns. He doesn’t remember anyone using journals now. It was a time of millennials, of technology. The last time he had seen a journal this close was Howon’s, and he only uses it to write down ingredients and recipes for his cooking — it wasn’t exactly journal content.

A bit perturbed, Myungsoo makes to throw it into a garbage bin, the ones sitting next to the building when the faint, mechanical hum of a car engine pulls his attention away. There’s a taxi nearing.

He flags it down, and when he gets in, he tells the driver his address. It’s only when the taxi had left the lonely district and enters the bright-lit central of Busan, the neon lights flooding into the car seat and across him that Myungsoo realizes he still has the journal in his hand.

∞

“What’s that?” Howon asks, while he stands over the stove in their small kitchen. Myungsoo looks up from his laptop, his vision blanking out for a moment as they take a break from endless numbers. Howon is a little shorter than Myungsoo, but his frame is fuller — much bigger than his. He guesses that chefs always seem to have this fullness to them, and it was probably their love for cooking, for food. Howon’s pretty in love with it, Myungsoo recalls. It wasn’t the fact that he owns a restaurant that made Myungsoo remember, but he realizes that it was probably because the first time they met, it was when Howon was selling tteokbeokki and beondegi in a run-down cart just short of two years ago, looking up from his fringe and asking Myungsoo what he would like.

He looks to the end of the table and sees the journal there, innocent. “Something I picked up from work. Haven’t gotten around to reading it, yet.”

H