-I persist and resist the temptation to ask you if one thing had been different, would everything be different today?-

Sehun,

I am alright. Your letter has given me reasons. Thank you. Now we're on the clear. I understand your reasons even though I always thought it would be impossible for someone to justify their lies to me. And perhaps I should put it into practice to know both sides before settling on a judgment. More than the guilt I feel in my heart for stopping our exchanges so suddenly, I feel the fact that I eased your wounds somehow more in my bones.

 Irene wanted to hold back her eagerness. It wasn't right to write back in such fashion when he had clearly violated her privacy. There wasn't a second of her education life that she wasn't bullied. Even when she would go out to play on her own, she would return home, crying, with a mess of chewing gum in her hair. Sometimes, she would be stalked to her secret hiding spot and the next afternoon, she would find it all broken and ruined.

 The isolation they gave her was another kind of an extreme bullying, it hurt more than watching her silky locks being chopped off when she was eight. The fake niceness, the nasty words they would throw at her face while assuming she couldn't hear them, and their constant acts of belittling her even though she hadn't done anything wrong, Irene was used to it all. 

 When she found out that Sehun knew her pathetic secrets and never thought of telling the truth, Irene had wondered if this was bullying too. His kind of bullying; perhaps behind those gentle eyes was evil. That was the first twenty minutes of finding out he had lied. How could he not know that she was Bae Joohyun? Couldn't he figure out the handwriting? Wasn't she to consider this as bullying? Was she to accept the fact that she will never have the peace she wanted? And the happiness? How was she to trust anyone now, anyone at all? Oh Sehun looked the kindest, the most understanding, the most beautiful. If he was bad, then obviously the whole world was more than that. 

 Sehun never said he had found comfort in her misery because hers made his own seem less, and better. He only said that he had found a friend in her clumsy handwriting. Irene was confused. There were two sides and after writing seven sentences on this piece of paper, she was yet not certain which side to live in for the rest of her life.

 One, he had lied. He lied again and again, countless times, in every gift he had sent her under a false identity. How was she to trust him again? Should she even be writing back? No, that was the good answer, no. But that was also the insensitive answer.  

 Two, her bullies had never sent her such sincere apologies. It was weird, her heart still fluttered at the sophistication of his pen's every , did that make her shallow, she thought. After breaking my own house with my own hands in my own land, in you, I had found my new home, she read. Now she must ask how she was to hate him if he proved to be so broken in every line. She had analyzed all of the books in her shelves and had long found out that such mark of melancholy wasn't easy to master. For this, lying won't be enough. To cut at people's heart, you must have cuts in your heart too.

 She sat there all evening, stuck. What did she need to do to get rid of the guilt settling in her own heart? He had said it would make him the happiest person in the world if she said yes, kneeling before her, staring into her eyes with such longing. So, was he the saddest person in the world now that they don't talk anymore? Or perhaps, it was her, the saddest person in the world. 

 Her phone vibrated with a message.

Joohyunie
How are you today, baby?
I don't think I'll be missing you for a long time now.

It was her father. Irene thought twice before clicking on the light pink box on her screen to read the full message.

I hate to say these
but i am not feeling really well these days
will you come home for a while to visit papa?
maybe it's because i miss you so much

 It was around May, that he sent another letter to Bae Joohyun. Months had passed but she was still on his side in his dreams. Sometimes, he would feel this certain void in his body, as if she had carved something, something very important, out of his existence. But sometimes, when he would be too drunk with sleep in the middle of the night, he would go through their texts and smile to himself. It was as if she had never left. But there would still be nights he would crawl under Yerim's blanket and sleep beside her warmth without waking her up.

 In this letter of his, he had told her that he would never be able to forgive himself for what he did, that he will never treat any person that way ever again. He understood every bit of his mistake and the blame was on his shoulders. He went on about it for a very long time, letting her know that however they ended couldn't be any more painful on his part. To see her walk away was the last thing he wanted but he will live with the sight for the rest of his life because he deserved it for all the wrong he had done. 

 He wrote that it might just be possible that one day, he would get over her. Jennie told him, nothing lasts. That night, he had kept every memory of Joohyun aside and listened to his friend. Nothing ever lasts, she said, and Sehun knew that it was only the truth. "You'll miss her, a lot, but then you'll get used to living without her. It would come as easy as breathing. And you'll start forgetting it, like you don't always remind yourself that you're breathing and you don't overthink oxygen and carbon dioxide," she had said. "It'll take time."

 He had remained on his side of the bed, staring at the ceiling, as he let the words echo in his bones. Jennie touched his hand under the blanket. It was the sign that he wasn't alone, that she would always understand him. He had written in his second letter to Joohyun that he was learning to live without her, perhaps he was becoming a lot like her in the process. There was optimism flowing in his veins. He had a smart haircut now and he had learned to maintain his social media accounts by himself. That was progress. If schedule allowed him, he would take part in a poetry workshop. He had seen the poster of it when he was passing by the museum they had visited. He wasn't hurt at the sight of the structure. Rather, he was content with the good memories it had given him.

 While writing, midway, Sehun did feel like it was just him trying to convince himself that he was fine, when it was truly not the case. But then the surge of forced optimism took him and he wrote another sentence, boasting about the fact that he was truly moving on. At least in the letters he sent her, he was moving on. It didn't matter if he actually was. In this world where the days were already shortening, it was up to him if he really wanted to be stuck in the spot they fell apart. 

 And no matter how much moving on he tried to play, he couldn't walk her street anymore. Cornelia Street became that warm memory in his head that had passed. And it felt like...it didn't exist anymore. Or...he didn't exist anymore. Something like that, he wouldn't be able to tell you if you asked why. 

 The reply came. But it wasn't from Irene. It was from a certain Mrs. Ethelza. He remembered the name on the door plate at the apartment Irene lived in. He tore it open, kept the postcard on his desk and took a shower for an hour and a half because he wanted to prolong this sensation. Whatever it was written in that paper, Sehun felt excited, but also felt like it would be a dreadful mistake if he read the postcard.

Dear Mr. Oh Sehun,

Your letter came this morning but unfortunately, it never reached its recipient. I write to inform you that our lovely tenant has left for a family emergency at her own land. If your matter is urgent, I can write to you the address of her house in South Korea. Hoping to hear from you soon. Take care!

 A closure was not the easiest. Irene had taken a quiet break from the hospital ward her father was sleeping in and followed the address that was delivered to her by a friend of some sort, the address she used to send her letters to. The shabby house stood before her, barely. There was the sign of abandonment on its wooden porch, and in the untended yard on both her sides. The handmade door plate further inside said:

Oh Doojoon
Best papa in the world
Shim Yoona
Mommy