Minhyuk meets Joohee again two days later on a chilly Wednesday morning when the sky is a pale shade of grey and the sun decides to laze behind the clouds and lets the rain to take his place. The rain starts falling just after he steps out of the building to head to work, and thanks to a note he stuck on the flake of his main door saying that according to the weather forecast it would rain today, he’s carrying an umbrella with him. He wonders how and where did he hear the forecast since he rarely watches the news, but he’s grateful anyway.

“Is there enough space for me?” Her voice almost gets muffled away by the drizzle, but somehow he hears it loud and clear.

He pauses, glances back, and finds a tall girl with a slender figure and blonde hair behind him, hands covering the top of her head using her bag, her chest moving up and down rapidly as if she has been running. Before he can answer, she has already stepped closer to share the shelter from the rain. He studies her face as she brushes off the water droplets on her shirt and wiggles her hair back, and recalls one of the latest entries in his journal about a new neighbour. “Joohee, right?” he asks.

She gawks at him and frowns. “You sure have the worst memory,” she comments.

“Well, you see, I―”

“Come on! I’ll be late to class,” she interrupts, pushing the back of his arm slightly, motioning him to start moving. “Are you taking the bus?”

He shakes his head no. “I walk. It’s quite nearby,” he explains. “But I do pass by the bus stop. I’ll accompany you there.”

“Really?” asks her, to which he replies with a nod. “Thanks.” She says nothing afterwards, and neither does him, so they keep walking in silence under the too-small umbrella meant for one person. Without her noticing, he tilts the umbrella a little to her direction, leaving half of his side soaked.

The bus arrives the moment they reach the stop, so they don’t need to wait long. Minhyuk makes sure to keep Joohee shielded until she boards the bus, and hands her the umbrella when she turns to thank him.

“But you’ll get drenched.”

“I can run,” he returns. “Take it. I don’t think the rain is going to stop soon.”

She hesitates for a while, but when the driver tells her to hurry take her seat, she accepts the umbrella with a worried smile. “I’ll give it back later!”

The door closes right then. He watches as the bus drives away, and once it is out of his sight, he resumes his strides and sprints to his workplace.

--

When he gets home later in the evening, there is a plastic bag hanging on the knob of Minhyuk’s door along with his umbrella. He looks inside the bag and finds fever patches, Paracetamol, and some other medicines, as well as a paper plane a tad smaller than the ones he saw on his table this morning. On one corner of the left wing, “In case you caught a cold” is written neatly in a pink glittery ink. Next to it, there’s a doodle of a boy―himself―looking sick with his eyes closed and cheeks flushed, steams rising from his head.

He laughs seeing the picture. Fishing out his sticky pad and pen from his pocket, he scribbles a simple thank you and considers drawing something back, but remembering the F he received back for art back in middle school despite him working for a company that publishes manhwa now, he decides not to and pastes the note on the door on his right before entering his own home all smiles.

--

“So you’re saying you have this condition where you don’t remember things that happen in your life, that they all get erased the moment you fall asleep.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You can’t remember what happened yesterday.”

“Yup.”

“And you won’t remember this conversation either.”

“That’s right.”

“What is it called again? The condition I mean. Unti―”

“Anterograde amnesia.”

“Right,” she nods. “And there’s no cure?”

“None.”

“Have you tried banging your head again, just in case?”

“Well, the idea never struck me. But I do―”

Without a notice, Joohee knocked her head against Minhyuk’s, to which he returns with a glare. “What? I’m trying to help.”

He’s not sure whether to laugh or to get angry, so he lets it slip and feeds another mouthful of rice into his mouth. They are sitting legs-crossed in his living room on the rug so green it almost looks like a patch of grass in the middle of the house, their backs against the couch and eyes on some makjang drama on the television that she insists on watching while eating late dinner. Joohee came knocking once she saw the lights on from her balcony, asking him for some food since according to her she’s running out of money. He doesn’t understand why he did it, but he let her in and began to fry the leftover rice he keeps in the fridge.

“Don’t you think the kimchi is a bit, I don’t know, stale?”

Minhyuk stares at his bowl and his head to one side. “I don’t taste anything.”

“Did you buy it from the supermarket?”

“I did.”

“No wonder. Supermarkets have the worst kimchis,” she tells him. “Why didn’t you ask your mom to make some for you?”

 He stops chewing and looks away. The food suddenly becomes tasteless on his tongue. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because… she’s not around anymore.”

Placing her bowl on the table, she fixes her gaze on him. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he replied rather casually. “To be honest I don’t even remember it. It took place after my accident.”

“Can I ask what happened?”

He shrugs. “I’d tell you if I know, but unfortunately I don’t. I didn’t write it down.”

She pauses, lowering her gaze. “You see my mom sent some kimchi just yesterday, and if you ne―”

“Don’t,” he cuts in. “I know my circumstance is rather pathetic. I mean, who forgets the cause of their mother’s death? But really, I hate it when people look at me with those sad sad eyes and sympathize. Sympathy, it’s burdening, you know? And suffocating too, both to the receiver and the giver. Once you start, there’s not an exact endpoint ―when is the right time to stop giving, when you should receiving.”

They both fall silent, the conversations from the drama barely audible at this point. Outside, the moon is bright in the sky, outshining the stars with it radiance. Minhyuk turns to Joohee, and upon seeing her expression, he sighs and apologizes. “It’s fine,” she says, her lips curling upwards slightly. “Sometimes you need to let it all out.”

“Your turn now.”

“Huh?”

“Now tell me how did you end up as a neighbour to this tragic guy who can’t remember how his mother died.”

She chuckles a bit, and picking up her bowl again, she flashes a smug smile at him. “I’ll pass.”

“Hey!”

--

There are days when he wonders why there are no further explanation and details about his mother’s death in both his journal and album besides the brief ‘passed away on 19^th February 2009’ written under her photo. He has tried asking Eunkwang several times in case he knows the reason since they have known each other since school, but Eunkwang would just shrug him off each time he shoots the question. “Maybe you didn’t want to get reminded of the pain,” he’d say.

Minhyuk suspects there is more to that answer, but somehow he never asked further and decides perhaps it’s for the best.