The third time Joohee tags along to the bar, she plays a song on the piano that Minhyuk has almost been erased by his mind.

He drops everything he is in the middle of doing, tunes out every voice calling out for him, and just closes his eyes and simply listens to the music. It feels like he is floated back to the past, where his memories are hazy yet clear, where the empty space in both his mind and his heart was non-existent.

It isn’t until she is done with the song that he opens his eyes and returns to the present time. Her gaze meets his and her lips curl into a smile. He forces a smile back but quickly looks away and retreats to where the lights are dimmer so that she can’t see his face.

--

Joohee thinks it feels strange that she hasn’t heard any sound from the next door since the last couple of days. No yelp in early morning because the water temperature is set too hot, no sound of creaking doors or dangling keys, no quiet hum late in the night. The house is dark and she gets no response when she knocks on the door. There is this feeling of emptiness tugging her heartstring but she gives it no further thought, until Eunkwang shows up on her door one late evening asking about Minhyuk.

“I haven’t seen him lately,” she replies, shaking her head. “Not since the last time I saw you.”

“That’s four days ago.”

“He didn’t go to work?”

It’s Eunkwang’s turn to shake his head this time. “I called his workplace and apparently he hasn’t been showing up there either. He didn’t answer his phone when I called. I figured maybe he fell sick or something so I thought I’d drop by to check.”

She her head to a side, thinking whether he had shown something, anything that could’ve been a sign to this sudden disappearance, but she couldn’t think of anything. “Has he ever done this before?”

“Once,” he answered in an instant. “After I told him about his mother.”

“Oh,” she exhales, lost for words.

“But he didn’t ask me anything this time.”

Both of them fall into a silence. Her mind is racing, her thoughts are a giant puddle of mess, scrambled and scattered all over the place.

“Let’s wait for, say, a couple of days more,” Eunkwang speaks up. “If there’s still nothing from him, then, I’ll go look for him.”

--

There isn’t a need to wait for a couple of days, however, because a couple of minutes past seven, Joohee’s phone rings with an unknown number on the screen. She picks it up on the fourth ring and presses the phone to her ear. “Hello?”

But there isn’t a response. She waits and waits but the caller offers only silence. Closing her eyes to the darkening sky, she lets out a sigh of relief.

--

After making sure that she has counted the right amount, she hands the money to the driver and hops out of the taxi without waiting for the balance. Tightening the scarf around her neck, she scans the place frantically to search for that one person. It is dark out and the dim lamp posts are not much of a help, in addition to that she is not familiar with the area. She takes a deep breath before beginning to walk.

She glances around, looking for someone ― anyone, rather, but there seems to be no one in sight. It’s like she has come to a ghost town with no apparent human existence. Her worn out sneakers squeak as she moves, making it the only distinct sound besides the melody of waves crashing against the shore in perhaps kilometres.

At last she finds him, sitting on a broken log facing the coastline in the darkness, his back hunched, looking somehow exhausted or dispirited or maybe both. Joohee approaches him quietly, and when she is close enough, she clears softly and waits until he looks up.

“You must be Joohee,” he says, eyes weary and drowsy.

“You must be Minhyuk,” she returns, eyes kind and concerned. “Can I join you here?” He smiles a small smile and nods before making a room for her to sit next to him. She notices him shivering so she takes off her scarf and wraps it around his neck. He mumbles a word of gratitude and doesn’t speak further after that. She lets him get lost in his pool of thoughts a while more as she waits for him to break the silence in his own time.

“Thanks for coming,” he says at last. “It must be a long trip.”

She shakes her head a little. “It was nothing. Besides, to tell the truth I was worried about you.”

Hearing that, he lets out a small chuckle. His smile lingers on his lips but it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Isn’t it ironic? With this memory of mine you’re almost like a complete stranger to me, but here you are coming all the way to my hometown at this hour just because you’re worried about someone who doesn’t actually remember you.”

She stares at him long and hard, not exactly feeling hurt by his words or even sympathetic but rather pained because she can’t do anything to help him. Even in the dark she can see the bags beneath his eyes, how he is battling to stay awake although he looks like he can fall asleep any second. “How long have you been awake?”

“Three days I think,” he shrugs.

“Did you not sleep at all?”

“I can’t. I don’t want to, because if I do I’d forget everything all over again. And I can’t do that.”

“What happened?” she asks, her voice soft and careful.

Instead of answering, Minhyuk takes out his journal, places it on his lap and flips the pages. Once he finds the particular page he’s looking for, he hands it to Joohee. Her eyes quickly fall on a yellow sticky note on the page, only the word ‘Clementine’ written on it in a messy handwriting and nothing else. Below the note is a Polaroid of her playing the piano from Eunkwang’s bar. Golden hair and bright eyes and happy smile, oblivious to her surroundings. She looks at him questionably with a frown on her face. “Ring a bell?”

She opens to answer but she isn’t able to find any words, and before she can he interrupts her.

“I don’t have that much memories, you know. Human brain so we can’t remember every little thing in our life. I don’t remember much things from my childhood, but somewhere in my mind I remember this one little detail,” he pauses. His face contorts into a smile as he fixes his gaze at a distance far away. There’s a longing look on him as he recalls a memory from the past. “We had this small piano in our house, at this corner beside the glass door to the yard. It’s old but still produces a nice sound. Every evening during the summer, my mother would open the door and let the breeze in, and our wind chimes would tinkle. Then she would make me a bowl of patbingsoo and I would sit there in the living room overlooking our yard, green and yellow and pink, and she would sit at the piano and play that song.”

“Clementine?”

“Clementine.”

Joohee shifts her eyes on the ground, her feet digging the sand, creating a small hole. “Did you find out about your mother?”

“Yeah.”

“I see,” she nods in understanding.

“You know,” he begins, still looking ahead. “Earlier while I sat here, I was contemplating about going in there. I almost did, actually. But then I saw this.” He reaches over for the journal and turns to final page. Her eyes follow his finger and this time she finds a familiar handwriting on the page

010-3162-3456
Someone you can trust

“I thought it was worth a try, and I guess I was right,” he continues, looking at her. “Thank you.”

She smiles and swallows back her tears, at the same time hoping that he won’t notice the glisten in her eyes in the darkness. They watch the waves in the silence and after a while, she glances at Minhyuk and nudges him on the elbow quietly. “Hey,” she calls.

“Hmm?”

“Let’s go home.”

He smiles back, this time it reaches his eyes. “Let’s go home.”