I kept on seeing him after that day. I was only going to spend one week in South Korea, but it was long enough to spend at least a few minutes a day at the café and see Kyuhyun. I still couldn’t understand a percent of what he was saying, and it was probably the same for him, but it was still pretty nice to talk to each other. He was telling me about his life, sometimes complaining about people, other times complaining about how difficult English was, for him. And I would do the same, telling him about my parents, and my sister, and my brother, and my work as a future professional violinist. I confessed that I also liked dancing, singing and playing other instruments, but that I hadn’t found anything that would let me do everything at the same time.

He seemed to understand, well, kind of, and in exchange, he talked to me about school, how hard it was to do that, work at the café, and train as a future idol. The last part made me frown a bit at first. A future idol? I was sure I hadn’t understood that part correctly, but then he said it in English, with his usual horrible accent:

“Idoleu… um… train lot? Singing, dancing… idoleu?”

That made me understand that I had understood him correctly despite the fact that I really couldn’t speak Korean. At least I knew a few words, after almost a week with him. Speaking of the time, I had only two days left before going back to Canada.

“Henry-sshi?”

I looked at Kyuhyun, who was staring at me with his just-a-bit-very-much creepy pure dark giant irises.

“What is it?”

He said something in Korean. All I could understand was “kayo” – go, in Korean – at the end of the sentence, a “neun” indicating that he was talking about something – the topic – and one “ka” indicating that he was using a noun ending with a vowel in the sentence, as a subject. That, and my name, to which he was always adding a “sshi”. I could’ve done the same for him, but I wasn’t used to honorifics enough to use them correctly, so I was just calling him “Kyuhyun”, which didn’t seem to offend him in any way.

“Eh?” I asked softly, since I hadn’t understood a lot.

“Henry-sshi…”

“Yeah?”

“You go? Soon?”

His vocabulary had evolved a tiiiiiny little bit since our first meeting, but his grammar was still horrible. Oh well, at least I could usually understand what he was telling me.

“Yeah, soon… I have to go in two days…”

He frowned, and I showed him two fingers. “Two, I mean… wait… hana… dul… okay, so… dul haru? Haru is day, right? Dul haru? Two days? Does that even make sense?”

And, though my grammar in Korean was probably as horrible as his grammar in English, he seemed to understand what I was saying, or trying to say. He pouted and showed me a calendar on his iPhone, pointing the day when I would have to leave. I nodded and he pouted some more before he put his cellphone away, and took out a pen. He took my hand and wrote something on it before I could notice what he was doing. I looked at the ink on my skin when he was done, and frowned.

“4-8-6?”

He nodded, blushing, and I frowned some more. “I don’t understand…”

He sighed and said something in Korean. I vaguely distinguished four syllables, before he shook his head and said it again, only removing the last one. He then said something about “banmal” and then apologized, sighing a soft “mianhae”. At least I knew that much, and I knew he was basically apologizing for using informal language (banmal). But then, I still didn’t know his first words.

“Kyuhyun, I don’t understand. What were those two first words you said? I only understood the last syllable of the first one and I didn’t even understand the second one…”

He seemed thoughtful for a second before he took my hand again and wrote down the word he had said right under the “4-8-6”. It contained three syllables, each one being placed right under a number. I barely knew the hangeul alphabet, so I frowned. I could see a “s” there… and “ng” there in the second syllable… but the rest of it… I wasn’t good enough. Kyuhyun looked at me, saying something in Korean, before he drew the symbols again, this time more slowly. And I could see. The number that was written above each syllable represented the number of lines, or , there were in that syllable. So, the “s” was two lines… the letter right beside it contained two lines too… so it was 4. The second one didn’t contain eight , but eight lines. The first symbol alone was five lines. The second one was the same as the second letter in the first syllable. And the last one was the “ng”. So 8. And then, the last syllable was made of two horizontal lines on top of a circle, and then something that looked like a “H”. It was the 6. Kyuhyun pointed the syllables and said them softly, one by one.

“Sa-rang-hae…”

I knew I had heard that word somewhere. In a song, probably. But I had never been curious enough to look up its meaning. All I knew was that it hadn’t ended with “yo”. And I thought it was a good thing, because I felt like the “yo” and “imnida” thing was too polite, or too formal, for me, and so I preferred banmal. I came from a country with two languages. Mine wasn’t a language in which you made a clear difference between formal and informal. The other one was, though; in Canada, I had learned that, in French, “tu” was the informal and singular “you”, while “vous” was its formal and plural version. But that was about it. I hadn’t really listened to the teacher when she was teaching that. Not that I didn’t like French, but it was complicated and I was tired the day she explained that.

Anyway.

Kyuhyun ended up having to go back to his counter before I could understand the meaning of his words. He touched my hand softly, kept on grazing it until he was too far to touch it anymore, and went away. I left, perplex, not able to take my eyes off the delicate on the skin of my hand. The delicate drawn by Kyuhyun himself. Drawn by the man I didn’t want to leave.

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I'm at work, but I brought my laptop, so here you go ;)

Enjoy ^^