NILWM - 18

His tone was calm, but the meaning between the lines was clear. The Vice Director could no longer argue and simply nodded. The alarm bell, warning that further defiance could be dangerous, rang much louder than his pride. His knees felt weak. The situation before him, where he was intimidated by someone much younger, felt unreal.

“Ah, I un... derstand.”

He had even debased himself by speaking formally, but the other person had already turned away. The desire not to deal with him further, after getting the answer he wanted, was clearly evident on his broad back and shoulders. He was dumbfounded.

“What the hell, where did that bastard suddenly pop out from! Ha...”

Only after the man was completely out of sight did he feel pathetic for retorting into thin air. But more than that, the fact that he had to give up on the ideal type he had set his eyes on was even more despairing.

“Damn it. If I had known she had a boyfriend... she should’ve at least shown some sign. Ugh, damn!”

The Vice Director started to kick the chair but subtly lowered his leg when he saw a passerby coming out of the convenience store. The rain made him even more frustrated and annoyed.

He had deliberately made that pharmacy across the street his regular, but now he was determined never to set foot there again.

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-Don’t touch what’s mine. -It seems you don’t understand when I speak politely, so I’m telling you to back off because Min Ye-seo is mine.

Ju-hyeok pulled his car over to the side of the road and leaned his head against the headrest. A bitter smile formed. He had flatly rejected her confession, and now he was calling her “my woman,” “mine.”

It had been a week since he started watching her like a stalker from across the street, matching the pharmacy’s opening hours. Min Ye-seo’s round crown, visible through the glass door, would temporarily disappear around 8:30 AM with the arrival of a middle-aged woman in a pharmacist’s coat, presumably her mother, or another employee.

When she wasn’t there in the morning, he would go in the afternoon, sometimes in the evening, after his day’s work. Each time, Min Ye-seo was always behind the counter. But sometimes, he would wait for a long time and she still wouldn’t appear.

What is he doing, exactly?

Ju-hyeok ruffled his hair haphazardly, questioning himself. His chest felt rough and suffocated. A few more days of this would surely give him a stress-induced illness.

He had clearly rejected her. He had never thought of her as anything more than a good junior. And it would continue to be that way. Emotional expenditures like romance were completely outside his scope of interest.

He didn’t want to be emotionally dependent on someone, to be swayed against his will, thereby disrupting his self-directed daily life. No matter how meticulously he planned and prepared for contingencies, was there anything more subject to large and small variables than human relationships?

I have to push her away.

Ju-hyeok nervously swept his hair back from his forehead and gritted his teeth.

It would break anyway. The closer they got, the worse the end of the relationship would be, so he had to end it here. That was best for both himself and Min Ye-seo.

How much longer did he stay in the car? Ju-hyeok opened his eyes at the sound of his phone ringing. He put the phone down again at the unfamiliar, unsaved number, but the call persistently rang.

He reluctantly answered. There was someone he suspected. The thought of his maternal grandmother in Sejong calling if he kept refusing the call made him cringe.

“Yes.”

-Ju-hyeok. It’s your aunt.

“What do you need?”

His voice came out automatically, dry as a machine.

-It’s vacation, won’t you come to Sejong? You said you came last time when I wasn’t around.

“I’m busy, so I think I’ll see you during Chuseok.”

A brief silence followed. When Ryu Hye-su spoke again, her voice was slightly strained.

-Ju-hyeok. Perhaps... you still... hate even seeing me?

The face of his deceased mother, Ryu Hye-jeong, in a photograph, came to mind, and Ju-hyeok closed his eyes. The sisters, then and now, resembled each other like twins. In his hazy memories, he had often run and clung to his aunt, mistaking her for his mother by her back.

-You always come to Sejong only when I and your uncle aren’t home, don’t you? Is it because you’re afraid Mother might call me... afraid of running into me...?

Her voice was frail, as if she might burst into tears at any moment. Though she was well past forty and nearing fifty, her voice was clear and youthful. Ryu Hye-su always had a girlish side to her, then and now. Was that why she did such a thing fifteen years ago? Because she was just a childish early-thirties woman?

-Ju-hyeok.

“Do you think that would be good?”

An irritable retort escaped him without his realizing it. At any other time, if he hadn’t been so troubled by Min Ye-seo, he would have brushed it off and ended the call appropriately.

“You don’t truly think I can act natural with you, like I know nothing, do you?”

Silence hung on the other end of the phone. The car was filled with suffocating tension.

“I’m an adult now. I’m already dealing with seeing you twice a year, during holidays, and that’s hard enough, so don’t ask for anything more.”

-Ju-hyeok...

“I’ll hang up now.”

The call was unilaterally ended. He tossed his phone onto the passenger seat, opened the console box, and pulled out a cigarette. Smoking was strictly forbidden at school, and he didn’t usually smoke much. But after the day Min Ye-seo confessed, his hand automatically reached for a cigarette whenever he thought of her.

As he inhaled the thick smoke beneath the filter, various past scenes intertwined, swirling in his mind. One was his mother, Ryu Hye-jeong, her face contorted in anger as she talked on the phone with her family sixteen years ago.

His mother in his memories was always an attention-grabbing beauty, wherever she was. Tall, with an elegant aura, and gracefully beautiful in every small gesture and movement, like a ballet major. And she rarely got angry. Rather than being patient or positive, it was because she was always exhausted due to her weak constitution.

His father and mother were not particularly close to each other. Yet, they weren’t cold or distant either. It was a relationship not uncommon in arranged marriages where dates were set immediately after a formal meeting.

His grandfather, Han Young-su, wanted a reputable and upright civil servant as an in-law rather than wealth. Following his wishes, his father, Han Seok-woo, married Ryu Hye-jeong, the eldest daughter of his maternal grandfather, Ryu Tae-seop, who was the governor of C Province. Everyone was satisfied with the marriage.

But his mother secretly harbored affection for his father. He didn’t know if she had liked him from the beginning or if affection had grown over time. The regrettable fact was that his mother’s feelings were one-sided. His father’s attitude towards his mother was not much different from his attitude towards the household staff.

-”She’s taking psychiatric medication, I tell you. I was completely tricked into this marriage! Then those genes will also be passed to the child...”

One day, he was assembling toy train parts, spread out on the living room window sill. A chilling sensation made him look up, and he met his mother’s gaze, holding the phone in one hand and staring blankly at him from the table. From the receiver, his grandmother’s shouts echoed.

-”Oh my, that can’t be! No way! Our Hyeok is so smart. Even if his growth is delayed due to his weak body, how clever is he, enough to go to a gifted school from age four! And Mr. Han is fine now, and, uh, panic attacks are very common abroad!”

-”Even so, the fact that he deceived me doesn’t change.”

-”Then what will you do? Are you going to break up? Not when we have our Hyeok! That’s out of the question!”

-”Who said I’m breaking up? For whose benefit...? I have absolutely no intention of doing that. But I can never forgive being deceived. I can’t let this pass without an apology.”

Their parents’ mundane but largely uneventful daily life was broken from that point on. But that day was only the beginning; the conflict gradually escalated into a larger pattern. His aunt, Ryu Hye-su, who used to visit frequently, also stopped coming at some point.

For a while, he was dragged from hospital to hospital by his mother, not knowing why. In front of the doctors in white coats, there was always a nameplate, “Psychiatrist so-and-so,” and his days were exhausting, spent responding to all sorts of drawings, quizzes, and questions.

His mother waited anxiously for the test results and meticulously examined the reports. Then she would let out a sigh of relief. His mother’s beautiful face was always filled with grim determination.

At the same time, she was always steeped in worry. Her will to definitively prove something through those countless tests, her sense of mission, burned while she was also enveloped in an unknown fear. Now, after a long time, he understood it all.

She must have needed proof that her son wasn’t crazy, confirmation that he hadn’t inherited his father’s bad genes. It would have been a natural concern for a mother.

One night, his father came home, and the two went upstairs to the bedroom with hardened faces. Even with the door tightly closed, shouts echoed into the hallway. There was also the sound of things being thrown and breaking.

-”Are you crazy? Are you crazy?! Of all people, how could... you! Dirty things, dirty and vulgar!”

And a few days later, the two of them...

At that point, the residual image sharply veered in another direction. He saw himself at eleven years old. Appearing no older than seven or eight due to stunted growth, he was clinging to a rock. Min Ye-seo gripped one of his wrists tightly with both hands, gritting her teeth.

-”Hey, don’t fall asleep! Stay awake! Just hold on a little longer...!”

Her face, as she struggled to save him, shone brightly. How old was she? Three years younger than him, so she must have been eight.

The scar that had formed on the inside of Min Ye-seo’s right wrist that day came to mind again. The faint, hairline-like mark on her slender, white wrist flickered before his eyes.

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-Avoidant attachment style often forms in childhood relationships with parents and persists into adulthood. It’s a person’s inherent tendency in human relationships; people who received a lot of affection from their parents in childhood and had stable emotional bonds are not in this category. Those people belong to the secure attachment style.

Ye-seo finally had some time to write after a long while. She was about to turn off the TV but put the remote down. On the screen, a famous psychiatrist was explaining attachment styles to a panel.

-There are anxious, avoidant, and disorganized types, which combine both. This case can be seen as avoidant. They have very strong independence and self-identity and don’t emotionally rely on others. Because they draw lines and maintain distance in their relationships with others, when someone gets closer than the boundaries they’ve set, they instinctively push that person outside the line.

-Even if they don’t dislike that person?

-That’s right. They push them away even if they like them, because they avoid relationships becoming deep and intimate. Since this repeats, no matter how many people they have around them, it’s almost like they’re alone. They’re always in an emotionally lonely and empty state.

-Lonely but unwilling to get close... That’s a very difficult type. It feels even harder than the anxious type with low self-esteem.

Ye-seo forgot to turn off the power and was now leaning in close to the TV. She felt she was closer to the anxious type. While avoidants reject and push away deep interactions with others, she desired connection and bonding with someone. She always longed for the affection of like-minded people and wished to grow closer.