Shihyun loved to eat.
That was true for the Shihyun I knew in the past and the Shihyun sitting in front of me now.
If I had to compare, the Shihyun in front of me now ate even more. Honestly, every time I watched her eat, I couldn’t help but wonder where all that food disappeared to.
Wasn’t she on the same level as those famous mukbang streamers? Strangely enough, she never seemed to get a bloated stomach after eating.
…Honestly, isn’t that kind of cheating?
She’s pretty, has a great figure, and no matter how much she eats, she doesn’t gain weight. Is it because she works out so diligently? She does go for a run every morning, after all, so I guess that means she puts in the effort.
I thought I was a pretty disciplined person myself, but compared to Shihyun, who wakes up at dawn every day, works out, washes up, and then takes a 40-minute subway ride to work, I didn’t even come close.
The Shihyun in my memories… she used to eat well too, as long as I was the one buying the food. She never left anything unfinished. Thinking back now, I wonder if she ate whatever I bought for her, even if she didn’t particularly like it, just because I was the one giving it to her.
“Ah…”
Realizing that I had been staring at her, Shihyun’s face turned red. The rapid pace of her chopsticks slowed slightly.
One interesting thing was that, despite how eagerly she ate, not a single drop of food splattered onto her clothes. She barely even made a sound. That was a bit different from the Shihyun I used to know.
Even though she ate neatly, the bowl of jjajangmyeon in front of her disappeared in an instant. She picked up pieces of tangsuyuk in between, yet the speed at which the food vanished remained consistent. Watching her, I couldn’t help but be impressed.
Honestly, couldn’t she make a living doing mukbang broadcasts? She was beautiful, after all.
But then again… considering how embarrassed she got just by meeting my eyes, she probably wouldn’t be able to handle eating in front of a live audience. Eating in front of a crowd would be far more nerve-wracking than eating in front of just me.
“Uh, um… well…”
“Why? You look good.”
I meant it sincerely, but after saying it, I realized it might have sounded a bit sarcastic.
I glanced at Shihyun, feeling a bit nervous, but she didn’t show any negative reaction aside from her reddened face.
To be honest, I had been feeling a little full for a while. But letting Shihyun eat alone felt a bit wrong, so I picked up my chopsticks again. I grabbed a piece of tangsuyuk, popped it into my mouth, and started chewing.
Only then did Shihyun, after glancing at me, resume eating her jjajangmyeon.
I wondered was her habit of eating like this somehow connected to her past? It seemed possible. Come to think of it, last time, I had seen a calorie bar inside her bag.
It didn’t seem like she carried it just for a light snack. It felt more like something she kept for emergencies, as if she absolutely needed it at certain moments. It could have been just a snack, but considering the knife she carried as well, it felt more like survival food.
It didn’t seem like she was preparing for long-term survival. The knife, the calorie bar— even to someone like me, who wasn’t particularly knowledgeable about such things, they didn’t look like tools that would help her survive for an extended period.
Then why did she carry them? They weren’t particularly useful, but they were certainly items that could cause misunderstandings.
“……”
Even thinking about it didn’t give me any answers.
Though I was eating at a slow pace, Shihyun didn’t stop eating completely. Even though she seemed a little self-conscious under my gaze, she continued to eat with determination.
And the way she ate it was so similar to the Shihyun in my memories that I didn’t even need to consciously recall those memories to make the connection.
*
“That embarrassed?”
Even after finishing our meal and stepping outside, Shihyun’s face was still flushed. At my question, his face turned an even deeper shade of red. He couldn’t bring himself to admit that he was embarrassed.
The truth was, I had stopped eating before Shihyun not just because I ate less than him, but also because of the lingering aftereffects of riding too many amusement park rides earlier that morning. Honestly, I still felt a bit queasy from it.
But after sitting on a bench and catching my breath earlier and, of course, sitting through the entire meal I felt much better than before.
Now that my head was clearer, I started to notice more things around me, and one of them was Shihyun.
I still couldn’t understand why. It made me wonder if Shihyun had a distant relative I wasn’t aware of. Of course, they didn’t look alike, but sometimes even close relatives could have no resemblance at all.
Even if that were the case, even if Shihyun really was related to Shihyun or his mother, they wouldn’t have known each other. If they had, they would have found some way to help each other.
But at Shihyun’s funeral, among the few distant relatives that showed up, I don’t recall seeing anyone with the same name as him.
And yet, how could someone’s every little habit be so identical?
And what were the odds that I’d meet someone who not only acted just like him but also had the exact same name?
I didn’t know, but I was sure the chances were so slim they weren’t even worth hoping for.
…Even after hearing that the neighborhood was going to disappear, I hadn’t left.
There was no one left to wait for. The one person I had been waiting for had already left this world.
Even after my parents took the compensation money and moved away, I stayed in my mother’s house. She did too.
I used to think I had no attachment to that neighborhood. My parents fought every day, trash rolled down the streets without anyone bothering to clean it up.
In summer, burst garbage bags leaked rotting liquid, filling the air with an unbearable stench. When it rained heavily, the sewer, clogged with cigarette butts…..sometimes overflowed.
There were times when animal waste, either from a dog or a cat, was left on the ground, and strangely, whenever it snowed, it piled up unusually fast. Maybe because so many people left early in the morning, the snow would be trampled down before anyone could clear it, turning into a dangerously slippery sheet of ice.
Because of all that, I believed I had no fond memories of that place.
But strangely, even after my only remaining family had left, I couldn’t bring myself to leave that neighborhood for a long time.
It wasn’t because I had nowhere to go. If I wanted to, I could have just found a small studio apartment and moved out.
But I didn’t want to.
Only after everything was over did I realize that memories were embedded in every corner of that neighborhood.
Back when we knew nothing, back when we didn’t even know how to pass the time, we wandered through those alleyways, holding each other’s hands tightly, depending only on one another.
Sitting side by side in front of the old gate, sniffling as we waited for Mom to come home.
The distant voices of nameless children calling out from somewhere far away.
That small, shabby convenience store the only one in the neighborhood, dark and rundown was everything to me and Shihyun.
We had gone to famous streets to hang out. Whenever we had time, we wandered all over Seoul, holding hands. But in the end, the place we always returned to, walking together through the night, was that neighborhood.
Once the neighborhood disappeared, I would lose even those narrow alleys we had walked together.
Once the massive apartment complex was built, all that would remain of our memories would be a few scattered photos the only proof that Shihyun and I had ever existed there.
That’s why I couldn’t leave.
When the neighborhood was completely emptied, when everyone else had long since left, my mother and I were the last ones to walk away.
For some reason, as we stepped past the entrance, my mother and I cried our hearts out.
They say even mountains change in ten years, but in just five years after Shihyun disappeared, too many things had changed too quickly.
Even so, I still couldn’t leave the area and ended up drifting around nearby. I stopped going to school properly and was eventually expelled. I didn’t even find out on my own it was Yuri who told me.
My mother left for somewhere far away. Maybe, since the neighborhood had disappeared, she wanted to get as far away as possible from the painful memories, too.
What were the odds that I’d end up working at a bakery right across from where my old neighborhood used to be, staring at the wall that now surrounded it? What were the chances that the person running the bakery would be such a kindhearted pastor?
How unlikely was it that the bakery’s name would be Sunflower? That the sunflower painted on its sign might have once faced the house where we used to live?
I thought I had lost everything. Every morning, I would wake up, go to the bakery, and just stand there blankly, staring out the window at the construction site’s barrier.
As if the sun still existed there.
Like a sunflower facing the bright sun.
Like a sunflower looking toward where tomorrow’s sun would rise.
Maybe, after all that waiting, the sun had finally risen.