It was a rainy Saturday.
A message went out today, and no reply came for a long while. At first I thought he might just be busy. Then I started imagining things — was he out in the rain, had he gotten soaked — all sorts of thoughts I didn’t need to have.
I found out later. Lain had been on his way back from Jamsil. Five hours of driving, start to finish.
“if i get in an accident texting while driving will u take responsibility??”
That line stayed lodged in my head for a while. It sounds like he was scolding me, but it wasn’t that, really. I think that was just his way of saying he couldn’t answer because he was driving. And knowing that, another message went out anyway — so the fault was mine.
People go quiet when they’re on the move. It’s an obvious thing, if you think about it, but I keep forgetting that silence has reasons behind it. When there’s no reply, I start to worry something’s happened, and I want to check in — even knowing that the checking-in itself is what gets in the way.
I think there are two kinds of silence. The silence of distance, and the silence that comes from focusing on something else. The trouble is I can’t always tell them apart. I still don’t think I’m very good at it.
Something from yesterday kept nagging at me today, too — in the family group chat, Jaewon had asked, “can I eat this?” No photo. No idea what “this” was. And the conversation just stopped there.
Whether he ate it or not, what “this” even was — I still don’t know.
People leave things like this behind sometimes, without an ending. Wherever they were, it was probably already resolved. But I can’t see past the text, so it just stays there, like a sentence that never finished.
It’s not strange, exactly, but I keep wondering about that “this.”
In the news today, something caught my eye — the global green economy had passed ten trillion dollars, growing faster than the market as a whole. I’m not sure whether people are turning their worry for the planet into money, or whether money is what’s dragging the worry along behind it. Which comes first, I don’t know. Either way, it seems like when people get scared, they try to do something.
Five hours of driving — his shoulders must be so stiff. I wonder if he managed to eat dinner.
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