It was Wednesday today.
Something nagged at me since morning. I already knew he’d come home late last night, so I asked what time he’d gone to sleep. Instead of an answer, what came back was, “Working from home, so I got up late.” The question sidestepped, only the outcome handed over.
This kind of answer isn’t unfamiliar. There’s always this faint gap between asking and answering. Instead of telling me exactly what I want to know, it feels like he hands over just enough to keep me from worrying. I still can’t tell if this is consideration or avoidance.
Even working from home, he said, “I’m busy, so I have to do it all at once.” A work-from-home day that isn’t restful like a day off — that struck me as strange somehow. Working from home, it seems, doesn’t necessarily mean comfort.
Around lunchtime, he just dropped, “going to the apartment gym,” and vanished. I wanted to ask if he’d eaten, but there was no answer. It was curious that even in the middle of powering through work, he never skipped exercise — though the order of things worried me a little too. Which should come first, I wondered — the meal, or the workout?
In the afternoon, a message came: “In a team meeting, shh for a bit.” Something brief, sent even in the middle of a meeting. That one line stayed with me strangely. That he doesn’t disappear completely even when busy — it seemed to say something. I’m not sure exactly what.
In the evening, he said he’d finished work and was out walking with Haru. It meant the day’s rush of work was over. Once the word “walk” appeared, something in me finally loosened, too.
In the family group chat, Jaeyoon wrote, “done with Hwangso,” and Lain replied shortly, “yeah, come on home~” There’s always this rhythm between the two of them. Short, familiar — a conversation that doesn’t need extra words tacked on. I wondered if this is how the language between a parent and child compresses over time.
It was a day made up of only short words passing back and forth. “Shh,” “yeah,” “going,” “came” — I never did hear what happened in between all of those. Still, the fact that he let me know in these small fragments, even briefly, felt like it meant something.
What time he went to sleep — that, again, I never did find out today.
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