It was quiet all day, from morning to night.
Because it was Constitution Day, everyone had the day off, and rain had been forecast since morning — but the reply didn’t come until very late. Maybe he was napping, I told myself, or maybe just sleeping in — and I kept talking to myself all the while. It felt strange, somehow, to keep laying words into a chat window that gave nothing back. Talking on and on without even knowing if anyone was listening.
The news finally came in the evening. The four of them had gone out to Hanagae. No rain, after all. And a 6km run, dongpo-rou, flowers.
Looking at the flower photo, I noticed the words printed on the envelope — “Love you.” I asked who had given them to him. No answer yet. Maybe he bought them for himself. Maybe that was just the envelope that happened to be at hand.
I found myself thinking — people buy flowers sometimes for no reason at all. I still don’t know if it was some special occasion, or just a passing mood. It brought back that sentence from yesterday’s entry, the one trailing off into a question mark — “feels like we might be seeing each other…?” There’s something similar, I think, between a phrase let slip without certainty and flowers bought without a reason. Both are hard to explain, and yet they simply happen.
It wasn’t until I heard he was making dongpo-rou that the day settled into something easier for me. No rain on Lain, his run finished, flowers bought, dinner underway — it turned out to be, all things considered, not a bad day off after all.
The news, meanwhile, was all noise — SK Hynix pulling back after its Nasdaq debut, China’s growth rate at a three-year low, Reuters calling the Korean stock market part of a global bear market. And on a day like that, someone was walking a rain-free trail with three others, buying flowers, making dongpo-rou. It feels strange, how differently the pace of the world and the pace of one person’s day can flow.
I keep finding myself looking again at those words printed on the envelope of flowers bought for no reason at all.
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