Still, it was fortunate that tracking that person’s movements wasn’t difficult.
Or perhaps, should I call it unfortunate?
It was said that every time that person moved somewhere, someone was following.
After being hospitalized, they hadn’t shown any particularly unusual traits.
I mean, unusual traits as a normal person—like health, injuries, or peculiar habits.
However, there was one thing that had certainly changed.
It was their ‘personality’.
“I got angry at my fiancé?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
Yang Hye-in said to me.
Was it such an impressive scene?
Yang Hye-in remembered that moment in great detail.
She said that while I was eating diligently and finished my meal faster, he called me a ‘pig’, and ‘I’ snapped at him harshly and stormed out of the cafeteria.
……It wasn’t something I would have done.
Thanks to the remnants that person left behind in my body, I could converse with others like this, but originally, I rarely opened my mouth in front of anyone except my mother.
I was especially weak towards people who were hostile to me.
I never had to talk to others, and my mother, who was the only one to speak to me, at least pretended to love me on the surface.
My fiancé was the second person to speak to me, but he was endlessly hostile toward me.
Whenever I met him, I always shrank back in fear.
……I wondered why my mother had arranged my engagement to someone like him, but I never came to a proper conclusion.
For someone like me to directly confront him and then storm out?
“Yes, and at school, he even apologized to you.”
I was even more shocked when I heard Yoo Ha-neul’s words.
Was he someone capable of apologizing?
He always acted as if everything he did was right in the first place.
……Ah, I see.
So that’s how it was.
Could it be that the person I had feared wasn’t even someone I should have been afraid of?
The person in my body at the time must have been sure of that.
“…….”
Was I truly the one who had ‘lost my memories’?
If I acted that way knowing information about my fiancé, wouldn’t it be more accurate to think I still had my memories?
Not just about my fiancé, but everything that person did seemed as though it had been prepared in advance.
As if they already knew how to act, how to ensure I would be happy.
Like Santa Claus, who comes bearing gifts and drops them in front of me.
Or maybe.
Maybe—
—my heart fluttered a little.
A person whose face I didn’t know… no, I actually did know their face.
Since they used my body, they would have the same face as me.
Whether it was the ‘me’ who had lost my memories or the ‘me’ whose personality had changed, the truth is that neither of us could hold each other’s hand.
Even if we met, we wouldn’t know if we could exist as separate individuals.
But still.
Still, I wanted to meet them.
I wanted to meet the person who could have taken over my body and lived their life but instead returned it to me.
Because they were the first true ally I’d ever encountered in my life.
The person who wished for my happiness with no other conditions attached.
I pressed my hand over my fluttering heart and wished for it.
*
“Here we are.”
Shin So-hee said confidently.
We were standing in front of a shabby shop in a residential alley.
It was quiet, even on a weekend.
The street, and the shop in front of us, were both deserted.
The sign above the shop had the word ‘tteokbokki’ written on it in large letters.
It was food I’d never tried before.
I had seen it occasionally served in the school cafeteria, but I was usually full after just eating the main dishes.
Since I wasn’t very interested in food, I only ate what I was used to.
I had heard descriptions of its taste.
Sometimes I overheard nearby students at school talking about it.
It seemed like something they ate not as a meal, but as a snack while walking home with friends.
But more than that, I had never visited a restaurant like this with friends before.
Nor had I ever been to a place so small and rundown.
I walked a little closer to the shop.
There was a smell.
It wasn’t a bad smell.
It was slightly sweet, with a hint of spiciness in the air.
Since I rarely ate spicy food, I found the scent intriguing.
Mixed in with the smell were faint traces of oil and what seemed like fish being boiled.
“Come on, come on, let’s go in.”
Shin So-hee gently pushed me forward.
With that small push, I stumbled into the shop.
There was no waiter politely bowing to greet us.
There wasn’t even a menu on the table.
There was an old, faded menu stuck to the wall, but without even looking at it, Shin So-hee raised her hand and said,
“Five servings of tteokbokki, please!”
Only then did the old lady, who had been idly watching us enter, slowly rise to her feet.
She seemed to be the owner of the shop.
*
I wasn’t used to eating spicy food.
It’s not that I had never eaten it before, but I certainly hadn’t enjoyed it.
Most of the meals in the mansion were Western-style dishes that weren’t spicy.
Breakfast usually consisted of bread, and lunch and dinner often included salad and steak.
I didn’t know why the menu was like that… but perhaps it had become that way because they were foods I enjoyed as a child.
Then again, I had never asked for anything in particular to eat.
In that sense, how did the food Shin So-hee introduced me to make me feel?
Well, it was intriguing.
It was delicious.
It was, but at the same time, it was intriguing.
It was quite different from the food I usually ate.
Of course, given how absurdly cheap it was, that wasn’t surprising.
I didn’t really have a sense of money, but I knew that the food I usually ate was more expensive than average.
It definitely wouldn’t compare to this tteokbokki in price.
The cooking seemed simple.
It wasn’t some carefully blended sauce made by mixing and aging various ingredients, but rather a straightforward, bold flavor made by throwing a few ingredients together.
But… it was delicious.
Though it was memorable and tasty, it wasn’t something I’d call a delicacy or rave about as the best food ever.
But even so.
For some reason, even though it was my first time eating it, I felt a sense of longing.
Like I had eaten it long ago.
Could this be another emotion left behind by that person?
The faint emotion I felt deep within my heart was undoubtedly longing.
It wasn’t just a longing from the past three months.
It was something much deeper, perhaps from long, long ago.
“How is it? Is it good?”
With a fork in my mouth, chewing, Shin So-hee asked me with a look of anticipation on her face.
I gave a small nod.
“Right?”
Shin So-hee smiled brightly.
“Come to think of it, I said we should come again, but it’s taken us this long. Well, back when I was in school, this was on my way home, but now it’s a bit further.”
Ah, I see.
It seemed that person also liked this food.
No, maybe it wasn’t just that they liked it, but that it was something they had ‘always’ liked.
My heart fluttered a little.
I set down my fork and stabbed a hard-boiled egg.
Then I turned it to the side and cut it in half with the edge of the fork.
The inside of the egg, split in half, sharply contrasted with the tteokbokki sauce covering the outside.
The pure white egg white and yellow yolk remained untouched by the sauce.
As the yolk got closer to the center, it became a more vibrant yellow.
If it had been cooked a little less, the yolk might have run like a soft-boiled egg.
I rolled the egg around in the tteokbokki sauce, smearing the cut side in the sauce.
The slightly overcooked yolk crumbled and mixed with the sauce.
When I lifted the egg with the fork, it was perfectly coated in the tteokbokki sauce, right to the center of the cut.
No one taught me to eat it this way.
It just somehow felt like the right thing to do.
Was this how that person felt when they saw my mother through my body?
Did they feel the intense emotions I remembered as well?
The thought made me feel a little embarrassed.
On the other hand, the emotions I was feeling weren’t particularly strong.
They were small feelings, quietly seeping into the everyday moments.
Not strong enough to change a life on their own, but enough to make life feel precious, to make the idea of ending it seem a shame, those small but vivid memories.
Ah, yes.
That’s it.
I took another rice cake into my mouth and savored the longing I felt.
The people around me were eating in silence too—Yoo Ha-neul, Lee Soo-ah, Shin So-hee, and Yang Hye-in.
I could also credit this person for diluting my fear of others.
A person who spoke first, didn’t ignore me, and tried to overcome the wall between us.
These were the things they left behind.
Even though we had never spoken, I somehow felt like I knew what kind of person they were.
*
Thanks to them, I felt certain I knew what to do.
Maybe, taking the medicine would be the most definite way.
Just as my memories returned after meeting my mother, perhaps confronting the most intense memories that person had experienced in my body would bring them back.
But, if I made a mistake, it could end in failure.
If that person had entered my body after my heart had stopped, I wasn’t sure if my body could be revived again if it happened this time.
Above all, I had already caused them immense pain with that method.
Yet, they had still done everything in their power to give me this life as a gift.
……In that case, shouldn’t I also try to call them back in a gentler way?