The One In Silence

In your final moments, there is only one person you can think of ever turning to. It wasn’t even hard really—it shouldn’t be. Not when she exists.

The one that no one noticed until it was too late—Kim Jiwon.

Behind you, on your left, you see the blonde girl already getting her soul ripped out from her body before the accident can even fully unfold: shrieking, reddening, embracing herself tightly. You never really gave labels to the members of your little group, but if she were to receive one, she’d be ‘the lonesome’. She didn’t seem lonely at all—not in the slightest bit. She didn’t seem left out or outcasted from the group either. Instead, she preferred her own peace of mind, her own solitude, existing in her own world. That’s who she was. But that wasn’t the only role she filled in your life.

Kim Jiwon was the one you loved in silence.

Staring into her dilating pupils, you notice a ripple across the thin membrane of her eyeballs. It’s tiny. Almost imperceptibly ignorable. But when you focus on it, your own eyes go wide—not in horror, not in fear, but rather, in awe.

As the mote of possibility beams right at you, swallowing you whole, you accepted your momentary blindness and allowed the unknown to consume you.

Kim Jiwon’s room is like the Fortress of Solitude—only she has access to this place. No one can enter or leave its premises without her, and rarely does she ever even come out of hiding from it.

But there is an extremely small subset of people in her life that’s allowed free access to her personal living space. No need for permission, no need for announcements of arrivals, no need for explanation.

And that subset of people is entirely composed of you.

It’s been a couple of years since you last visited, but you’re oddly glad that her house hasn’t changed. She still lives with her parents, who greet you warmly like you might be a brother of hers who was visiting them after being away for so long. You find it almost embarrassing that they remember the minute details about your life like when you flew off your bike at age twelve or when you got stood up to the prom in junior year. But surprisingly enough, just like riding a bike, navigating your way around her household was as simple as letting your muscle memory kick in again.

You remember to dust your shoes off by the welcoming mat. You remember to squat down low when their bulldog comes barking at you. You remember which steps on the stairs creak when you place your weight on them. And you remember which door down the hallway on the second floor belonged to her.

Smiling to yourself like an idiot, you lean in and try to eavesdrop on what was going on inside.

“Damn it! Why can’t you remember your rotations! It’s in the fricking guidebook! Ugh, don’t tell me searching it online is that hard.”

You gather she’s playing some sort of multiplayer game. You can’t tell if she’s speaking to someone or if she was just venting to herself. Either way, you don’t waste any more time and decide to knock on the door the way you’ve always done so before.

Silence.

Then the sounds of spells and abilities being casted routinely are replaced momentarily by scrambling footsteps, shifting cloths, and skittering items.

When the door opens, you see her rocking brown hair now, which is tied messily into a bun atop her head. Donning an oversized shirt, shorts that cut dangerously above her thighs, and with headphones wrapped around her neck, Kim Jiwon looks up at you once and her face instantly turns into a tomato.

“O-Oppa, I didn’t know you were in town. Had I known, I-I-I would have—.”

“Cleaned up?” you finish her sentence as you push past her and enter the room that smells like leftover food and a pathetic excuse for air freshener. “Don’t bother. I’ve already seen it all before.”

She punches you playfully against your spleen before tucking her headphones onto her head again. “Can you wait for me? I’m just finishing this dungeon. I’ll be with you in a sec.”

You nod and crash down into her beanbag, fluffing it up and pushing out all the leftover Cheetos and dust that was hiding within it. Wincing, you decide to spend some time helping her clean up the immediate hazards in the room while she finishes the dungeon raid she had to put on hold for you.

By the time she finishes, you already manage to sweep her floor, wipe the dust from the most prominent surfaces, and even sorted out her messy array of action figures, controllers, wires, and video game cases into the cabinets and boxes along the wall. She’s in complete awe at this as she turns around in her gaming chair. “Ya … now I feel way worse … having you come all the way here just to clean my room.”

“It’s nothing. Just happy to help. You seem, um, busy.”

Your remark immediately sours her mood. Before you can try to change the subject, she addresses the elephant in the room. “If by busy you mean I’ve turned into a complete shut-in, then I guess you’re right, oppa.”

Definitely hit a sore spot there.

You try your best to look around the room to see if there’s anything you can bring up in conversation: something new, something interesting, something that’s different. But as you glance around the familiar four corners of her bedroom, you realize something painstakingly obvious.

Nothing’s changed since you were last here all those years ago.

And Jiwon senses this realization of yours too.

“O-Oppa … Do you want to go somewhere?” she says, further fueling your suspicions that something isn’t right here. Jiwon was never the type to want to go out. She might have called herself a ‘shut-in’, but you know very well that an introvert like her preferred to be somewhere she was more comfortable with. “We can go watch a movie if you want? O-O-Or maybe get some food … outside?”

You shake your head, immediately turning down the idea, and you see her relax a little, taking deeper breaths again. “Easy, Jiwon. I just got here. Honestly, I just wanted to check in on you. I’m glad you’re doing fine. You’re still the same Kim Jiwon I remember you to be.”

She does not take that remark of yours to well either.

“I … I guess so,” she mumbles, twiddling her thumbs against her stomach. She locks eyes with you for a moment, but she shifts her gaze elsewhere. “I-I-I … What do you want to do, oppa? I’m not really sure what we can do here at home now that I think about it …”

“Are you kidding me? Let’s fucking game!’ you exclaimed, whipping out one of the controllers you sorted out from earlier. “Is your TV still working? Boot up a shooter or something. Something we can both play together. Anything will do. It’s always fun playing with you.”

Eating her own lips, she fought hard to stop her smile from blossoming on her face, but you catch it anyway. “Ok … I have a few new games. Want to try them out?”

And you do. You spend almost the entire afternoon doing what you and Jiwon did best—playing with each other.

It all comes back to you.

The afternoons you spent racing back to her place just to open the new Pokemon game you bought on a discount at your local game store. The evenings you burnt the midnight oil together trying to reach a hundred-percent completion on the LEGO game that released that year. The mornings you completely slept through because of your shared fatigue over mapping strategies out for your next run on Civilization Revolution.

Every time you entered Jiwon’s room, regardless of the weight on your shoulders, regardless of the mess going on in your mind, regardless of what the outside world might think of you, you never left her room without a smile on your face. Before you knew it, Jiwon’s room became your home.

And it felt good to be back.

“Aw damn it, I was so close too!” she groans as you sank the final bucket into her side of the field, securing your three-point lead over her team as the match concludes. “I knew I should have substituted my shooting guard out the moment you fouled him way too many times.”

“What can I say? I know ball,” you tease, setting down the controller by your side and stretching your legs outwards towards the TV. “That felt great. But shit, it’s already eleven. I should get going. Don’t want your parents to scold you in the morning.”

“Don’t … worry about it. They don’t care anymore.”

You pause mid-shift in your seat, back still against the edge of her bed. “What?”

She tenses up, shaking her rapidly. “N-Nothing.”

“No, seriously, is something wrong? You can tell me. We’re both still geekerds, right? And geekerds need to stick together.”

Your words of reassurance seem to do the opposite. While she remembers the term of endearment the both of you used to describe each other growing up, there’s something coming in between her and the sentiments that have been boiling up inside her since you arrived her.

It’s only when you stand up and act like you might leave that she finally spills the beans. “My parents … they don’t care about me anymore. Why should they? I’m twenty-seven, oppa. I … never finished my degree. Never looked for part-time job. Never … pursued anything else. I just … stay here. In my room. Gaming. Watching. Rotting.”

You kneel down next to her, but she looks away, and you notice now that she’s crying into her sleeve. “Jiwon …”

“I was so happy to see you again, oppa. But at the same time, I was so … embarrassed. I didn’t reach out to anyone all this time because … I felt so ashamed. So ashamed over how you would see me. Afraid that you might … that you might judge me. Worried that … that I’ll look like a laughing stock to you all …”

Between her sniffles and clears of her throat, you place a hand over hers and squeeze it. “Jiwon, I … I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were going through … a lot—.”