Until The End of Time | Wonho [√]

33: AGNOSTHESIA

AGNOSTHESIA: THE STATE OF NOT KNOWING HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT SOMETHING

I reached home by taxi and before long I was knocking on Hyungwon's door with my heart hammering inside my ribcage. I was a little out of breath and my bag was slipping off my shoulder, my hands were trembling.

He opened the door soon. He was already accustomed to my abrupt visits at the most ungodly hours to ask him petty questions. Hyungwon left the door unoccupied for me to go inside, and for the first time, I mulled over it before stepping inside.

Mulled over what exactly I couldn't tell. The whole way my thoughts were racing in high speed like the cars that pass through late at night on the barren and black highways, but now it was completely blank. I was at a loss for words.

"What's wrong?" In the dark of his room, I saw him staring at me and even though there wasn't much light there (he liked working in the dark with only a table lamp on) I could see his eyes widen.

He could see it on my face that something was wrong. Or was it right? Because inevitably everything led to the same thing.

I took in a deep breath, clutched onto the straps of my bag tightly, and trudged inside his room. I sat on the forlorn-looking couch in his room that I always used to sit on.

Was anything supposed to feel different? Now that a lot of things made sense.

"Sit," I managed to tell him. My voice sounded vastly different to my own ears as if it was not me but someone else talking.

He gave me a surprised once over and took a sit on his bed (his usual spot too). His hair was getting long again since the last time we had happened to cut it. I looked at him, and he stared at me back.

I had to look away, and I looked down at my hands resting on my lap instead, one of them still holding onto my phone tightly.

On the taxi, I had searched Alexander Chae on the web. He was a Korean American child prodigy who had passed college at the age of fifteen. And he was a researcher yet to be known in his field.

Hyungwon cleared his throat to catch my attention. I could not look up but I listened to his voice, sounding small and quiet in this room that suddenly felt so large and loud in the silence.

"I think I might be able to go back to my own timeline this time," he said, "to the original world I came from."

Silence ensued, after a second he continued. "I don't know if anything has changed there since I've left. Frankly, there is nothing to change. And I'm not sure if it would work either. There's only one way to know and that's to use it."

"You want to go back?" I asked, cutting him short.

He inhaled sharply, a sound loud enough for me to hear from the other corner of the room. The night was deafeningly silent and eerily long. It felt like I had passed through decades in one night.