city of stars

XXI

"Can you hear us?" A voice asked in a bored, routine tone. He couldn't tell where it was coming from, couldn't tell where he was or what he was doing. It was like one moment, he was watching their old television report the news, warning of an upcoming war, and the next he was here. In this sterile white room. With a chunk of his memories missing.

"Can you hear us?" The voice asked again.

Hyunjin managed to nod, cracking his eyes open a little more to look around. He was sitting in a chair, the room around him perfectly empty save for one man. Dressed in all black, he had his back to him, looking at some clipboard he held in his hands. There wasn't a single wrinkle on his suit, not one hair out of place.

"Do you remember your name?" The man asked, turning around. His face was ageless. Pale, as if he hadn't seen the sun in years. There was no color to his lips, no brown in his eyes. In fact, for a moment, Hyunjin thought he was colorblind, if not for looking down and seeing his own hands.

Golden, from all the time he spent in the sun.

"Hwang Hyunjin." He answered a little belatedly, finding that he couldn't find any feeling to put into his words. There was no inflection. No panic, no happiness, no sorrow. Just a gaping nothing. Just like his memories.

"What is the last thing you remember, Hyunjin-ssi?"

"Watching the news with my girlfriend."

The man wrote something down. "Year?"

When Hyunjin answered, he immediately knew he was off. How much time had passed since then? He couldn't bring himself to care.

"Your girlfriend – her name is?"

"Eunji."

Making another note, the man nodded to himself. "We'll call for her to pick you up, Hyunjin-ssi."

"Where am I? What happened?"

"You're in the hospital. You've been in an accident."

"Accident– but I can't drive."

"You might notice a few gaps in your memory. That's normal for someone recovering from a head wound. Over time, you'll hardly notice that anything's wrong."

With no other choice, Hyunjin belived him.

Eunji picked him up a few days later. She looked a little older, a little more mature. Dressed in a loose white dress, with her dark hair falling neatly down her back, she looked as beautiful as she always did – shy but bossy, a caring hand helping him stand from his bed, car keys hanging off a small keychain with a white ferret toy on it. He had gotten her the keychain when they first started dating in high school.

She told him it's been about 4 years since that morning he remembered. Four years of memories he couldn't get back.

The pills he took didn't let him worry about it.

As they left the hospital, arms around each other, an unfamiliar face watched them leave, piercing feline eyes glued to his back. Something about that man sent goosebumps down Hyunjin's back.

Their life together was easy to fall into. There was always breakfast on the table when he woke, and he made sure there was dinner ready when she came home from work. They engaged in simple conversations, testing the waters, moving closer and closer over the months.

There was something enchanting about her, something that drew Hyunjin in. She was delicate, like a flower, but there was a steel edge to her, too. On certain topics, she was as unmovable as the Great Wall of China.

His curiosity was piqued as he started going out more, securing a position as waiter in a nearby cafe. There seemed to be a certain order to the way things were done, a script to the conversations people had. Colorless, emotionless, clueless – the world he found himself in was too different from the world Hyunjin remembered.

The first time he kissed Eunji felt like ... nothing. So he kissed her again, and she didn't protest. Another routine was established. He wasn't sure he liked her – the pills made him look at it all the same. She was familiar, and there.

He told her he loved her. She said it back.

They were sitting on the terrace once, leaning against each other, Hyunjin's arm around her shoulders, watching a deer graze in their backyard, eating the last of the wilted grass.

"I haven't seen a deer in years." Eunji said to him then. Her voice was soft, like chamomile tea.

He smiled, drawing her closer, dropping a kiss on her temple. "It's a doe."

But some part of his heart latched onto those words – where were things going? Why were they all disappearing?

"Why does everything have to be black-and-white, Eunji-yah?" Hyunjin groaned as his fiance fixed his crooked tie.

"The least you can do is look nice, Hyunjin-ah." She told him, squeezing his hand. "Come on, stop being so negative."

He hated that word.

"I'm sorry." He apologized nonetheless, kissing her hand. "I won't ruin this for you."

They got married in a small ceremony. It was black and white.

At the very back, standing next to the exit, was the same man as before, as the one Hyunjin saw in the hospital. His eyes glowed with something – something Hyunjin found everyone else to be lacking. It was almost as if he was angry.

Jeongin was Hyunjin's wake-up call. The moment the boy came into the world, Hyunjin's life stopped revolving around anything other than his son.

He spent every waking moment raising him. Making him laugh. Playing with him, teasing him, feeding him, teaching him.

Eunji was not a fan.

"You're making him weird. No other kid acts like that! He's so loud, Hyunjin-ah. People are staring!"

"He's happy." Hyunjin shrugged. "Let him be."

Jeongin grew up to be his father's boy. He clung to him when he learned to walk, and always ran to him first when he got home from work. Little by little, something in Hyunjin changed, and it was like a dam broke.

He stopped taking his morning pills, and every emotion spilled forth. A year later, he and Eunji got divorced, and he moved out.

Five years after that, he met Lee Felix, for the second time in his life, believing it to be his first.