If it was a major pileup in the middle of the city, with five people seriously injured and three dead, then the story changed.
At the end of the segment, the news anchor added that it was “truly regrettable,” wearing a suitably sorrowful look, but that vanished from his neat face as it segued into a related piece emphasizing how important routine vehicle inspections are.
People said the crux of the case was whether the cause lay in the perpetrator’s negligent maintenance or in a defect in the vehicle itself—but that was only an interpretation from the perpetrator’s point of view. His life would depend on how the cause of the brake failure was officially determined.
Once my maternal grandparents confirmed my mother’s death, they immediately prepared the funeral, and a simple three-day service was held. They left my father shut up in his studio with his mouth closed and took me to attend. My grandfather acted as chief mourner. No one notified my uncle’s household.
When the funeral ended and I came home still in mourning clothes, my father still wouldn’t come out of the studio, so I contacted Hani, because I had no idea how to handle anything alone.
My mother died in a traffic accident. My father won’t come out of his room, won’t eat, won’t answer anything I ask. I don’t know what to do. I’m so scared. I’m so scared...
As I spoke to him, my words became more and more of an emotional ramble, and kneeling on the bed in an ill-fitting black suit, I cried uncontrollably. It was probably the first time I cried after fully registering that my mother had died.
Until then, the accident had been so sudden, and everyone around me demanded that I just perform the role assigned to me without any detailed explanation, so I couldn’t grasp my mother’s death itself at all.
Two days later my grandparents came to the house and, facing my father, who showed no reaction, said they would sever ties completely and left. Given how things were, they said they had no lingering attachment to life in Korea, that they would go to Europe, make art, and spend the rest of their years there. They said they would handle everything related to the accident—the legal and paperwork issues, the settlement with the perpetrator. Before they stepped out, their eyes lingered on me with a briefly complicated look, but they turned their backs even more coldly than that.
It was a sudden death caused by an accident, and no one had been prepared. Everyone was in chaos, and everyone was desperate to find some practical equilibrium in whatever way they could.
Everyone except my father.
Days passed and there was no sign of improvement. If I brought him a clumsily prepared meal, he ate a little plain rice, but he still didn’t say a word. My worry and fear for my father choked off even my ability to mourn my mother.
"Back then... I wasn’t sleeping well anyway, but if I woke up at night, I’d get up and open the studio door. It was scary sleeping next to a father who’d become a completely different person... but I was also scared that maybe my father... might... end his own life.... Or that he might be dying and in agony... and I wouldn’t know..."
I tried to sound calm, but my voice trembled despite me. With wet hands I rubbed my face to hide the damp at my eyes.
"For your father, a world without your mother... was the same as a world with no value... It seemed like he could think that way, easily. So... when my uncle came and I moved to my grandfather’s house, I was actually relieved... Thinking I wouldn’t have to carry all that weight alone anymore..."
Since my father wasn’t improving at all, my uncle had no choice but to leave work and come. Because my father absolutely refused to go to the hospital, we had to call around and spend extra money to bring a doctor to the house.
The doctor diagnosed him with psychogenic aphasia.
After an event that inflicts a severe emotional shock, a person whose body has no actual impairment experiences his hearing becoming paralyzed. The unconscious preemptively blocks responses to external stimuli—so I learned from searching the internet after my uncle told me the diagnosis of psychogenic aphasia.
I took it to mean that the unconscious cutting off conscious responses was a kind of defensive act, a way to protect oneself.
In other words, stopping listening and speaking felt safer to my father than listening, speaking, and communicating with the world.
Even if that world included me, his son.
"They say there’s nothing actually wrong, that your father might have chosen to shut his mouth. He can hear it all and he can say it all—he might have just decided not to."
That night after the doctor left, my uncle said that over soju at our kitchen table.
I understood.
Watching my father’s stubborn refusal to leave the studio where my mother’s traces remained, while other people, unable to accept a spouse’s sudden death, can’t even bring themselves to look at their belongings... I came to understand that for my father, I was only a secondary existence gained as a result of his love with my mother.
While that love with my mother stood whole and unthreatened, my existence, as part of that love, was precious to him; but with my mother absent, my value faded.
It wasn’t that he didn’t love me at all. It’s just that his love for the son who remained wasn’t the kind of love that could heal the grief of losing his wife. The grief of losing his wife blanketed my father’s world, and I was simply included in that world.
After that whole chain of events, I stopped drawing. There was nothing left I wanted to draw, which was the same as having nothing I wanted to say or express.
And I grew afraid of love.
If love is something that, by one side disappearing, can turn the other side into a monster, then it felt like a risk you should insure against. But I had carved into my bones through my mother’s accident that insurance only lessens the burden of the aftermath—it can’t prevent the accident.
Before that winter ended, my father and I moved to my grandfather’s house. It wasn’t only that I couldn’t handle my father alone; it was also because, despite resisting every suggestion, my father reacted when my uncle said we should return to that village by the sea.
So I left the house the three of us had lived in for many years without even attending my middle school graduation, and my father kept his silence for more than six years after that.
Sitting with my knees up, fingers loosely laced before my ankles, I continued, then hesitated and lifted my eyes to look at him. Hoping he wouldn’t be making too pained a face.
"......"
"Hmm..."
Seeing how hard he was working to control the emotion that looked ready to erupt at any second, I let out a soft sigh.
His shoulders sagged and he bit his lip.
"I... never imagined that was why you quit painting."
He raked his now-dried face with a rough hand and shook his head.
"No, I just... hoped it was the kind of thing where... over time you happened to have more fun hanging out with friends, painting started to feel dull... and you naturally drifted away from the brush because of teenage fickleness. Because if not..."
"......"
"I was afraid I’d hear a story like this."
The nuance was that he couldn’t forgive himself for trying to avoid my reality by holding on to that hope. Even though none of this contained any fault of his.
I gently stroked his calf, stretched out loosely to my right, and managed a faint smile.
"It’d be a lie to say I’m fine... but at least now I don’t feel like... I’m going to die. I haven’t overcome it, but it’s dulled."
"......"
He looked at me like, That’s what you call something to say?, but he was holding himself back, thinking that such words wouldn’t help me at all and would only dump raw, regretful emotion he’d later repent. I could read it in his face alone.
The tub, cemented between bricks and tiled over, was perfectly adequate for one person, but not long enough for him to fully stretch his legs. I kneaded his long, awkwardly bent legs as if massaging them and looked down at the thin, mostly vanished suds.
"Alienation was drawn before the accident, and back then the feelings I had between my parents weren’t at a fatal level. I don’t know about other people, but I... don’t only paint intensity. It was just... like how other kids at that age want to get free of their parents’ interference and have complaints about how they were raised for their own reasons... In that same vein, I was a foolish kid who felt jealous of my parents’ bond..."
He finally looked like his question had been answered—how a painting I’d made out of that ordinary, adolescent self-centered feeling could trigger fear intense enough to cause hyperventilation. But he didn’t look relieved.
I put an arm on my raised knee and swept back my hair, and with my right hand I kneaded his ankle.
"In that process, the emotions I didn’t process properly... must have warped my insides into something unnatural. And I... left myself that way, let it harden..."
"......"
He couldn’t open his mouth easily. In his eyes, complicated, varied feelings surfaced and fell away.
I knew that, hearing something like this, people feel burdened by not knowing what reaction to show the person it happened to. When we had a friend whose °• N 𝑜 v 𝑒 l i g h t •° personality changed from the shock of his parents’ divorce, everyone was careful not to bring up anything near that topic, even by accident. Whether out of consideration or discomfort.
"Feeling anything, forming relationships with the people around me and going through emotional changes within them—those things scared me. What I wanted was... for safe days to keep continuing without plus or minus. I thought that was the best way to protect myself."
I lowered my head further, resting my chin on my knee. Morae and Hani, Yuni and Juhan. I couldn’t help thinking about how paltry I’d felt in front of the way they thrashed to break through the obstacles in front of their lives.
"But what I was actually trying to pursue wasn’t peace or safety—it was tastelessness. Just another form of silence, different from my father’s. I gagged myself..."
Their way might not be the one absolutely right answer. Their present isn’t perfect either. Behind every choice I saw and heard, someone had to be sacrificed. What mattered was that I felt ashamed in the face of their choices and the effort they made to take responsibility for them.
I couldn’t like the way I had chosen. I couldn’t call it the best. If my father’s was an extreme silence, mine was a weaker ‘small silence.’
"Back then you were..."
He seemed to be trying to keep his composure, but his voice, for once, trembled slightly.
"You were only sixteen. You were someone who needed care to handle and settle a situation like that. It was your father and the other adults—who abandoned that duty—who were at fault; you were someone who should have been protected, emotionally and environmentally."
His voice and expression were twisted, unnaturally, like someone trying to suppress anger.
"Yes... I spent a long time thinking that way, angry and resentful. Most of that anger and resentment was directed at my father, but sometimes it spiraled out of control until I couldn’t even tell where the target ended. But not everyone can receive the help they need when they need it... Of course it would be good if they could... but I couldn’t..."
I don’t know if sharing a heavy past is a necessary process of love. Maybe it’s better for only one person to know it than for both to suffer. I had thought that, too. But as I talked to him, I realized something. I didn’t want his sympathy for the pain of my past.
Cradling his sleek ankle with my hand as if measuring its thickness, I spoke carefully.
"It’s arrogant, and it’s... much too early to say, but..."
"......"
"Now, just a little... I think I might be able to understand my father. Not all of it, of course. I still... have so many things I want to ask, and my resentment and hate are so big that I’m scared to bring up those questions and hear the answers... but I have the vaguest feeling that I might, a little, understand..."
Oddly, I was out of breath. I paused, drew a deep breath, and steadied myself.
"What it means for one person to become more important in their life than anything else—maybe even more than their own child..."
His eyelids crumpled and his gaze shook roughly. He looked like someone who had completely given up on restraining the self-control he’d tried to maintain. To soothe him, I toyed with the ankle in my hand and went on.
"Thank you for asking me to go to Chicago with you. My answer wasn’t impulsive because I was in a knotted state, either."
For me, this might have been even harder than confessing the past: to speak honestly about my feelings in a moment when reason was holding instinct in check. It certainly felt that way, after so long keeping silent about emotion. But now I wanted change.
"I want to go. I don’t want to be apart from you either, CEO."
He moved his lips as if to speak, then collapsed into a ragged whisper.
"I’m sorry."
"For what?"
"Just... that you can’t even cry while saying all this..."
I watched him rub his face with his palm as if trying to grind it away, unable to finish his sentence, then reached out and gently took hold of his fingers where they lay vacantly on his thigh.
"I already cried a lot, back then..."
"......"
"And now, there’s Kun... and Awi..."
With a splash, he gathered me into him.
Wet lips pressed deep; the high bridge of his nose pressed my cheek. His big hands covered my cheeks and ears, and I heard a muffled rush of air I don’t usually hear. A kiss that pressed our lips together again and again without tongues wasn’t erotic so much as consoling.
I wrapped my arms hard around his broad, solid shoulders and finally let my feelings overflow.
"I’m allowed to think this, right?"
"......"
"That because you’re here, I’m not alone anymore. I’m not... misunderstanding, am I?"
With his forehead pressed to mine, he bit his lower lip and was silent for a moment.
"Can I be honest?"
"......"
He took my chin and made me meet his eyes; my lids burned.
"I’m angry at your father for abandoning a child to such loneliness... but if I lost you and went through the same thing, I’m not sure I could handle it any better. It might be too soon to say something like this, so you might not be able to believe it..."
How could I not. I was the one who, for the same reason, felt I might dimly begin to understand my father.
He didn’t try to comfort me with carefully crafted words, or to reassure me by force. After the kiss he led me out of the tub and dried every corner of my body with a big towel. We went back to the wrecked bed and pressed our bodies together once more.
We touched each other’s faces more than usual, looked into each other’s eyes more than usual, and what we did felt less like applying stimulation to flesh than like sensing and confirming each other’s existence. The caresses went on and on; it didn’t roar forward as primally as before, but it was thicker. I checked below with my hand again and again where we were joined with no gaps, and I felt him fully, without lack.
It was probably the first day since that winter at sixteen that I laid bare, before someone else and before myself, my most fragile weakness and the shame I most wanted to hide.
The next day, for the first time, I set a lock on my phone—the one I could previously use by just dragging the screen. And about three weeks later, we headed to Chicago together.
To be continued in Diamond Dust, Volume 5.
