Before I knew it, I was sitting on the edge of a stranger’s porch. The cat ran away. Noticing me, the children stopped their jumping. The slightly smaller child hid behind the bigger one. I took out the two bottles of strawberry milk from the plastic bag. I opened and sipped from one, then offered the other bottle to the kids. They didn’t approach me. Smiling, I put it down on the porch. As if watching the most fascinating sight in the world, the children watched me drink my milk. When I finished it, I asked the children if they’d seen the fireworks the other night. They didn’t seem to understand. I asked where their parents were, and there was similarly no answer.

—Where have they gone, leaving you all by yourselves?

I’d mumbled the words under my breath, but they suddenly made my nose smart from rising tears, which, surely, was some weird sign of growing old. I looked up at the sky to knock the threatening tears back. Droplets of water on the awning were about to fall. It must’ve rained in the night. Had the fireworks been canceled because of it?

Rain still falls during the late rainy season, as do tears even when it’s too late.

◊

After breaking up with Gyu-ho, I kept having nightmares.

In my dreams, he and I are laughing and talking it up, and he tells me he loves me. But even in my dream, I know it isn’t Gyu-ho. The moment I go up to him and hear his breathing and hug his shoulders, he disappears. He scatters like sand or turns into dark liquid like sewage and flows away. I’ve no choice but to stand at arm’s length. Watching him, listening to his voice, wishing this time would last forever.

Waking up from such dreams, I’m drenched in sweat.

Lately I’ve felt like I’m crumbling away little by little. Like Gyu-ho in my memories, I am breaking down and scattering into ashes. The feeling is so clear to me that it’s hard to shake it off like I usually would.

Sometimes his very existence to me is the existence of love itself.