They kept talking, and Baeksan kept staring.
She was smiling so naturally now it looked like she had never been shy in her life. Her voice, gentle but steady, rose and fell with his as though they'd been rehearsing these exchanges for years.
Every question she asked, he answered with a warmth that seemed bottomless, the kind of warmth that didn't demand anything in return. She tilted her head, brushed a strand of hair behind her ear, her red eyes glowing like embers under the train's tired lights.
He leaned slightly toward her, his face softened into that rare expression—the one that could disarm anyone.
To Baeksan it was unbearable. Not because it was loud, not because it was unusual. It was unbearable because it was beautiful.
The beauty of something so close it almost touched him, but never would.
He watched their faces move in rhythm, watched the small, unthinking gestures—her hands tightening around the strap as she laughed, his eyes narrowing gently when he listened—and it carved something raw inside him.
It didn't matter that he didn't know what they were saying. He didn't need the words. The meaning was obvious: connection.
It was a thing he couldn't fake. A thing that had never chosen him.
His chest tightened. His vision tunneled. Somewhere in the swaying of the carriage, his mind slipped away again.
The world darkened. The train dissolved.
He was young again, smaller than small, sitting on the floor with his arms clamped tight around his knees. The space around him was endless black, as if the world had been swallowed whole.
Above, a single spotlight hung suspended, cold and merciless, pinning him in its pale glow. It lit his hair, his hunched shoulders, the curve of his back, but beyond that circle there was nothing. Not silence, not emptiness—nothing. There was no existence, even the slightest one.
He kept his head down. He didn't call out. He knew there was no one to answer.
The boy rocked slowly in place, the way children do when they have no other comfort. His knees pressed hard against his chest, his breath shallow, his eyes wide but empty.
He was waiting for something that would never come. A hand, a voice, a break in the dark. He waited until waiting itself felt like the only thing keeping him alive.
And still there was nothing.
Back on the train, his body remained motionless. His gaze flicked between them—her smile, his patience—and for a moment the two images overlapped: the boy in the spotlight staring out of the dark, watching the warmth of others like they were a distant constellation he would never touch.
He didn't blink. He didn't breathe.
The sound of laughter reached him faintly, like an echo bleeding in from another dimension. Her laughter, his answering murmur, the comfortable hush that followed when they didn't need to fill the space with words. They were together in a way that felt simple. Effortless.
And in his mind, he was still sitting on the floor of that dark world, hugging himself tight so the loneliness didn't spill out and drown him.
He wanted to move. He wanted to step closer, to reach for the warmth, to prove he wasn't as untouchable as he had always believed.
But the weight inside him held him down, just as surely as the train's steel bolted him into his seat.
So he stayed there, silent, eyes wide, his chest hollow.
Watching. Always watching. Like a child locked out of heaven.
The dark space shifted. The boy hugging his knees tilted his head back, as though something new had entered the silence.
A shape. A doorframe. A table. Slowly, painfully, the blackness gave way to outlines of a room.
It was a living room—or something close. A low table, wooden floor scuffed by years of shoes, light spilling in from a window that didn't really exist.
He could almost hear it: the faint noise of a TV left running, the tick of a clock on a wall that had no wall to hang on.
And people. He could sense them. A family. His family.
A man slouched on the couch. A woman moving between the kitchen and the table. Voices, light, the vague pulse of life.
But when he tried to look—the faces weren't there.
They blurred, melted, turned into blank ovals like half-finished sketches.
No matter how hard he squinted, the features refused to stay.
The boy in the spotlight rose to his feet, craning his neck upward.
"Why can't I see them?" he whispered, though no sound escaped his throat.
The question echoed in Baeksan's mind.
Why can't I see them?
Why can't I remember the curve of my father's mouth, the tilt of my mother's eyes?
Why is there nothing but outlines where they should be?
He tried harder. Forced details into place. His father's voice—deep, maybe? His mother's hair—dark, and tied back? He searched for fragments, scraps of something solid to hold on to.
But every time he thought he had it, the image slid away like water through his fingers.
All he could see clearly was the feeling.
The heaviness of a man's hand on his shoulder.
The distant sound of someone humming in the kitchen.
Shadows that should have been warmth.
He pressed his palms into his eyes. The harder he tried to drag their faces out of the dark, the further they slipped, until it wasn't just that he couldn't see them—it was as if they had never existed at all.
On the train, his throat tightened. He didn't move, didn't shift, didn't let the others notice. But inside, the thought cut through him like glass:
If I can't even remember their faces, did I ever really have them to begin with?
The blur of voices—hers, cheerful and tentative, his, calm and steady—washed over him again. Laughter that belonged to someone else's world, not his.
And Baeksan sat there, eyes wide, trying not to fall apart in silence.