On one of the hardest days of my life, I met her.
At that point, my life looked successful from the outside, but inside it was unraveling.
The company was consuming me. Every meeting felt like a test I was about to fail. Expectations pressed in from every direction, and mistakes were no longer mistakes, they were headlines waiting to happen. I carried responsibility like a weight on my back, and no matter how much I worked, it never felt like enough. I smiled when I had to. I performed when I was expected to. But when I was alone, I felt hollow.
That day, something inside me finally gave in.
I left without a plan and ended up at Cheonggyecheon. I sat by the lake, staring at the water, letting time pass without counting it. My phone buzzed in my pocket. Messages I didn't want to read. Calls I didn't want to answer. I ignored them all. For once, I wanted to exist without being needed, judged, or watched.
That was when she arrived.
She walked into my line of sight and sat right in front of me, as if she had chosen that exact spot without knowing I was there. The way she moved was calm, unguarded. When I looked at her, she was smiling softly, lost in her own thoughts. It wasn't a smile meant for anyone else, and that made it impossible to ignore. Something shifted inside me. I remember thinking, absurdly, that she looked like someone who belonged to a different world. A quieter one.
She had short hair and warm brown eyes. Those eyes held something steady, something grounding. It was obvious she was a foreigner, and for a moment I hesitated. I told myself to stay where I was. To let the moment pass. But courage has a strange way of appearing when you least expect it, especially when you are already broken.
I stood up and sat beside her.
She didn't know who I was. That fact alone felt like relief. To her, I was just another stranger by the water. Her presence was gentle. Her scent was soft, almost sweet, and it reminded me of spring, the kind that comes after a long, punishing winter. As we sat there, the noise in my head began to fade. The pressure, the fear, the constant feeling of being watched all loosened their grip.
For the first time in a long while, I felt light.
I don't know why I thought of her as my light.
Maybe because she appeared when everything felt dark.
Or maybe because, without knowing it, she made me feel human again.
On one of the hardest days of my life, I met her.