He returns to the room, barely hearing his own footsteps—as if, over the course of the day, he has finally forgotten how to occupy space. The noise of the school, the streets, and the stairs still hums somewhere at the bottom of his head, but here it arrives muffled, as if through water. The door shuts on its own—not with defiance, but softly, with a tired sigh.
Blue twilight stands in the room. It lies upon the curtains in heavy layers, displacing the remnants of the day. It smells of dust, stagnant air, and the warm bitterness of old textbooks. The scent of time set on pause. It seems the room held its breath two years ago—and never dared to exhale.
The backpack falls to the floor. The sound turns out to be frighteningly concrete—a heavy, leaden thud, like a strike against thick glass. The notebook in his pocket hits the boards, and this sound cuts the silence, leaving a short ringing in his ears. Jun flinches.
He lies on the bed still in his school uniform. He stares at the ceiling. The day plays out inside like a spent algorithm: lessons, faces, corridors, cautious steps. Everything in its place. Without failure. His gaze slides toward the backpack. From the slightly opened edge, the familiar cover looks out provocatively.
The notebook here is superfluous. Foreign. It violates the sterility of the room by its very presence.
Jun stands up. The yellow circle of the desk lamp carves the object out of the twilight. He takes the notebook cautiously, almost fearfully. It lies upon his knees—not heavy, but perceptible, like a question that has not yet been asked.
Under the lamp, the drawing on the cover emerges more clearly. A fox, rendered in colored pencils. The strokes are uneven, stubborn, too attentive to detail. A child's hand. Adults rarely spend so much time on every single hair—they are usually not up to that. A simple drawing turns cheap imitation leather into something valuable.
The chair creaks quietly. The cover rustles, and a sweetish note of old paper mingles with the smell of dust. Jun notices that he is smiling—not from joy, but from recognition. On the first sheet, it is neatly written:
"My Thousand Desires."
"Ambitious," he thinks. A thousand. The number seems almost indecent for a single life. He already imagines banal points, neatly folded dreams of something simple and safe. A light boredom seizes him—the very kind that appears when one knows how everything will end. He thinks about how tomorrow he will have to ascend to the roof again, look around again, returning the notebook to its place, while his own world continues to revolve along its customary gray orbit.
He turns the page.
The paper responds with a soft, confident sound. It smells of finger paints and cheap glue from stickers. The first page is sunny. The handwriting is large; the letters slant to the sides. In the corners are stickers with cats, guarding points 1–10:
"Eat ice cream on the roof." "Learn to whistle." "Pet an owl."
Jun smirks. In the corner of the room, a guitar string resonates quietly—he has not touched it for an eternity. A child, he thinks. Safe. Easy.
He leaves through further.
The handwriting changes. The letters align more evenly; the stickers become more austere. The color of the pencils in the margins darkens: blue, pink, an anxious green. A sense of haste appears in the lines—the words crowd together, as if the author is afraid of not making it in time.
Point No. 43.
Jun freezes.
"See a rainbow without rain."
Nearby is a bold cross. Heavy, pressed into the paper.
He runs a finger over it. The paper yields; the ink smudges slightly. Outside the window is a deep night, where dogs bark, confirming that the world still lives its own life. The cross feels like a splinter beneath the skin. Something inside Jun—quiet, stubborn—tenses. It is spring outside; it smells of ozone and promises, but for the one who wrote this line, time has stopped here.
Point No. 88: "Read that very book with the blue cover while sitting by the seashore."
In the margins is a hurried arrow and a note: "Maybe one day."
No. 97: "Learn to apologize for real."
Jun leaves through further. With every page, the childish, bright world retreats—slowly, centimeter by centimeter, yielding to something heavier. The notebook lies on his knees calmly, but he feels how it changes weight—as if there is less and less air inside it.
He does not close the cover immediately.
Outside the window, the last lights go out. The day that began with the ticking of a clock ends with someone else's unfinished desires. Jun sits in the silence and understands: tomorrow he will no longer be able to simply return this notebook to where he found it.
It knows too much.
And now—so does he.
---
The pages rustle, and with them, the tone changes. It becomes sharper, drier, as if the soft shell has been stripped from the text, exposing the bone. The lightheartedness of the first desires vanishes. Its place is taken by an almost business-like precision.
The items on the list now resemble a duty roster in an intensive care unit: "Make an appointment." "Get the pink tint from Etude House for my birthday." "Ask Dad not to look me in the eyes when he is tired."
Jun reads and feels a circle closing within him. In a Korean family, love is rarely expressed in words. It lives in the geometry of gestures, in the distances between people, in the sound with which a plate is placed before you. These entries were mercilessly Korean: deeds instead of feelings—so as not to drown in pity.
In the margins, the fox flickers again—a tiny ginger beacon among medical terms.
Further on, there are no longer desires, but rules. Statutes of internal defense: "Do not show that I am afraid." "Do not ask for pity."
Jun freezes.
He knows this language too well. For years, he himself had polished his father's shoes to a mirror shine—not for the sake of cleanliness, but so as not to see the reflection of exhaustion in his eyes. And now, this girl is building the same barricades simply to appear normal. Normality here smells of sterility and loneliness.
On one of the pages, there is a drawing. A faded, uneven rainbow. Beneath it, a caption: "Mama said that rain only falls for those who know how to wait."
Jun takes a sip of water to dispel the lump in his throat. This is too similar to his own mother—giving answers with the weight of ancient wisdom, even if the question concerns nothing more than the weather.
He turns the page.
And ceases to breathe.
Point No. 217: "I want to hear that I am important. Not because I am dying, but because I exist."
Under the lamp, the ink seems damp, as if it has retained the warmth of a hand. Jun rereads the line again and again. The word "dying" resonates not with pity, but with a short electric discharge. His heart strikes against his ribcage—dullly, unevenly.
Suddenly, the room seems to fill with the smell of bandages. Behind the children's stickers, something final is hidden. In these words, there is no plea. In them—a demand. Not for compassion. For recognition.
Before his eyes, the platform in Busan flickers. His father, shrinking to a dot. Words about importance that sounded empty then, like counterfeit bills. But here, importance requires something else—something simple and alive: "Have you eaten?", said aloud, eye to eye.
Jun closes his eyes. The items of the list race before him: a week without IVs, the hatred for orange tablets, the dream of giving Father a new belt. In this tally of struggle, there is no room left for his hollowed apathy. While she wrests seconds from time and calls them by name, he has allowed his days simply to drain away.
The ticking of the wall clock becomes distinct. Before, it was background. Now—a pulse. Jun leans back against the chair, feeling his bones creak. He sees himself from the side—a man who chose not to feel.
The notebook lies before him, open, vulnerable.
Jun carefully places his palm on the page—directly beneath line No. 217, covering the words with warmth. He does not know what to do with this next. He does not know how to keep promises.
But the hand does not pull away.
And for now, that is enough.
---
The lamp hummed—barely audible, like a tired insect living out its days. Jun did not notice as the hands of the clock crossed the line where tomorrow begins. Twenty minutes remained until dawn.
He had sat all night over the notebook—the most fascinating and most terrifying book of his life. Page after page, this paper labyrinth would not let him go, not allowing him simply to close his eyes and go to sleep.
A creak. A dry rustle. A page.
Desire No. 500.
Beneath the number was a neat period. And beyond it—emptiness. A blinding, frightening whiteness, screaming louder than any words. Jun runs a finger over the sheet, as if checking: perhaps the words had simply hidden within the paper? No.
She had stopped.
And it was not a pause before a continuation. It was a precipice. The hand could not go further. The ink had run out before the hope—or the hope before the ink.
Jun stood up. Bare feet touched the cold floor, and the frost instantly rose upward, wrenching him from his numbness. He did not search for slippers. This pain was useful.
He approached the window. A dusty windowsill. In the corner—a forgotten eraser, a reminder that mistakes can be rubbed out. In this notebook, nothing had been erased. Everything had been written in finality.
Behind the glass, the city shifted in its pre-dawn half-slumber. Somewhere below, a lone bus rumbled—a hollow, echoing sound. The sky brightened reluctantly, as if doubting whether it was worth beginning a new day.
Before, morning for Jun was simply a continuation of yesterday's nightmare.
Now it seemed fragile. Like an eggshell squeezed in a palm. One extra movement—and it would crack.
He thought of her. Of the person who, knowing their allotted time, spent minutes numbering reality. Counting desires. Ridiculous ones. Desperate ones. Absurd ones. A rainbow without rain. Hearing "you are important"—without a medical subtext.
Jun gripped the edge of the windowsill. His knuckles whitened.
He was alive.
And suddenly a thought came sharply, like a blow to the chest: The one who wrote this loves life more than I do.
The strip of dawn outside the window expanded, filling with a peach-colored light.
"I must find out why," he said into the emptiness of the room.
A pause.
"And return this to her."
This was not a nocturnal promise that dissolves by morning. It was a decision. Firm as the concrete on the school roof.
Jun returned to the desk. He closed the notebook and smoothed the cover with his palm—slowly, almost tenderly. Thus one adjusts a blanket over a sleeping child. He placed it in his backpack, checked the zipper. Then once more.
The ginger fox flickered one last time. In the morning gloom, it seemed to him that it winked.
He looked at his hands. Usually, they trembled. Now—they did not. Clenched into fists, heavy, real.
The clock clicked drily, counting off a new minute.
Very little remained until dawn.
And for the first time in two years, Jun did not fear that the day would begin.