CH 111

“It’s alright.”

Lee-yeon paused at the frail sound of his voice.

“Chae-woo, why do you seem so worn out? Is something wrong?”

“….”

“Do you have a fever or something?”

Lee-yeon hurriedly reached to feel his forehead, but rather than warm, it was cold as ice.

“It’s nothing.”

As Kwon Chae-woo recalled the words of the strange shaman, his face hardened. An inexplicably bad feeling washed over him. He hugged Lee-yeon’s waist closer to him and clung onto her tightly.

“How is the tree? Do you think it’ll be alright?”

“I think we’ll have to keep an eye on it for the next couple weeks. We took care of everything urgent, but who knows how well it’ll recover…”

“You did a great job, Lee-yeon.”

Before long, the sun was beginning to set. Its color was ethereal, like that of violets set loose in water. As the wind blew, the landscape that hung at the eaves of the village shrine wailed brilliantly. As she spoke, Lee-yeon gently stroked the tree that had gone through so much.

“Chae-woo, come to think of it, that too was like a sort of sacred tree to me.”

“You mean the singing tree?”

Kwon Chae-woo felt around for her hand and grasped it. Soon, the two stood before the disassembled tree.

“It was my greatest memory, and my greatest source of comfort. You could say it’s my guardian.”

“Every time I hear that, I feel sour. It seems like your secret first love.” Kwon Chae-woo made a face.

He was familiar with the singing tree that Lee-yeon occasionally told stories about. When they ate, when they made love and shared their feelings, when they held each other tightly and dozed off—anytime they shared small spaces, Lee-yeon cautiously let her guard down and opened up, and the topic was always the tree of her childhood. That was the only memory that Lee-yeon spoke of with a smile.

A tree that sings…

It could have just been Lee-yeon’s imagination, something she created in her loneliness. That’s why anytime Kwon Chae-woo heard these anecdotes, he wished to insert himself. Although he was the one who lost his memory, sometimes Lee-yeon seemed more like the empty one.

“Then I’ll tell you, and only you. Who my sacred tree was, that is.”

“Just please don’t say something like, ‘It turned out to be a male tree.’ I don’t want you to resent me for nitpicking about the gender of a tree.”

“It was a girl.”

“A girl?” Funnily enough, Kwon Chae-woo’s face filled with relief. His expression softened as he tucked Lee-yeon’s baby hairs flying in the wind behind her ears.

“I’m not a fool, you know. I was in high school at the time. Too old to believe in fairytales.”

Kwon Chae-woo was fairly certain she had still believed, but he suppressed the smile he felt creeping up.

“I was just thrown off at first. I realized soon after that it was a person playing. And not the tree singing at all.”

“….”

“One day, when I cried, I heard a comforting melody, and when I laughed, I heard dance music. And another day, it purposely played the wrong notes, like it was teasing me.”

Then Chae-woo’s vision suddenly became shaky and Lee-yeon’s face blurred, becoming two and then three faces.

Her side profile, that of a woman over thirty, now looked as if she were a teenage schoolgirl in uniform. He furrowed his eyebrows and tried to refocus his eyes.

“Since then, I’ve often left post-it notes and slips of paper on trees. I ask who they are, what kind of song they sing, and I tell them how I feel, like a diary. It’s embarrassing, but I’ve also written that I’d like to meet them. I used to be so giddy at the thought that maybe even I could make a friend…”

“….”

“Of course, I never got any responses.”

Chae-woo slowly blinked and instinctively gripped Lee-yeon’s hand tightly. ‘If I don’t grab her right now, if I don’t hold her in my arms…’ Those kinds of strange thoughts kept mucking about in his mind, like black ink.

“Then at one point, the village had become a bit boisterous, and I helped a girl I knew hide. Before she left, she told me to try digging under the tree I often visited.”

“….”

“That was the first gift I received in my life. I think that girl was the singing tree. You see, there under that tree were all the old records that I had heard before, that had been played for me.”

An intense nausea that made him want to vomit his insides gushed through him, like a sticky swamp. Lee-yeon’s voice, usually pleasant to his ears, sharply pierced his flesh and cut him inside somewhere. Kwon Chae-woo chewed the inside of his lip and tried hard to repress his repulsion.