What was the reason that that melody came up so frequently only after I'd lost the person who practiced with me, playing the guitar? Laying buried in the couch, I stared at the piano that stood some distance away. After being expelled, I had thrown away my mother's piano key. It was the only thing I had taken from the ruins of the burned building, it half-burned itself, and I had thrown it out the apartment window. I thought that would end it. I repeated to myself the promise that I would never touch a piano again. Early in the next morning, I took the stairs down, unable to wait for the elevator. I thought I had fallen asleep in a flash, but the sun was already rising. Suddenly, the events of last night came to my mind. There was nothing in the flowerbed outside the window. The security guard told me that the garbage truck had come not too long ago. That was how I lost my mother's piano key.

Even after that, I gave up on music countless times. I won't do it. I won't come back. Music is nothing. But even as I ran away, I knew. I knew that I would start music again, the same way I had run stumbling down those stairs. Music was that kind of subject to me. Within music, I was just as free as I was suffering. I was confused, but I was also lucid. Fear and confidence, hope and despair--it seemed like I was living inside those conflicting emotions.

Suddenly I wanted to play the piano. Inside it, I wanted to meet the me who had only pretended to be strong, even though in reality I was fearful and cowardly. I wanted to pour out curses and make wisecracks and give wounds and hit and destroy and hold and cry. And I didn't want to run away. I wanted to complete the melody that had been made by the guitar and piano. This time, it seemed like I could.

TRANSLATED BY @ORIGAMYFIREFLY. PLEASE DO NOT REPOST.

I swung the door open and came in, then pulled a bag out from the very bottom drawer of the desk. When I turned it inside out, a single piano key fell out with a clack. I threw the half-burned piano key into the trash and laid down on my bed. The fire in my heart wouldn't cool down, my breathing was a mess, and at some point soot had smudged all over my fingers.

I had gone alone to the house that the fire had destroyed, once the funeral was over. I had gone into my mother's room, and had seen that the piano had been burned so badly you could barely recognize its shape. I sunk down at its side. I sat there as the afternoon light came in through the window and then began to fade. The last of the light rolled over a few of the piano keys. What sort of sound would come out if I played them? I had thought about how many times my mother's fingers had touched them. Then I had put one of them in my pocket and left the room.

Almost 4 years had passed since then. The house was quiet. It was insanely quiet. It was past 10, so my father would be asleep, and everything afterwards held its breath. Those were the rules of this house. It was hard to endure this stillness. It wasn't easy, either, to keep to prescribed times and regulations and forms. But nevertheless what I could endure even less than that was the fact of living in this house. I received allowance from my father and ate dinner with my father and was scolded by my father. Rather than opposing him and going astray and causing trouble, I lacked the courage to abandon him and leave the house to live on my own, to make that freedom into action and not just words. I suddenly rose up from the bed and dug the piano key from the trash can under the desk. I opened the window and the night air rushed in. That air slapped me in the face with the strength of everything that had happened that day. I threw the piano key out into that air with all my strength. I listened hard, but I couldn't hear the sound of the key hitting the ground. No matter how hard I thought, I couldn't imagine the sound that piano key would have made. No matter how much time passed, that piano key would never make a sound again. And I would never play the piano again.

TRANSLATED BY @ORIGAMYFIREFLY. PLEASE DO NOT REPOST.

I killed time wandering around the convenience store. I used to sometimes skip school by jumping over the back wall of Songju Jeil Middle School, and I would sometimes wait for the hyungs in the small park across from the convenience store. I looked around me. It had been a while since I'd visited this neighborhood, but nothing much had changed. I remembered that Yoongi hyung and Jungkook's houses were in this area. As I looked around, I saw something that looked like graffiti inside one of the alleyways to my right. It looked like Taehyung's work. I walked over that way.

Unconsciously, I stopped in front of the drawing. It was someone's face, scribbled in rough black lines without any sort of warmth. I say 'someone's,’ but I knew whose face it was. It was Seokjin hyung. As soon as I thought of hyung, someone else's face was superimposed on top of it. It was an entirely different face, but both of those faces looked identical. They had the same eyes. Soulless eyes. Only then did I realize who I had to find.

TRANSLATED BY @ORIGAMYFIREFLY. PLEASE DO NOT REPOST.