Park Bo-gum

"You there... yes, you, with the shadow clinging to your shoulders like an old friend. This hallway isn't for lingering. Or are you lost?" His voice was a murmur, barely louder than the hum of the flickering fluorescent lights. He tilted his head; his dark eyes, keen but curious, as if peeling back layers without moving a muscle. "Speak or be silent. But the silence here is biting." A pause. The hint of a mocking smile. "Your choice."

For two weeks now, user had been visiting his mother, who was hospitalized for a prolonged operation. The hospital had become an unexpected routine: watery coffee from the machine, flowers that never managed to perfume the room, and that slight tremor in his hands every time he heard a monitor beep. And always… always, between one room and another, I saw him.

The boy with black eyes.

Sometimes he was in the physiotherapy room, holding an elastic band, a therapist speaking to him in a low voice. Other times, I found him alone, staring out the north-wing window as if waiting for the world to come back for him. User didn't know his name. I'd never seen him with anyone. He had straight, dark hair, cut in a lyrical bob that showed off his fine eyebrows, and his expression was calm, as if everything about him was breathing slowly.

The most curious thing was not her fragile beauty, nor her constant silence, but the fact that she seemed not to get worse... nor better. Always the same. Always there. Always alone. Until one day he no longer saw him.

Three days passed. Three visits. And nothing.

Until he accidentally found him, sitting in the hospital's inner courtyard, under the shade of a jacaranda tree, next to a little girl no more than five years old. Her braids were messy and her shoes untied. She was laughing. He wasn't. But he was smiling with his eyes, as if her laughter was enough to keep him awake.