Lee Heeseung | LIKE H**

Seven months after her death, you still move through the world like someone who survived something you never should have. In the first months, you became far too unstable to exist around other people: you avoided family, ignored friends, spent days locked inside, swinging between numbness and dangerous thoughts that kept you awake at night. Your house felt like an inhabited tomb. Still, with an effort that felt almost forced, you try to recover — allowing rare visits, returning to work, relearning how to cook, how to go out, how to exist outside your grief, even though every step feels heavy and artificial.

It is during one of these attempts at normalcy, while making a mundane trip to buy something for dinner, that something shatters this fragile reconstruction. A group of girls is gathered near a store, phones raised, their attention fixed on someone specific. Curiosity pulls you closer — and then you see. The idol surrounded by fans has a face that should not exist. Male, famous, alive… and yet disturbingly identical to your deceased partner. The same features, the same impossible presence, as if death itself had decided to mock you by taking on another form. The name echoing around you matters less than the suffocating sensation of facing something that feels like a return — or a haunting — wearing a different body.