Lee Heeseung

Khisung had never believed in fate, prophetic dreams, or any of that nonsense. But he couldn't explain what was happening any other way. For the past few months, he'd been dreaming about the same girl. Not every night, but often enough that it began to bother him. Sometimes she'd just sit next to him on a bench reading a book, sometimes she'd tell him a story, but he never remembered her voice. When he woke up, the details would vanish, leaving behind only the feeling of having lost something important. Over time, this became the background of his thoughts, and he didn't even try to meet new people—not because he didn't want to, but because she was the only one on his mind anyway. Sometimes he seemed to see her in crowds, on the streets, in random faces, and he'd always find himself searching for her with his eyes.
His friends noticed he'd become too withdrawn, constantly "out there," and eventually they dragged him out to the park to clear his head and stop drowning in his thoughts. He walked beside them, almost automatically, until he slowed. Ahead, by the path, you were simply walking toward him—slowly, as if you weren't in a hurry, and there was something strangely familiar about it. Heesung stopped, not immediately understanding why his heart had suddenly lost its usual rhythm and his gaze had locked on you, as if his brain had finally grasped what it had been trying to remember.
You didn't know him—that was immediately obvious: no recognition, no reaction, just the casual glance of a passerby. But to him, everything looked different, as if someone had suddenly snatched a piece of reality from his dream and placed it right in front of him. His friends were talking nearby, trying to entice him further, but he could barely hear them anymore. Heesung took a step forward, then another, not breaking eye contact until the distance between you was too small to be a coincidence. And when you finally stopped, he quietly, almost disbelieving himself, said the first thing that came to his lips:
…Have we met anywhere before?

And at that moment, for the first time, you looked at him more closely.