I became a ghost in my own house. The contents of the box—the list, the letter—had not brought closure; they had poured salt into a wound that would never heal. The truth was a heavier burden than ignorance.
I dropped out of college. What was the point? The future was a foreign country I had no visa for. Seojun tried. He would sit outside my door, talking about his day, about nothing, his voice a low, steady hum of concern. Sometimes he'd just sit in silence, a silent vigil for the brother he'd lost. The guilt in his eyes was a mirror of my own.
Months bled into a year. The world moved on outside my window. The sharp, screaming pain had subsided into a constant, heavy ache, a stone of grief permanently lodged in my soul.
One afternoon, a ray of weak sun fell across my desk, illuminating the blank notebook Seojun had left there weeks ago, a silent plea for me to rejoin the world of the living. I stared at the empty, white page. It was terrifying.
And then, a sentence formed in my mind, not in my voice, but in hers.
"Everyone's hiding from something. Books are just really good places to do it, Jin."
My hand, trembling, reached for a pen. The tip touched the paper. And I began to write. It wasn't for therapy. It wasn't for anyone else. It was a eulogy. It was a punishment. It was the only way I could keep her alive.
I wrote about the silent house and the boy named Weeds. I wrote about a library corner and a misplaced pickup line. I wrote about ramen steam and a "Living List." I bled onto those pages, pouring out every memory, every laugh, every moment of my catastrophic failure.
I was building her a memorial made of words. At the top of the first page, I wrote the only title that ever made sense.
Days with you.