MAUERBAUERTRAURIGKEIT: THE INEXPLICABLE URGE TO PUSH PEOPLE AWAY, EVEN CLOSE FRIENDS WHO YOU REALLY LIKE

It was roaring October. I either spent all my time at the mundane lectures, or at the journalism club with Changkyun and Hanbyul, or guarding the library, or simply cooped up in my own room.

I had told Hyungwon that he no longer needed to work part-time at the library, because the money he owed me was long paid, and also because after Wonho was gone from my life there was a vacant slot to do a lot of other things.

I wondered why this emptiness had never occurred before, or maybe it did.

Somehow I could not imagine the life before Wonho. He had left a void in me that was always there, just its presence wasn't felt as much as this before.

"Sun Hee," a voice spoke breaking me from my trance. The tall and blond man stared at me with his deep blue eyes. "Coffee?" His eyes sparkled like the glimmering water under the pouring sunlight.

At that second, I had a feeling of déjà vu, as if this exact event had happened to me before, the same blue eyes with the same tilt in the neck, 'coffee?' the same voice too.

Then I realized that almost the exact thing had happened in the library before when I had noticed Alex for the first time.

I was practically losing my mind at this point. "Sure," I replied hugging myself with my hands. It was warm inside but I felt a sudden chill on my skin, hair standing up against the back of my head.

Alex asked me if I'd like to come with him when my part-time job was over, when I was shutting the library down, only for him to take me to a 24/7 public library instead.

I didn't know what I was thinking when I had gone along with him, certainly not a date as it clearly as the day wasn't. I just wanted to escape the university—job—apartment cycle, even for a small while.

"Thanks," I told him as he handed me a paper cup filled with instant coffee, the smell sweet and the cup warm against my palm.

"Whenever you want to go back I will stop my studying and take you back to your place, if you wouldn't mind me to," Alex said in his accented Korean. The six feet boy was almost drowning in the pile of books before him.

I nodded a yes to him. "When are you going to go back?"

"I just spend my night here," he flashed me a quiet grin and then he opened up his laptop and sat uptightly. Probably feeling my questioning eyes on him, he looked my way and added, "oh, for collecting my research material."

I suddenly recalled that he had told me he was already an P.H.D doctor (at such a young age too to my surprise) and came back to Korea from the USA as the government here had agreed to fund his experiments.

For some reason, his identity kept eluding my mind. I remembered that one of those vague days, the days before the spring boy came to my life I was legitimately afraid of strange men and going out alone at night.

And now I was sitting at an almost empty, a bit dim and eerily quiet 24/7 library with a boy whom I only knew from his visits at my part-time job, and that too for a handful amount of time.

I sipped on the coffee and it burned my tongue a little, the taste as extra sweet as any instant coffee would be. There was a Murakami novel in front of me but I could barely concentrate on any of the words, my eyes darted towards the pile before him, and glazed over the few quantum physics book he had in front of him. The rest of the books and what kind of complexities they contained, I had no idea.

"Can I ask you what you're working on?" I asked him in the lowest voice I could measure, I had to lean a little forward and I received a strong smell of coffee coming from him. Alex basically lived on two substances— caffeine, and nicotine.

"You don't have to whisper. Practically no one's here and they don't really mind," he said, enunciating his words slowly and deliberately. All the while his eyes scrutinized the opened laptop before him. His brows were furrowed.

Then the crease between his dark blond brows disappeared and he looked at me. For a second he pondered to himself before answering, "to put it simply I wonder how can an object rush through a speed that's way higher than the light's and remain unscathed."

He kept watching me as if waiting for some kind of approval and so I nodded as if I understood everything, when in reality I was just as confused as the dead ant floating upside down on the discarded paper cup filled with stale coffee which someone had left on the table. Alex went back to his work.

His presence felt as natural to me as oxygen in the air. I asked myself why, it wasn't like Alex had a mellow personality but he was quite eccentric in his own way.

His blond hair, blue eyes, tall, and lanky frame, and accented Korean mixed with perfect English pulled everyone like bugs when they spot a light in a dark evening.

And Alex was always straightforward, he never hesitated before speaking or doing a thing. The fact that he didn't know me any better but abruptly told me to join him here said about his personality.

Still, his overbearing presence was somehow calming to me. Most of the time, Alex was lost in his own world too.

"Moon Sun Hee," again his voice brought me back, making me focus on the blue eyes staring at me. His laptop was shut in front of him, plugged into a charger to the electric socket under the table.

"I was asking you what you wanted to do after graduating," he said, his hands folded and placed before him on the wooden surface.

"You did?"

"Yeah. If you don't mind me asking this too," he pushed away a lock of blond bangs dangling before his eyes and continued. "You seem often sad and lost in your thoughts. Is there anything bothering you?"

"No, I'm fine," I shook my head to the sides a little and then locked my eyes with his. "After I graduate," I paused, hesitating. "I don't know. Just any regular job will do maybe."

I didn't know why I hadn't mentioned my dream to travel around the world someday and write blogs. Wasn't I entirely crazy about that idea? Wasn't my sole reason for moving to Seoul to study journalism was because I had big dreams to pursue?

All of a sudden, I felt hollowed out, as if something was gnawing at my ribcage and eating away from the inside. I didn't know what was wrong with me and I wasn't liking this strange and empty feeling at all.

When I looked up, Alex was still staring at me with his ocean eyes, but rather than drowning me in they somewhat filled me in and lifted me, I was floating. Before he could ask what was wrong again, I asked him. "What about you? After your research here is done?"

He bit the side of his lower lip, thinking to himself and tilting his head a little to the left. "It will probably take me years though, maybe even a lifetime."

"Your work must be really fascinating." My vague statement probably revealed that I actually had no clue about his research topic, or what he was working for, at all.

He silently inspected me for a second, his eyes sparkling in the dim and brown interior of the empty library. Midnight had already passed by then, and I did not feel any pull towards the idea of leaving for home any time soon.

He pulled out his laptop from underneath the table. I saw the lit-up screen reflecting on his translucent eyes. He typed in a few things, long fingers moving swiftly and precisely on the keyboard as if every movement was counted.

"I have always had this idea, ever since I was a kid," he said, "it may sound strange at first but bear with me."

I nodded even though he was not looking at me but at his computer's screen. Albeit as if on cue, he spoke right after my nod.

"I've always wondered what if an object could travel through space and time."

"Okay," I said. What were the odds of him and I being interested in the similar subject matters?

"There's just so many things we don't know about the universe yet. What if there's not only one you and me but a few others, maybe a million others who have gone through this exact moment but with maybe a few changes happening. Those little changes were just as distinct to form a completely different line of time and space, like another whole universe coexisting." He was talking rapidly and viscerally, the words flowing out of him. He hadn't realized just when he had switched from accented Korean to fluent English.

I was having a hard time following but I kept at it.

"You know, it may sound so silly but I've been making prototype objects and working on them ever since I was seventeen, so ten years have passed already since then." He looked at me for the first time, the ocean in his eyes raging with ardor now. Blond locks fell on his forehead and ears.

"Here's the thing, five of them burned down, four exploded into bits, but there was the one, the last one I had made a few months ago, it just popped up like that and vanished." He made a grand gesture with his hands, spreading them wide in the air. "I could not retract it back. Thankfully I had installed a tracking device in it. Guess what?" He beamed.

"It's giving me a signal. It's out there, somewhere, and I just have no idea where. I just know it's alive but I don't know where," he added.

I did not know what expression I was wearing right then, but whatever it was, it urged him to speak more. "Maybe it's just lying in a gutter somewhere in Georgetown, USA, and is unable to show me its location. But the fact that it upped and vanished like that is a matter of concern itself."

"I can't help but think if it did actually end up jumping from this line of time and space to another the government would conduct my research illegal and shun me out. Just imagine how many criminals can do whatever the hell they want and you can never catch them because— by the time you're trying , they're gone from this era and this world right here, entirely and forever," he added, and after a very short dramatic pause swiveled his laptop towards me.

By that time, my breathing had almost stopped. It was no coincidence that I had met Alex, Alenxander Chae, to be precise. Just like his occupation, his full name kept escaping my memory. Though I was sure from this point forward, I was to never forget Alex.

"Why are you looking at me like that? Yes, the prototype is a watch," he let out a short humorous chuckle. "Just always admired those superhero comics."

It was no coincidence either that he had a sketch of a watch on his laptop's screen, similar, if not the same to Hyungwon's watch.

Meeting Alex was as natural as seasons changing, but even that slow and steady process could bring about disastrous calamities. It had never occurred to me that somehow this half Korean boy I had met only a month ago would bring a tornado in my life.

"It's not too tacky looking, is it? I do care about style. Why do you look like you want to cry?" He asked me with parted lips. Now those eyes really drowned the floating me and I started noticing the similarities between Alex and Hyungwon.

The same plump lips, black eyes but with that feeling of the vastness of the sea behind them, tall and slim frame, the long deft fingers and bony wrists, the habit of smoking and reading comic books.

Hyungwon's black eyes that were actually like mine too, and black silky hair exactly like mine, which differed so much from Alex's blond and wavy curls.

"I need to go." I took my sweater and my bag, getting up to leave.

Seeing me, he also attempted to quickly clean away the mess of books and paper cups before him and shut his laptop. "Alright, then I'll just-"

"I will take a taxi. I need to meet someone."

"You sure?" He asked.

"Yeah." And so I left, to meet Hyungwon, Chae Hyungwon. For the life of me, I just could not take the notion and form it into words in my head, even though I was almost sure now it was the only truth, not almost, but wholly sure.

That Chae Hyungwon— I tried my best for my insides not to fall apart as they shook in violent tremors— that Hyungwon was the son of Alex, and, me. 

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A/n: a lot of readers actually predicted hyungwon being related to sunny.

How do you feel about this plot twist?