It's Okay to Run Away

"All right. Then I'll hold on to this sketchbook."

The man took the contract without a fuss. Woo-yeon nodded and carefully looked down at what she held in her hand.

She clenched her fist. The letters on the check were finally beginning to feel real.

Before I go home, I'll stop at the bank. I'll put this money toward my admission fee. And in two months, I'll enroll at the Seolim Arts University I've dreamed of for so long. I'll hole up there for four years and draw the pictures I love until I've drawn myself thoroughly, gloriously sick of them. If this is the chance that finally gets me out from under Dad's hand — then instead of bungee jumping off the Han River without a cord, I might actually get to live. To thirty, to forty, maybe even past that. Maybe it'll even be fun. Maybe it'll even be good.

Whatever comes after that, I can think about when I get there. So for now — this far. Only this far.

Woo-yeon lifted her head, the check still gripped tight in both hands. Salty drops fell onto the marshmallows melting into white. Plip. Plip-plip. Once again, instead of telling her not to cry, the man only patted her shoulder in silence, and kept patting until the tears ran out.

Thank you, mister. Thank you so much.

When Woo-yeon bowed her head deeply, he tipped his own in return, accepting the gesture. Even a thing that small looked elegant on him. Beautiful, even.

It occurred to her, suddenly, to wonder why he had come to Mapo Bridge at all. Unless he was some Avengers hero who popped up out of nowhere to save people in crisis, or the kind of vision that had once made the Little Match Girl so perfectly happy — a man like him would have had his own reason for standing on Mapo Bridge on a night this cold.

"Mister, can I ask you something?"

"Hm? Go ahead."

His chocolate-brown irises sank slowly beneath his lids, and a smile welled into the corners of his eyes. Before she knew it, the air around them had gone thick with the sweet scent of chocolate.

"What were you struggling with, that you came here?"

"What were you struggling with, that you came here?"

"What makes you think I was struggling? A man can come out for a breath of fresh air, you know…"

Woo-yeon turned her face aside and made a face. Pfft. For someone who'd been frozen stiff as a dead fish, he sure had a breezy way of talking. He seemed to realize that one wasn't going to fly, because he offered something else.

"…Well. Perhaps God sent me here to save you."

The answer was so unexpected that her tears dried right up. So he was a believer? Then what had God been doing the whole time she was getting the life beaten out of her — and the moment she actually decided to die, He dragged some perfectly decent stranger off the street and planted him here? Woo-yeon barely managed to shove the words back down before they flew out of her mouth, and objected as carefully as she could.

"I, um, that's… I don't believe in God. Or Buddha. Or Allah."

"Ah. If that sits wrong with you, then let's just say you and I were fated to meet on Mapo Bridge today."

"Eugh! That's even worse! Fateful meetings are the thing I hate most in the entire world! They give me the creeps!"

She shuddered on reflex — then froze, shoulders hunching. He'd meant it kindly, and she'd gone and told him it made her skin crawl. If she'd answered her father like that, a slap would already have been on its way. But the man didn't get angry. He only answered, mildly:

"…Fair enough. I suppose that might have sounded a bit much."

"I, that's — it's not about it sounding like a bit much. I hate the meeting-by-fate thing itself. Completely."

"Why?"

"Because my mom and dad met by fate, and fell in love by fate, and had me by fate. If you meet someone by fate, everything's finished. It's over."

The man laughed at the rush of words pouring out of her. Tried to laugh, rather. But the forced smile died almost at once, and the corners of his mouth began, slowly, to twist. Woo-yeon waited for him — the way he had waited for her.

"My father passed away the day before yesterday. I was on my way back this morning from laying him to rest at the family burial ground."

His tone was still even, but Woo-yeon could tell it had cost him something to open his mouth. She held his eyes and tried to feel her way into whatever was behind them.

"Did you… come here because you wanted to cry?"

"No."

"Because you were thinking of your father?"

"…No."

He smiled, faintly.

She'd had a feeling it wasn't that. Behind the well-practiced smile, Woo-yeon had no trouble picking out the dense darkness, the hint of chaos. There was an emotion in him powerful enough to swallow even the grief that should have come first — and it was a color close to suppressed rage. She hesitated, wondering if she was allowed to say it, then asked as carefully as she could.

"Did your father maybe… stab you in the back on his way out?"

His eyes went wide. Wide enough that the dark brown of his irises showed round and complete. He wasn't smiling anymore, and Woo-yeon knew her guess had landed. He didn't admit it, though.

"My father wasn't a bad man. He loved me very much. He was a good person."

He didn't entirely deny it, either. His voice dropped, and he added:

"And my worries… they're too well-fed and luxurious to even deserve being called worries."

Woo-yeon looked up at him steadily. The sepia irises that had felt so warm and sweet now looked as if they were holding a deep, private pain.

"Still… if there was a complete stranger standing next to me, I think I wanted to ask, just once."

She blinked. Their eyes met. It was a gaze well practiced at enduring pain in silence.

Then tell me, mister. We're complete strangers to each other. That's exactly what we are.

At last, carefully, his lips opened.

"If you had to choose only one — between 'the work that fits me, the work I desperately want,' and 'the work I am obligated to take responsibility for'…"

Why is that even a question, mister? You do the thing that fits you. The thing you desperately want.

She swallowed the answer before it could come out as if it were obvious. He wouldn't have come all the way to Mapo Bridge if the obvious answer had been enough. When Woo-yeon blinked, he refined the thought with care and tried again.

"No — more than that. If you had to choose between 'the path where I am happy' and 'the path where many people are happy.'"

Woo-yeon read, slowly, what his face was saying, what his whole body was saying, and sat with the two sentences for a moment.

The two problems were the same problem.

The path that fit him, the path he desperately wanted, was the path where he was happy. The work he was obligated to take on was the path where many people would be happy — and he would not.

And the father who had stabbed him in the back on his way out of the world.

At last she could read it: his face, his body, the reason a man who had just come from a funeral was standing on Mapo Bridge. He had come here because he wanted to run. Same as her. She didn't know what burden his father had left behind, only that the road he was supposed to walk with that burden on his back was too hard.

But unlike her, he didn't even know that running was what he wanted. Her lips started to tremble before she realized it. Was she really allowed to say this? Woo-yeon worried, and the man waited, and a shaking voice slipped out of her like a whisper.

His eyes went wide.

"Other people don't care how hard it is for you. Whether a million people are happy or ten million people are happy — if you're the one who's suffering, what does that have to do with anything? There's no reset button in life. What could possibly matter more than you being happy?"

"Run? Did you just say… run away?"

His face twisted hard. It was clearly not the answer he had expected. Woo-yeon knew she'd been right. She nodded quickly.

"Yes. Run. You only take a beating when you can't dodge it. Just endure it this once, you'll get through it — that's how you end up beaten to death by your father or your husband. If you can dodge it, dodge it. If you can run, run. And if you can be happy wherever you ran to — then live happy. That's allowed."

He hesitated with his eyes still wide, then slowly shook his head.

"A proper adult can't spend a whole life just… running. There are such things as responsibility and duty. You have to be able to think of other people before yourself."

Woo-yeon could tell he was reacting to the word run with more heat than it needed. She didn't know why. She only knew that hearing that stuffy, goody-two-shoes answer — responsibility, duty, other people before yourself — made her furious, and sorry for him, all at once. She didn't have time to sand the edges down. The words came out raw.

"Mister, that's not a 'proper adult.' That's a sucker."

His eyebrows jumped. She flinched; her toes curled in her shoes. Oh no. Was that too blunt? But how was she supposed to dress up a fact that accurate?

Woo-yeon hated rounding things off into something vague and palatable. If she was going to speak at all, she believed in saying it clearly and precisely — better to keep her mouth shut otherwise. Given that no amount of beatings from her father had ever corrected this, it was probably just the way she was born.

"If being a sucker is what it takes to be a proper adult, then don't be a proper adult. Be a fake one. People around you will fall all over themselves to accommodate you anyway."

"Does that look good to you?"

"Of course it doesn't look good to other people. But for the person living it? It's the easiest thing in the world. Just look at my dad. He does whatever the hell he wants and nobody can say a damn—"

She clamped her mouth shut and dropped her head. She was out of her mind. How could she possibly put her father in the same sentence as a man like this? And of course, he asked it with a face that said he couldn't believe what he'd just heard.

"So you want to become someone like your father too, Woo-yeon? Is that the kind of parent you're planning to be?"

She shook her head. For all her talk that a life like her father's was the sweetest deal going, she had no desire to become that kind of person — and she couldn't have, even if she'd wanted to.