It had been almost a week and a half since I had saved that guy Mark and other than going to the temple to pray for his recovery. I had done nothing at all, not even left my house, which was a pretty bad rut to be in. It felt strange, not getting up early, not doing everything for a grown man while he treated me like his string puppet.
I didn’t have to do his laundry, order him food, clean up his house, grab the paper, or turn on the TV to the news.
It surprised me to realize it, but I hadn’t turned on my computer or checked the news at all in all that time.
I guess it made sense, as my body held this revolting aversion to the idea of seeing anything that would remind me of Mr. Lee Ahn Jun. Or how he would receive everyone's bountiful praises for his amazing new ingenuitive comic… Yet again.
In all that time I had checked my phone screen probably over three hundred times, sadly, like an angsty teenager waiting for her crush. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed Hyeri hadn’t contacted me even once.
Was I really so far back in her mind? She knew I did the work for Lee Ahn Jun; she had even read that comic once and should know that the material was mine.
But she hadn’t thought to ask me how I was doing since it’s worldwide online release, not once.
‘Yes, but you haven’t gone to see her in all that time either… Have you?’ My own brain betrayed me with that single thought and I threw my phone beside me in a small fit of annoyance.
“I always contact her first… what was this a one-sided love?” I pouted and kicked my feet on the couch in annoyance.
“Lee Ahn Jun!!! I should sue you until you are completely broke, you bastard!” I yelled to the empty room.
It left a wave of anger in me, my chest and stomach were wound so tight it felt like I was boiling. I wanted to turn around, march back to his house and smash his computer. But I knew that if I did so all that would happen was me becoming even further disgraced.
I got up and walked over to my desk and stared at my computer and drawing tablet. They were exactly as I had left them. I had avoided them, I had avoided coming to sit down. I knew what I would find, a whole day of work where I had sketched the death of an innocent character just because I was angry and didn’t count my own life as precious. Just because I had given up. I had promised by my hand, I would never make anyone die ever again. And in my fit of anger, I had broken that promise.
I felt dirty… ashamed… upset. I knew that Mark was just a character. But to me, I had been drawing him since I flew over to Korea five years ago. He was the very first thing I started to tentatively draw back when I was breaking away from my old life.
He had grown and developed with me and so had his story. So much of what I had put into the story had been from my own life and experiences, I had used the new environment around me. Like a canvas to create a world I wished existed for me. I even created my house and everything how it would be if I was there myself. My drawing tablet, my pen, my computer, it was all brought to life in this world I had spent five years creating.
A world that revolved around South Korea and China, the places I had moved to after Ryan had passed. I had used the new fire of excitement to en passion, my comic… to bring Mark and his sordid, hard past together.
And so to everyone else it was just a comic. Each chapter is a short five to eight-minute read. But to me, he was alive.
Because I had poured my soul into this one, even more so than the one that was stolen.
But a week ago I had murdered again.
For the second time in my life, I had become a murderer.
Murderer...
I sighed and plopped ungraciously into my computer chair, which creaked as if to protest.
“Let’s stop wallowing in self-pity and undo what you did. Just erase the chapter and change his fate. Don’t make it so morbid. Just because you are unhappy doesn’t mean he has to have an unhappy ending. Right?”
“You got this.” I cheered myself on and bravely clicked the button to turn my computer on for the first time since that night Mark had been here and the storm had killed it.
The screen whirled back on and the computer booted up seamlessly without even a second of delay.
I let out the breath I had been holding in. I may have pretended to be cool, pretended that I didn’t need the computer anymore because I wasn’t going to work or draw anymore, but internally the panic that I had been swimming in inside my brain settled and sucked out of me. Almost like my inner self had unplugged the drain and it was all rushing out of me.
I would not have to spend thousands of dollars to get a replacement when I didn’t have a job to make money anymore.
I opened my drawing program and clicked opened recently. And my mouth dropped open.
“What!”
“Where did it all go?” my voice echoed into the empty room with no one to hear or answer me. The little black cat that wandered around outside my house on the hillside stared at me for a moment before jumping off the sill outside my window and walking off.
I had disturbed it, and now it would meander off until some later time when it would come back to stare at me through the window again.
I pulled open my recovery and checked my entire hard drive for the file.
Search: Lines Crossed, Chapter 184...
Searching…
0 Results.
I stood up. Leaned forward, my eyes staring listlessly at the screen.
My fingers erased chapter 184 slowly, one character at a time.
Search: Lines Crossed
Searching…
0 Results.
My stomach dropped out and my legs became jello. I sank back in the chair.
‘Nothing? Nothing at all? How… Had I deleted it when I fell asleep on my computer that night? Has the power outage corrupted the files? Why were they not even in the recycle bin? What had I done? All of my work…’
‘Gone…’
‘Five years are all gone…’
I buried my face in my hands, the stress making me curl my fingers inwards to cup my face in despair.
‘Hyeri!’ She could help. She was great with computers.
She could definitely get my stuff back.
I called a taxi, it didn’t take too long till one was outside the front. I threw my hood up as the wind blew against the back of it. It was one of the reasons I loved this little old house. It was still in the city but yet far enough outside of it that it could be considered elusive. I looked back at it fondly. All my troubles from last week seemed heavy and daunting. But the sun was shining and I was off to see Hyeri!
I knocked on the dark red door to her apartment holding my bag with my computer and tablet. It was only my second time knocking, but my anxiety at the missing work was building up and felt as if it were a disease slowly infringing on my sanity. Crawling its way up my skin to devour me whole. The panic was like a knife I knew I should never wield, but was sharp and dangerous. It put me in a bad position where I could do nothing but clutch it tightly to me despite knowing it would hurt.
I knocked a third time.
“Yes, yes, I am coming.” Hyeri threw open the door, her soft angelic voice a little miffed at the inconvenience.
Her eyebrows shot up and she stared at me in confusion. Then her face grew positively bored and inconvenienced.
“Can I help you?”
“Huh…. Yah, very funny.” I laughed. “That huge storm last week seemed to have fried my computer worse than chicken. Can you please take a look at it for me.
She rolled her eyes.
“What?” She paused, but crossed her arms.
I stared at Hyeri in disbelief. She had been my first and only friend when I had come here to Seoul and despite how I felt like sometimes I was unimportant to her. She was certainly important to me. I sometimes felt like I held her in more regard. Staring at her this way I realized my guesses might actually have held an active truth in it.
But there was something different about her.
It was subtle, but it was there.
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