[Mimi/Seunghee] Secretly, Secretly (for @foryoobin)

[omgexchangemod]

Title: Secretly, Secretly
Written for: @foryoobin / binuni
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Mimi/Seunghee
Word-Count: 5411 words
Summary: Seunghee has accidentally acquired an imaginary friend.
Author Notes: this was betaed by myself so sorry for any typos! pinch hit for @foryoobin. 


She sits by Seunghee’s chair in pretty much all classes. She stares at Seunghee the entire time – not subtly, not out of the corner of her eye, but fully facing Seunghee rather than the professor in front of them, her head and shoulders turned, a silent smile on her lips. More than once, Seunghee has glanced around the large classroom, searching for acknowledgement of the situation by her classmates, even if in shape of a discriminatory, cursory side-eye… but nothing. None of the professors say anything either, even when Seunghee talks in class to answer or ask a question, which is usually addressed normally by the teachers, just like they’d do to any other student. Not a comment. Not a look.

Therefore, Seunghee reaches a simple conclusion regarding the situation. Her beautiful wavy-haired desk neighbor is, of course, non-existent… a figment of her imagination. It’s not hard for Seunghee to conclude that she has gone insane. Deep inside, she always knew this day would come.

What a quaint way to do so, though, she thinks to herself while walking down the hallway, aware of the figure that follows her from afar. The image of the girl is so vivid, and yet… she doesn’t seem to bear too close resemblance with anyone Seunghee knows or admires; where had she gotten such a detailed projection from, then? But then again, Seunghee never looked at the girl in the eye, hadn’t even done so when they first met. When was it again? Seunghee remembers greeting her, but she’s always been bad at making eye contact for greetings. Anyway, it’s pointless to think about that now…

Or is it? At this point, Seunghee has walked down the hallways, then down the halls, the campus, and into her usual path in a pensive haze. That one path, narrow and surrounded with greenery, is usually empty of other people except for Seunghee’s… friend, so to say, and Seunghee herself. That isn’t any different today, and Seunghee thinks for a moment, her steps slowing to a halt.

What if she looks at the girl’s face, and sees nothing?

Will the illusion shatter? Will she disappear? Perhaps the shock of looking at something her brain wasn’t ready to make up – a body, hair, clothes are all easy to imagine from generic sources, but certainly not a face – so perhaps, perhaps it’ll jolt her brain into normalcy again? Seunghee’s thoughts race. She knows that, ten or fifteen steps behind her, the girl stopped too, and, by turning her head slightly, Seunghee can see that her swaying on her feet, looking at the trees to feign oblivion.

At once, Seunghee turns around.

At once, she firmly keeps her eyes up, and stares at the girl’s face.

She does have a face though.

She has a face, a very particular one, which Seunghee can’t directly trace back to anyone she remembers, if she were to try to justify a creation from residual memory. She looks, in fact, startled to be suddenly stared at. Seunghee notices that her eyes are somewhat piercing even if they’re wide in vulnerable surprise. She also notices that the atmosphere, right now, isn’t the best, now that they’re just staring at each other in silence, and the girl looks rather cornered.

Seunghee lowers her eyes for an instant, pensive, but is quick to raise them again, which seems to startle the girl yet again. What a scaredy-cat, Seunghee thinks. “You’ve been following me,” Seunghee states simply, voice a little hesitant, but clear. “What’s your name?”

The girl blinks. Her irises dash left. “I haven’t been following you,” she offers, and Seunghee scoffs out loud.

“No, you’ve literally been following me right now. Like, this?” She whacks her hand back and forth in a vague, perhaps rude indicative gesture. “This that you were doing, walking behind me and such. That’s following. So you’ve been following me.”

She has managed to corner the girl even more. Well, one thing is for sure, she seems to have some guts to her, because she hasn’t ran away yet, despite being caught in the act. But then again – it takes guts to follow someone in the first place. And to stare at them so openly.

“What’s your name?” Seunghee asks again.

The girl hesitates on that as well.

“I’m Mihyun,” she finally reveals. Seunghee muses over the name; she can’t say she remembers having heard it somewhere, but it wasn’t that uncommon… “And you?”

What, she doesn’t even know the name of who she’s been stalking?, Seunghee thinks to herself with a quiet chuckle. She’s sure to be going insane. “My name is Seunghee. Nice to meet you, Mihyun.”

“You can call me Mimi if you want,” Mihyun says, a wide, pearly white smile blossoming on her lips. “Do you have a nickname too?”

“Uh, not really. Just Seunghee.” Seunghee replies, chuckling again. She decides to get closer to Mihyun, physically speaking, and walks up to her. “Is there a reason why you’ve been following me?”

Mihyun shows proof of her guts yet again, for her eyes lock on Seunghee’s own, and don’t waver; she smiles a small smile, and shrugs. “I think this path is a shortcut for my way home,” she replies simply, like it’s enough.

Seunghee sighs, exhausted. She figures it should be enough.

“Let’s walk home, then,” she says. And they walk home together for the first time.




The next day in class, when Seunghee sits down, Mihyun waves at her.

Seunghee tries ignoring her like always. She wonders if it’ll make her feel dejected, considering they’d talked the day before. But nothing happens. Mihyun stares as always; smiles as always. Seunghee looks around. The others ignore as always.

She really shan’t wave back.



They meet for lunch.

Mihyun doesn’t ask her about the greeting.

Instead, she asks: “Seunghee, what’s your dream?”

Seunghee turns to her, wide-eyed at the suddenness of the question, the straw of a box of juice pending from her lips. By her side, Mihyun sits hugging her knees, back agains the trunk of the tree that provides them shelter from the sun.

That part of the campus is empty at this time, largely due to its lack of benches and tables, and to the oddness of the time – classes tend to end at o’clock hours, but this class Seunghee and Mihyun take ends fifteen to twenty minutes earlier. Sitting on her jacket to protect her jeans from the grass and fallen leaves, Seunghee finds the silence and stillness of the empty area comfortable. So does Mihyun, if the question is to judge by.

“That’s sudden,” Seunghee comments finally, drinking the rest of her juice in one vigorous slurp.

“I just wanted to know,” Mihyun shrugs.

“Ah, well, I guess it’s fine.” It’s okay not to try to make sense of this, Seunghee tells herself. She’s having lunch with her imaginary friend after all, what’s so odd about that question in context? “I guess I’ll tell you a bit about my family as well, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t,” Mihyun reassures her. “Go ahead.”

“Fair then. See, both my parents had neurodegenerative diseases. My mom had a really early onset of Alzheimer. Father had frontotemporal dementia.” Seunghee is aware that’s a sudden way to start a story, so she searches Mihyun face for signs of discomfort. None. She seems merely to be interested, and perhaps a bit saddened. “Mom passed away when I was fifteen, and my father passed away last year. Their illness overlapped really little, but it was hard for him to take care of my mother sometimes. But he told me that he definitely didn’t want to send her to a care house, because he said they wouldn’t know how to treat her there.”

Her legs tire from being extended, so she crosses them, leaning back to support her shoulders on the firm tree trunk. “It’s probably true. Care houses are usually viewed, and managed, like dumpsters for unwanted people. Unless you have a lot of money to pay for a good one… but anyway, I decided to get into business school because I hope to one day manage an accessible, humanized care house for people with neurodegenerative illnesses.” She turns her head to look at Mihyun. “That’s the long-winded version of it. Boring, right?”

“Not at all,” Mihyun shakes her head with conviction.

“What about you, Mihyun?”

Mihyun smiles. “Just ‘Mimi’ is fine,” she says.

“Are you sure?” Seunghee furrows her brows – not because she thinks Mihyun will secretly reject the nickname, but because she finds it odd that she’d insist in it, even though they haven’t talked much. But she nods. She nods, so Seunghee tries it out: “Okay, Mimi. What about you? What’s your dream?”

“Hm, I have a lot of them.” Mihyun—Mimi—stretches her arms above her head, letting her eyes settle on the swaying foliage of the tree. “Yeah, quite a lot.”

“That’s not an answer,” Seunghee points out, chuckling. “Describe me one.”

“But that’s hard,” Mimi scrunches up her nose. “I’d be embarrassed. Your dream is wonderful, but my dreams are all sorta’ tiny.”

“Huh? You think?” Seunghee is a little bit surprised. She’s been told her dream is good once, when she’d told her advisor in high school about it, but… she’d always felt that hadn’t been sincere, perhaps. Hearing it from a peer feels different. “Well, thank you. But like, do any of your dreams have to do with going to business school? You take all the same classes I do, right?”

“Hm,” Mimi nods vaguely, still not looking at Seunghee.

A different question pops up in Seunghee’s head. “Mimi, how old are you?”

“Wait, that’s too many questions!” Mimi laughs, her brown hair swaying as she shifts positions. By laying her legs to the side, she seems to get closer to Seunghee, facing her fully. Almost unconsciously, Seunghee does the same, turning her body slightly towards her. “You could say I’m chasing a certain dream now.”

“You could say you’re chasing a dream all the time.” Seunghee rolls her eyes. “All it takes is saying it. But I see that you won’t tell me anything else, so I’ll take this.” Mimi chuckles again, this time quieter. Seunghee can’t help but smile. “How old are you?”

“Hm… maybe around your age.”

Seunghee frowns. “Maybe?” Her frown deepens. “Won’t you ask my age?”

“Does it matter much?”

Mimi gets to her feet. In the distance, Seunghee can spot some people arriving from the sides of the nearest building. She guesses their time of tranquility has passed, and gets up as well, storing her trash in her back and retrieving her jacket.

“Who knows,” she says simply. Mimi doesn’t reply.

Seunghee wonders if imaginary friends age.

Seunghee wonders if this is the first time she’s had a full vision of Mimi’s back.




As it is, they start regularly having lunch and going home together, sometimes having normal and pleasant chitchat, sometimes conversing about strangely intimate topics. Seunghee notices a couple of things.

Mihyun seems to avoid speaking in front of others.

If they talk in their way back home, but suddenly other people come to the road they take, she falls immediately silent. The first time it happened so clearly, so obviously, Seunghee had fallen quiet as well, because she’d been waiting for Mihyun to finish a sentence. After she notices this pattern more clearly, after it’s happened twice and thrice and a couple of other times, she learns this is her cue to fall silent as well. Mihyun will only talk to her if it’s just the two of them within sight and earshot. Seunghee finds that oddly considerate of her own conscience.

Perhaps for that reason Mihyun hadn’t expected her to wave back at class that one time.

Another particularity is the way they part. Their way home starts on the same greenery-surrounded path they had once exchanged their first words with each other at; they follow it until it widens into a boulevard, which is full of what seem to be bookshops and nondescript cafés, but is never too lively from what Seunghee has seen. Even so, this is where Mihyun usually stops talking. Seunghee wonders if Mihyun can sense the people inside the cafés and bookshops; regardless, the silence shared between them is usually pleasant, pensive but light.

Then, at the end of the boulevard, theres a bus stop, where Seunghee stays. Mihyun usually bids goodbye to her there, and then continues forward, turning right on the first corner, away from Seunghee’s sight almost immediately. After weeks, and then a month, of walking this path together, Seunghee has inevitably come to wonder where Mihyun goes when she turns the corner.

Does she disappear into thin air?

Were Seunghee to follow her, would she see her dissolve into nothingness before her eyes.

Or maybe she does go somewhere? Sitting on the bus stop, Seunghee has tried to remember places that are beyond that corner countless times now. The sea? A shopping mall? An intrusive part of her brain always chirps in with a ridiculous question: where was the nearest cemetery again?

Ridiculous, of course. At this point, Seunghee should’ve accept her abnormally early onset of dementia, and acknowledged Mihyun as what she is – an hallucination. Also, she should’ve gone to the doctor to check the damage already done to her brain by the possible disease.

But it seems that she’s failed to do both of those things.

Does she wish Mihyun to be real? Does she merely not believe Mihyun could not be real? Mihyun is a unique person, after all; she smiles, laughs, talks in a way Seunghee doesn’t find particularly familiar, even though it’s all somewhat remarkable to her eyes. She has a good scent to her, too. Seunghee has wondered if it’s her shampoo, if that’s the origin of the sweet, fruity scent that wafts through the air to meet her when Mihyun turns around, laughing, avoiding one of Seunghee’s questions yet again.

Do hallucinations wear shampoo?

She tries following Mihyun once. On a Tuesday – or perhaps a Thursday – just after they’ve bid goodbye, Seunghee is watching Mihyun walk away, and decides she has to follow her. She has to—she wants to—and she must be quick, because Mihyun is turning around the corner. So she quickly steps forward, and power-walks to the spot where Mihyun had been standing on just seconds before, quick, but careful not to make noise or make her presence be sensed. It’s an useless effort, though. When she turns around the corner, cheeks starting to burn from the sudden rush, Mihyun is nowhere to be seen.

Which raises again the question: do hallucinations wear shampoo?

Surprising herself, Seunghee feels tears well up in her eyes later that day, in the bus. In the end, she really doesn’t like this feeling. Of not knowing. Of not being sure. Of losing control. She knows she has to get used to it, as she’s genetically fated to a future comprised exactly of those three things, but… she doesn’t like it at all, and she doesn’t like feeling Mihyun escape her reason like threads of smoke, in the same crafty way as she dodges Seunghee’s questions, elusive like sunlight itself.

Seunghee wishes she could talk to Mihyun right now. Do hallucinations carry cellphones?

She makes up her mind to clear things up the following day. An early onset is an early onset, but she has a long way to go before she’s clinically insane.





They meet for lunch at the usual field. This time, class ends half an hour too early. The teacher for that particular class isn’t all too interested in giving detailed overviews of the subject; Seunghee, for once, doesn’t mind. She sits side by side with Mihyun near some bushes, which are peppered with white and yellow flower buds, which Mihyun marvels upon as soon as they sit down.

“This kind of flower blooms quickly,” she says. Seunghee nods.

“Mimi,” Seunghee calls. Mihyun turns around immediately, inquisitive. “May I ask you something?”

Mimi blinks. “Sure.” She chuckles. “Why so formal?”

“Just thought it fit the mood.” Seunghee speaks in a light tone, but her eyes are serious, and they aim to pierce through Mimi’s own when she meets her glance. Pierce and search. Search and analyze. “Mimi, why do you stop talking to me when other people come around?”

It’s sudden. Mimi looks, once again, just like on that first day in the green path – she looks cornered. Not like a small animal, after all… she’s more like a deer. Blithe, ethereal, her brown eyes wide.

“Huh?” She laughs somewhat clumsily, scratching the back of her head in embarrassment. “I do that? Haha.”

“Mimi.” Seunghee is unwavering. “Can other people see you?”

The smile drops from Mimi’s lip. So does the hand on her head, which comes to rest over her folded knee. “What do you mean?”

“Can the other people in class see you? The people in the streets?” Seunghee presses on, leaning forward, closer to her. Mimi almost flinches; it feels like she wants to retreat, but ultimately doesn’t. “See, you haven’t answered my question directly. Usually, someone would say ‘of course’ right away, wouldn’t they? But you haven’t said that.”

Silence. Mimi’s eyes fall from Seunghee’s own to the ground, as she herself presses her lips together, speechless.

“You never answered my questions directly. You don’t talk to anyone else, and never talk to me in front of other people. You—now that I think about it, you never told me anything about yourself either, did you?” Seunghee, at this point, feels her throat burn, and that’s how she realizes her voice has gone up, something between a scream and a desperate plea. No; it’s a desperate plea, and that’s all it is. “Mimi, I need to know. Who are you? Where have you come from?”

The soft touch over Seunghee’s hand makes her startle, gasping softly at the sudden touch. When she looks down, she sees it; Mimi’s hand over her own, holding gently, warmly.

Do imaginary friends have a touch so soft?

For what feels like hours, or eons, they just stay like that; looking into each other’s eyes, Mihyun’s hand gently wrapped around Seunghee’s own, the tip of her index finger gently drawing small patterns on Seunghee’s skin. It calms her down from a high she hadn’t realized she’d been in, releases the tightness in her chest that she hadn’t realized was there. But at the same time, it feeds into Seunghee’s need to know; was this real? Was she imagining this tenderness? Did it come from elsewhere? Was Mihyun really there, comforting her so lovingly?

Mihyun finally speaks.

“To me,” is what she says, “you’re the only one I see, or want to see.”

Seunghee blinks. “Is that literal?”

Mihyun chuckles. “Who knows.”

“Mimi.” It’s a plea again, barely above a whisper. “Please tell me. Are you really here?”

“I’m with you right now, am I not?” Their fingers interlace, and Mimi’s other hand comes to the side of Seunghee’s face to put a lock of her hair behind her ear. It results in a soft caress on Seunghee’s cheek, one that feels so light, but so real… “Seek me more, Seunghee. Search for me, okay?”

Seunghee startles. “What?”

“Seek me.” Mimi leans closer. “Search for me. Ask for me inside your heart.” Her forehead rests against Seunghee’s; her face is closer than it’s ever been. She has long lashes. The scent of her shampoo. “Want me. Don’t forget to do that, no matter what. Okay?”

Seunghee closes her eyes before she can ask herself why. The touch of Mimi’s lips is as unbelievably soft as her hands.




Mimi disappears.

Once they part that day, as informal as always despite the conversation in the afternoon, Seunghee doesn’t see her again. She doesn’t show up in class the next day. The chair besides Seunghee is – as she presumes it always seemed to be – empty.

She doesn’t show up at lunch time. She doesn’t follow Seunghee drown the green path, or take her to the bus stop. She doesn’t show up in class the following day either. Or the one after that. Or the one after the one after that.

She’s gone. Her scent is gone. Her crystalline laughter is gone. Her presence is nowhere to be felt by Seunghee’s merely human instincts, even when she finds herself looking behind herself as she exits the classroom, expecting, maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of wavy chestnut-colored hair.

It’s like she’s following an order. Seek me, Mihyun had said. So Seunghee seeks, here and there. At one point, she does something she wouldn’t have imagined herself doing a couple of months ago – she asks her classmates.

“Hello. Excuse me.” She intrudes on a particularly quiet group, who seem to be in a lazy, sparse conversation about mobile games just before the class starts. When Seunghee calls them, they all look up in a confused manner; then, seeing who has spoken to them, they seem even more surprised, and even somewhat pleased if Seunghee is to analyze that much. “Sorry for just suddenly coming up to you, but I’d like to ask you something.”

“Sure! Hyun Seunghee, right?” One of them sits up straight on her chair, and Seunghee finds it odd that she knows her name. “Ask away.”

“You guys know the desk on my left? On the left of my usual desk, I mean. The one nearest the window?” She points. The group, comprised of four of her classmate, all look at the same time, nodding. “Has it been empty since the beginning of the term?”

Unexpectedly, she sees some of them furrow their browns. Exchange glances. “I’m pretty sure someone sits there. Right?”

Her heart stops.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I think so too,” the sole boy of the group evaluates, scratching his temple. “This class is pretty packed, I don’t remember seeing any empty seats.”

The others nod and hum affirmatively. Seunghee’s mind races in circles, in a web of questions without answers. “Is it so,” she comments feebly, trying not to seem too fired up about it. “Do you remember who sits there?”

“More or less?” One of the girls say. They exchange more looks. At least it doesn’t seem like they’re judging Seunghee, is what she notices, relieved. If anything, they seem to be growing to be as confused as her. “Now that I think about it… do you guys remember?”

“Uh…” They all stare at the empty desk. Seunghee does too. It’s almost like she can see her sitting there. Her tan skin, her piercing eyes, her usually playful smile… “Wow… I’m sorry Seunghee-sshi, I don’t remember at all.”

“It’s weird. Neither do I.”

“No problem.” Seunghee smiles cordially to them. “I… thought I might be the only one confused, haha. I’m glad that’s not the case. Thank you for your help.”

“I see…”

“Still, weird, isn’t it? Can’t you guys remember anything?”

“Not really. You?”

“Thinking well, was there someone in that desk?”

Seunghee bows politely, and heads back to her desk, a slightly sad smile on her lips.

She’d call that night, and schedule a doctor appointment.











Years went by, as years tend to do.

Years going by meant that Seunghee, eventually, finished her Business, Marketing and Administration major.Years going by means that she got to try many things; that she got jobs here and there, and tried a couple of different activities at university; that she went through happy times, as well as sad ones, difficult ones, tranquil ones, and ones when she didn’t quite know what to do, but ended up moving forward nonetheless. And as many, many of those years went by, Seunghee got closer to her dream as well. A big part of the time, Seunghee is now busy with her longest-running job yet: being a teacher at the same university she had graduated from, teaching, more often than not, classes about ethics in business environments.

However, one of Seunghee’s greatest joys now is finishing her classes for the day, changing out of her dress pants and button-ups into a pair of jeans and specific T-shirt, taking a bus at the nearest bus stop, and heading to one of her favorite places in town: a nonprofit humanitarian care house for dementia patients, one that’s younger than Seunghee’s own degree, but that has caught her eye with the kindness and understanding with which they treat their inquilines.

Today too, she has finished that particular routine of hers, and walks to the care house in wide strides. She’s in a good mood. Classes had gone as usual, but today was a special day for the care house, for there was a special event for the neighboring community about Alzheimer’s, its prevention, and its treatment. Seunghee quite likes that kind of event. Usually, she gets to know new people, sometimes people like her – who had lost one or two relatives to different kinds of neurological illnesses – and, much unlike how she was in high school or university, she’d grown up to become a quite social person.

Being social helped to keep the brain healthy, after all.

She arrives on the nick of time, bringing with her some refreshments in plastic and fabric bags that pend heavily from her reddened hands. Despite that, when she arrives at the door, she’s smiling. Everyone smiles back, and the very cheery staff member that’s usually at the door greets her like an old friend, inviting her in immediately.

“Thank you,” she smiles at different staff members who come help her with her bags. “Am I too late? There’s quite a lot of guests here already.”

“Not at all! We haven’t started yet.” The short, lively woman who replies is one of the funding members of the place. She quite likes Seunghee, as she’s said herself many times. “Oh, right, Seunghee, come here meet Mr. Kim Youngho! It’s his first time coming and we’ve talked about you to him, and he says he wants to meet you…”

Seunghee follows her, looking at the direction she points when she talks about Mr. Kim Youngho. In a couple of seconds, she figures out who it must be: a slightly curved man who has just had a chair brought in for him, and now struggles to sit down slowly, helped by the young girl who stands by his side, a protective arm supporting his shoulders.

Seunghee stops a few steps behind her colleague, who cheerily approaches them. She no longer smiles.

“Mr. Youngho! Here’s the Hyun Seunghee we’ve told you about!” The woman calls, and both the man and his companion turn around to face them. “She’s an university professor, but she always rushes here to help us. Seunghee, this is…” she audibly trails off. Seunghee isn’t looking at her. “Seunghee…?”

Shes aware of the tears rolling down her cheeks. She’s also aware of the impossible tightness in her chest, which compresses her lungs as well, making every breath she takes a shallow, trembling sigh. She’s aware of it. She’s aware of how her eyes are locked on the figure of Mr. Kim Youngho’s companion, who stares back with nothing but confusion in her brown, brown eyes.

“Mimi,” Seunghee murmurs, and the tears fall even more profusely.

The world dulls around her, fading into shadows.





She’s outside, sitting on a swing bench the care house has in their backyard, face thoroughly stained with tears. Her breath now comes in deep gulps, almost like her lungs dive and resurface in water, and each intake of air shakes her frame slightly. By her side, for some reason that she doesn’t understand, Mr. Kim Youngho’s companion – his niece, Kim Mihyun – sits with a box of tissues on her lap. She herself doesn’t seem to understand why she’s there.

Whenever Seunghee glances at Mihyun, a fresh batch of tears fall from her eyes. It seems to put the other girl off immensely.

“This is the first time I’ve seem someone cry just from looking at my face,” she remarks gloomily when it happens for the hundredth, maybe two-hundredth time. “Not sure how I should take this.”

Seunghee sniffles. Quickly dries her tears with a dry tissue, then trains her eyes on the grass beneath them. “You don’t know me, do you?” She asks.

Mihyun fiddles with the tissue box. For a minute, it looks like she won’t answer. But she does. “It’s the first time we talk,” she says.

Seunghee can’t help but laugh, and heartily at that. A couple more tears roll down. “So vague,” she remarks. So typical, she wants to add.

“Uh, I mean, would you consider you ‘know’ someone you’ve seen a couple of times but never talked to?” Mihyun seems embarrassed about it. Seunghee, however, is shocked.

“Seen…? Wait, what does that mean?” She frowns. “Where have you seen me?”

“Here.” Mihyun kicks her feet a bit. “I’ve come to some lectures and such. I’m usually hiding at some corner though, because I came alone before today, and I wasn’t sure if it was allowed… this kind of thing.”

Seunghee can finally look at her. Her surprise overcomes her tears, even if her chest still tightens upon seeing those eyes, those lips, that face again after so, so many years. Her hair is a little lighter than Seunghee remembers it. It’s also shorter, she thinks. “I haven’t seen you…” she comments. Even though she’s been searching… “You… must be really good at hiding.”

Mihyun laughs out loud, delighted. Seunghee ends up smiling too, even though her chest hurts more than ever.

“Sure am. Was it allowed, by the way?”

“Yeah. Lectures are mostly open to public. You could’ve come whenever.”

“That’s good to know.” Mihyun looks at her; their eyes meet. Seunghee feels like she might burst. “You’ve stopped crying.”

Seunghee almost cries again.

“Back then, when you saw me,” Mihyun points at the house with her thumb, seeming a bit sheepish. “You… called me Mimi.”

“I did.”

“How did you know my name?” Her voice is low. She’s not quite embarrassed, Seunghee notices, but maybe… shy? A little scared? In the end, it might not be hard to understand what’s going on. “Actually, how did you know my nickname? That’s mostly my family that calls me like that. Are you a long lost relative?”

Seunghee laughs. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you, you know.”

Mihyun looks at her inquisitively, in a way that’s way too familiar to Seunghee, even now. Seunghee wishes she could kiss her again, as if bringing back that day from her memories, but…

That wouldn’t be correct after all. The one who had kissed her wasn’t Mihyun. It wasn’t this Mihyun who sat by her side on the swing bench, and had, in her own inventive way, stalked Seunghee through her lectures in the care house, watching them from behind the door and God-knows-where, really. The Mimi who Seunghee had shared a kiss with wasn’t here, or anywhere but her memories. Which doesn’t mean that they were two different people – but they definitely weren’t the same.

But Seunghee knows now; she knows why Mimi had come to her. The quiet, elusive, mysterious Mimi of her memories. Seek me. Want me. Don’t forget to do that, no matter what. Looking at this Mihyun, who really must be around Seunghee’s own age, if not a little older, and whose hair is a little lighter, and who steals glances at Seunghee in a mixture of worry, wonder, and curiosity, it finally makes sense to her. It’s no wonder the tests back then denied the so-feared early onset of an illness Seunghee couldn’t name, but was sure of.

Wherever Mimi’s had come from, Seunghee now knew she had been real. But Mihyun, of course, is much realer.

“Would you like me to call you Mimi?” Seunghee teases. Mihyun laughs in a confused fashion, looking away, lips threatening to become a permanent smile.

“I mean, if you want so. No one has called me that in years, but… I wouldn’t mind,” she confesses, and she truly, truly is a lovely person. “Can I call you Seunghee then?”

“Sure. Or make me a nickname.” Seunghee takes one last tissue. “Well, since we’ve got some time before we’re called back, tell me, Mihyun… what is your dream?”