The apartment was suffused with the kind of silence that only exists in the hours before dawn…not the comfortable quiet of rest, but the hollow emptiness of someone still awake when the world has chosen to sleep. Cha Eun-woo sat at his desk by the window, the cursor of his half-finished poem blinking mockingly on the screen like a heartbeat that refused to settle into rhythm. Outside, the city sprawled beneath layers of darkness and the faint smog that never truly lifted from Seoul, even in the dead of night. Inside, there was only the sound of his breathing and the distant hum of the refrigerator in the next room…sounds that had become so familiar they had ceased to register as sound at all.
The poem had been fighting him for three days now. It was supposed to be about memory, about the way certain moments crystallize in the mind while entire years dissolve into fog. But the words kept slipping sideways, refusing the shape he tried to impose upon them. In his twenty-eight years, Eun-woo had learned that poems were not things to be conquered but conversations to be had, and this one had grown sullen and evasive, giving him only fragments when he asked for revelation.
He read the lines aloud, his voice strange in the silence:
"The night remembers what the day forgets,
holds it close like a secret between lovers,
or like a knife between friends."
The metaphor felt forced. Too obvious. Too eager to provoke. He deleted the last line, watching the words disappear into the digital void, and leaned back in his chair, rubbing his eyes. The blue light from the monitor cast his reflection back at him,a figure with hollow cheeks and hair that probably needed washing, wearing a sweater with a hole near the collar that he kept meaning to repair and never did.
At 3:47 AM, his phone rang.
The sound was jarring in a way that made his heart lurch. Nobody called at this hour unless something had fractured somewhere in the careful architecture of the world. Eun-woo stared at the phone for two seconds…perhaps three,watching the name flash across the screen: Sunghoon.
He answered immediately.
"Sunghoon?"
The breathing on the other end was shallow, urgent. For a moment there was only the sound of someone trying to make a decision about what to say.
"Eun-woo." His friend's voice was strained, pulled tight as a wire about to snap. "I need you to listen. I can only say this once."
"What's wrong? Are you okay?" Eun-woo was already standing, some instinct pulling him upright though there was nowhere to go, nothing to do. "Where are you?"
"I made a mistake," Sunghoon said, and there was something in his voice that terrified Eun-woo more than any scream could have a flatness, a resignation, as though he was speaking from very far away. "A big one. The kind that can't be unmade."
"Sunghoon, you're scaring me. Tell me what happened."
"There are people…" Sunghoon's voice fractured slightly. "People I trusted. People I thought were friends. I saw something I shouldn't have seen. And now—" He stopped. The silence stretched between them, thick and terrible.
"Now what?" Eun-woo's hand had gone white-knuckled around the phone. "Tell me now."
"Now I don't know what to do." Sunghoon's laugh was bitter, edged with something that might have been hysteria. "Isn't that pathetic? I'm twenty-nine years old and I don't know how to handle a simple mistake. I look at my hands and they feel like they belong to someone else."
"Listen to me." Eun-woo forced his voice to be steady, the way one speaks to someone standing at the edge of something. "Whatever happened, we can figure it out. Tell me where you are. I'll come to you."
"You can't come." Sunghoon said it with finality. "That would make it worse. For you, I mean. You have to stay away from this."
"Stay away from what?"
The pause that followed was measured in heartbeats. Eun-woo could hear the sound of movement on the other end,the rustle of fabric, the soft closing of a door, the complicated sounds of someone considering their options and finding them all wanting.
"There's a poem," Sunghoon said finally. "The one I wrote last month. Do you remember it? About the boy who couldn't find his way home?"
Eun-woo did remember. Sunghoon had given it to him, and it was good,painfully honest in the way that Sunghoon's best work always was, a quality that had made him a better poet than Eun-woo would ever be, though the world would probably never know it. "Yes. I have it. It's in my notebook."
"I need you to keep it safe," Sunghoon said. "Don't show it to anyone. Don't tell anyone I gave it to you. And Eun-woo?"
"Yes?"
"Don't believe everything you're going to hear. About me. About what happens next. There are going to be stories. They'll sound convincing. But before you believe any of them, I need you to remember that I'm telling you this now. I need you to hold onto that."
The words were strange and wrong, constructed in a way that made Eun-woo's chest tighten with a fear he couldn't quite name.
"Sunghoon, you're not making sense. What are you trying to tell me?"
"I'm trying to tell you goodbye," Sunghoon said, and his voice was so quiet now that Eun-woo had to strain to hear it. "In a way that doesn't sound final. In a way that gives you deniability later."
"No." Eun-woo was moving now, reaching for his jacket without any conscious decision to do so. "No, you don't get to say goodbye to me like this. You don't get to call me in the middle of the night and sound like…"
"Like what?"
"Like someone who's already decided."
The silence that came after was different. It was the silence of someone weighing whether to speak a truth that, once spoken, could never be unspoken. When Sunghoon finally answered, his voice was strange,almost gentle.
"Take care of yourself, Eun-woo. Keep writing. The world needs your words, even if it doesn't know it yet."
"Sunghoon…"
But he was gone. The call had ended with the finality of a door closing, leaving Eun-woo standing in his apartment with his jacket half on and his heart hammering against his ribs in a way that felt dangerous.
For a long moment, he simply stood there. Then he called back.
The phone rang once. Twice. On the third ring, it went to voicemail,Sunghoon's recorded voice, casual and young, asking him to leave a message. Eun-woo hung up without speaking.
He tried again. And again. Each time, the voicemail. Each time, the growing certainty that something fundamental had shifted in the world, though he couldn't yet see the shape of it.
Eun-woo sat back down at his desk. The poem was still open on his screen, the cursor still blinking. He read the lines again, and they seemed different now,sinister somehow, full of implications he hadn't intended. He thought about calling someone else,their mutual friend Jimin, or his older sister,but what would he say? That Sunghoon had called in the middle of the night speaking in riddles? That his oldest friend sounded like he was saying goodbye? It sounded paranoid. It sounded like something born from sleeplessness and the particular anxiety that attacks in the hours before dawn.
Fear often sounds louder than truth, he told himself. That was something his literature professor had said once, years ago, and Eun-woo had written it down in a notebook he'd lost long since. It had stuck with him, this idea that fear was a kind of noise, a distortion of reality. Perhaps Sunghoon was just having a bad night. Perhaps the poem…his own poem…was melodramatic or overwrought. Perhaps the strange flatness in his voice was simply exhaustion.
Perhaps.
But as Eun-woo sat there in the blue light of the monitor, he found that he couldn't quite convince himself. There had been something in that call,something beneath the words, something genuine and terrible.
He opened a search browser and looked at Sunghoon's social media. The last post was from three days ago,a photograph of coffee and a book with some ironic captions about productivity. No signs of distress. No cryptic warnings scattered across his timeline. Sunghoon's life, as documented by Instagram, seemed entirely normal.
Eun-woo closed the browser. He returned to his poem.
For the next three hours, he worked with an intensity that bordered on obsession, as though if he could just finish this one poem, if he could just find the right words, then the wrongness of the night would resolve itself and he would wake up and Sunghoon would text him something stupid about breakfast and everything would be as it had been.
At 6:30 AM, with the sky beginning to lighten beyond the window, Eun-woo wrote the final lines:
"But what if the night remembers wrong?
What if the secret it keeps is not a secret at all
but a warning written in a language
only the living can fail to understand?"
He read them three times. They were not perfect, but they were true in a way that his earlier attempts had not been. The poem was finished.
He sat back and felt the exhaustion of the entire night settle onto his shoulders all at once. His eyes burned. His mouth tasted like old coffee and the particular staleness of an apartment where no windows had been opened in days. He should sleep. He should shower and sleep and maybe call Sunghoon again in the morning when the sun was up and everything seemed less apocalyptic.
At 7:15 AM, the first news alert came through.
Eun-woo's phone buzzed. He picked it up, expecting some notification about a celebrity scandal or a political development or one of the thousand small fires that the news industry considered worthy of breaking alerts.
What he saw instead made his blood stop moving through his veins.
"Park Sunghoon Found Dead in an Apartment. Police Investigating."
The headline was short and clinical, as headlines are before they've had time to become tragedy. But even in that sparse language, Eun-woo could feel the weight of it,the absoluteness of it.
He opened the article.
Police had been called to Sunghoon's apartment building in the Gangnam district at approximately 6:40 AM, responding to a report from a neighbor who had heard something fall. What they found was Sunghoon in his bedroom, the window open to the night air, and all the signs suggesting that he had either fallen or jumped from the fifth-floor window sometime in the early morning hours.
Eun-woo read this information once, then read it again, then continued reading even though the words had begun to separate from meaning.
The article mentioned that Sunghoon had been a poet and teacher. That he had no known history of mental illness. That he had been active on social media as recently as three days ago. That police were still investigating and no foul play was immediately suspected.
Eun-woo stood up. He sat down. He stood up again.
When he could move with any kind of intention, he walked to the bookshelf beside his desk and pulled down the notebook where Sunghoon had written his name and the title of the poem: "The Boy Who Couldn't Find His Way Home."
Sunghoon's handwriting was neat and careful, with a slight slant to the right. Eun-woo had read this poem perhaps a dozen times over the past month, had analyzed its structure and its imagery and the particular way it ended with a question rather than an answer. He had written Sunghoon an email about it, praising the emotional resonance and the surprising restraint in the language.
He had never thought it might be a warning. He had never considered that the words might be exactly literal.
Eun-woo held the notebook against his chest and felt the world reorganize itself around a moment that had already passed…a moment in the dark hours before dawn when his oldest friend had called to say goodbye in a way that sounded like something else entirely.
The apartment was very quiet.
Outside, the city was beginning to wake up, but Eun-woo couldn't hear it. He could only hear the echoes of the call,Sunghoon's voice breaking on certain words, the sound of his breathing, the terrible gentleness in his final goodbye.
He thought of his finished poem, sitting on his screen, waiting to be saved. The final lines felt newly prophetic now, though that was impossible. He had written them after the call, after Sunghoon was already gone. He had written them from some place of intuition so deep that it felt less like poetry and more like evidence.
Eun-woo looked at the notebook in his hands, then at his computer, then at the window where the dawn was breaking gray and indifferent over Seoul.
Everything had changed. Everything would continue to change. And he, Cha Eun-woo, was standing at the threshold of a mystery he had not asked for and could not refuse holding his dead friend's words like a secret, like a weapon, like the first clue to a crime that had already been committed and officially closed and yet somehow was only beginning.
The poem waited to be saved.
Eun-woo did not touch the keyboard. Instead, he sat very still and let the morning come, holding onto the sound of Sunghoon's voice and the terrible weight of words that had been said and could never be unsaid.
Outside, the city continued its indifferent waking. Inside, in the growing light, Eun-woo began to understand that whatever had happened to his friend in the hours between that phone call and the moment police found his body, the real story was only beginning and he, whether he wanted it or not, had been chosen to tell it.