✓ PLOT TWIST | JUNGWON

52 - The Last Page Isn't the End

Click. Click. Click.

The keys clatter beneath my fingertips like falling rain, frantic and fast, and I don't stop. I sit curled up in my desk chair, knees tucked into my chest, a chipped mug of lukewarm coffee resting by my elbow. The window is cracked open, letting in the kind of cold that kisses your skin before it bites. I don't mind. I like the chill. It keeps me alert, keeps me grounded.

My fingers move quickly, like they know a truth my brain hasn't caught up with yet. There's this idea that's been swirling in my mind about a writer whose stories come to life and slip through the cracks of the page, tiptoeing into the real world with bare feet and bleeding hearts. 

Her character was never supposed to be anything more than an echo—an echo of a thought she hadn't meant to think too hard about, a soft outline with no spine, no pulse, no reason to reach out and grab her by the wrist. But he did. He did. He reached through the page and pulled her under, and now she can't tell where the fiction ends and she begins.

"Ugh, I love this," I whisper, going through the lines I've wrote as if I wasn't the one to write them. Of course I love it. It's angst, after all. It's always angst. I have a thing for making my readers cry. I have a thing for breaking hearts. I have a thing for bleeding on the page and calling it art.

I scroll back to the beginning, reread the paragraph again, twice, and let it settle under my skin. There's something about writing pain that feels more honest than anything else I do. Love is too easy. Joy feels like a lie. But grief? Grief is loyal. Reliable. Always waiting.

I sip the now-cold coffee and try not to wince. 

Angst is my favorite poison. My favorite addiction. My favorite way to keep myself from remembering. Because sometimes I think—if I write enough pain into the world, maybe it'll drain out of me. Maybe the aching in my chest will finally find its way onto the screen and leave me hollow enough to breathe properly again. 

I type another sentence. Another broken promise. Another character left alone in the rain. Another pair of hands that don't reach back. And it's good. God, it's so good.

My phone starts ringing and I let out a sigh, already dreading the conversation about to happen. "Yes, Areum. No, I haven't finished writing. Yes, he will die. No, I won't think about it. Anything else?"

My colleagues at the publishing house say I write like I've lived a thousand lives and died in each one of them. They tell me my words feel haunted, like I'm remembering something I shouldn't, like every sentence I write is an echo of a memory that doesn't belong to me. I always laugh when they say that. I don't know why. 

I hang up before she can say anything else and return to the screen. The cursor blinks at me like a heartbeat. Mocking me. Daring me. Write it, it says. You already know how this ends. But the truth is—I don't. There's something strange about this story. This boy I keep writing. I don't remember naming him Jungwon, but the name spills from my fingertips like I've said it before. Like I've whispered it into the dark a thousand times. Like it belongs to me. But it doesn't. 

I don't know a Jungwon. I've never met a Jungwon before. I've never spoken to someone by that name, never followed anyone on Instagram, never passed by someone with that face in the halls of any school, or in any memory I still claim as mine. And yet—he's everywhere. In the pages I type out at two in the morning, in the rhythm of my dreams I never quite remember when I wake, in the spaces between each breath where silence stretches long and aching. 

Sometimes, I feel like I'm not even creating him anymore. Like he's already there, waiting—impatient and unfinished—just behind my eyes, watching through the keyhole of my skull and begging me to remember him.