7th/8th Story – ‘The Truth that Couldn’t be Told’

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Please do not repost my translations. Links to the page are appreciated. Translated by @courtneylazore.

This post was originally published as the 7th story in 2017, then deleted from the blog and reuploaded in 2018. The post was deleted again and reuploaded in 2020 as the 8th story.

Actually, I didn’t come from a very well-off family. The time I spent studying abroad in the U.S. was really difficult too. I was a foreigner and I wasn’t proficient in English, and I couldn’t present a future.

On the day we promised to go to Italy together, I was waiting for my friend at the airport when I saw her, through the glass door, as she got off the bus with a good-looking, cool guy. I hid right away. Why did I do that? I also don’t know… I just reflexively hid myself, and then turned around and walked away.

“Of course. We couldn’t have traveled to Italy together. To her, I’m nothing but a pathetic foreigner who knows nothing.” I had feelings like that.

My friend called me, but I didn’t answer. I just stared blankly at my face in the airport bathroom mirror.

Then I turned off my phone and got on the plane. We booked the same plane, so my friend should be somewhere on the plane, but I didn’t look for her. I wanted it. I don’t know how much I wanted my friend to come find me while looking around the plane. But as the plane crossed the Atlantic Ocean, entered Italian airspace, and landed at the airport… there was no one who came looking for me.

“The city of smeraldo” remains as both a painful and happy memory for me. The smeraldo flowers were so beautiful that I cried. And a strange thing happened that night. While I was sleeping at the bed and breakfast, I was woken up by a strange noise. The bed was right under the window, and I kept hearing a noise that sounded like someone knocking on the window. The room was on the second floor, and it was quiet outside. It was past midnight, and the curtain was closed, so I couldn’t see outside the window.

I didn’t feel scared or uneasy, but it was still a weird event. I thought about getting up for a moment and opening the window, because who could be knocking at a window on the second floor, but I didn’t. I wondered if tree branches were shaking in the wind and hitting the window, and I tried to force myself to sleep, but truthfully I couldn’t sleep well. With a feeling of constraining something, I laid still for a long time listening to that sound.   

It was lunch time the next day when my friend called me. No, it wasn’t a call from my friend. It was her older brother. He said my friend got into an accident while rushing around the airport looking for someone, and that a little after midnight, her breathing became unstable and she left this world.

Before I left my lodging that day, I opened the window next to the bed. The sunlight came shining in, and I could see the colony of smeraldos in the distance. As I gazed at those flowers, felt the sunshine, and felt the wind moving past, just for a moment I felt like my friend was standing there at the window with me, looking at the smeraldos.

On my way home from the airport after coming back to the U.S., I heard the news that what I had wanted for so long had been achieved. It was that the smeraldo flower shop in Korea had been approved by the Smeraldo Academy. Because smeraldos are rare, the association strictly manages overseas sales, and what I applied to do was approved by the association. Since then, three years have passed until the opening of Flower Smeraldo, but I decided to think of the news from the association as the last thing my friend told me.

That friend told me “the truth that couldn’t be told” like that and went to another world.

This is the special tie between myself and smeraldo that I mentioned in the first post.