The days bleed into one another, a bland, repetitive cycle of silence and forced smiles. I try to remember my real name, my real life, but the memories are elusive, fragmented, like shattered pieces of a mirror reflecting a distorted image of who I once was.
Sometimes, a word or a phrase will surface—a child's laughter, the scent of baking bread, the feel of a loved one's hand in mine—but they are quickly swallowed up by the relentless tide of oblivion.
It doesn't feel like a prison. That's the first thing people always assume. That if someone goes missing, they must be locked in chains, kept in darkness, starved, beaten, tied up, or dragged through the filth of some forgotten place. But it doesn't feel like that.
It feels like beige walls and soft lighting. Like neutral-toned curtains that always stay half open, even when there's no window behind them. Like lukewarm food placed on ceramic plates at exactly the same time every day. It feels like an illusion of order.
I wake up to the sound of humming. I don't know whose voice it is anymore. The song lives here like we all do. A permanent resident.
Kkogkkog sumeora. Meolikarag boila.
It echoes in the pipes, in the walls, in the spaces between our conversations. When we're silent, it hums for us.
We call this place "the home." Not a home. The home. As if there is no other. As if it's the only version of shelter that exists. Eun Hye-won is always smiling. Jang Min-jae watches without blinking. They don't shout. They don't raise their hands. They say things like, "You're safe now," and "No one will hurt you here." They believe it.
I used to believe it too.
There are others here. Hundreds? I don't know. We're spread across places. Houses. Apartments. Basements turned into bedrooms. I'm in one of the quiet ones—Unit 6.
Yuri is here too. She's seventeen now. She was twelve when they took her. She doesn't remember her last name. Doesn't want to. She's proud of the name they gave her: Ba-yeong. "It suits me more," she says, running her fingers through her plaited hair. "It feels softer." She means she feels softer.
She believes she was saved.
Her father was a drunk. Her mother left when she was ten. She says the couple found her when she was sleeping in a coin karaoke booth. They fed her. Dressed her. Gave her a room. Yuri doesn't ask questions. Doesn't remember if she ever tried to run.
"Some of us don't want to be found," she tells me once, eyes vacant. "What's there to go back to?"
Then there's Eui-jin. He remembers everything.
He was taken at twenty-three. Studying law. Volunteering part-time at an advocacy centre. They said he looked tired. Said he needed rest. He never saw it coming.
Now, he sits by the basement window each day, carving small lines into the wood with a paperclip he stole from one of the books they gave us. The books are censored. Crossed-out names. Torn pages. All endings removed.
"They gave me a new name too," he told me last week. "Min-soo."
He laughs when he says it. Not a joyful laugh. A fractured one.
"I tried to tell someone once. One of the others. They told the couple. I wasn't punished. They just stopped talking to me. Everyone did. For weeks. It was worse than being hit."
That's the real punishment: silence.
The worst thing they do here is remove you from the rhythm. From the structure. Breakfast. Reading. Group gardening. Afternoon rest. Dinner. Humming. Sleep.
If you break it, you vanish. Not killed. Just... relocated. To another unit. A different name. A different life. Until even the other people here forget you existed.
Min-jung was eight when she arrived. Now, she's nearly fifteen. She calls Eun Hye-won "Eomma" and means it. She braids Hye-won's hair. Helps cook. She doesn't remember her real family.
"I used to be scared of the dark," she says. "But Eomma left the hallway lights on. Now, I'm not scared anymore."
She sleeps with her bedroom door open.
Sometimes, we're allowed to talk to each other. Briefly. Quietly. We're discouraged from whispering.
They give us clothes. All soft beige and navy. Nothing with labels. Nothing that belongs to anyone. We all wear the same shoes. The rooms have beds with pale sheets, desks with no drawers, lamps without bulbs.
There's no internet. No phones. But there are notebooks. You can write if you want. They don't read them. Or maybe they do. I don't know.
They tell us we'll be ready soon.
"Ready for what?" I asked once.
"To go home," Min-jae replied. "To the life we chose."
But I never chose this.
Some of us do leave.
I remember one girl. Hye-rin. She escaped.
She was kept in Unit 9. Always quiet. Always watching. She smiled too much, but her eyes were wrong. One day, she slipped out during laundry duty. Took the side door. Disappeared.
We thought she was gone forever. But I saw her again.
Three years later.
She was walking her son to kindergarten. Perfectly ordinary. Her husband beside her. She didn't flinch when I passed her on the street. Didn't blink. Didn't run. Just... kept walking.
But her hand never left her son's shoulder. Not once.
She remembers. She just won't say it.
And I understand why.
Because some things, once named, come back for you.
She is a survivor, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, a reminder that even in the face of unimaginable loss, hope can still endure. But the song remains, a constant reminder of the city that does not remember, a city that has forgotten, a city that will pay.
One day, a new girl arrived.
Her name is 'Ha-na' now, but I've heard whispers of another name, a name lost in the labyrinth of her forgotten past. She is quiet, watchful, her eyes always darting around the room, her gaze filled with a quiet desperation. She hums the song sometimes, a soft, melancholic tune that only she can hear. She never speaks, but sometimes, I see a flicker of defiance in her eyes, a refusal to be erased, a determination to survive.
The others—they're slipping.
Like Ho-jun. He used to be a dancer. His feet still move in his sleep. He hums without knowing. The same song. Always the same.
Kkogkkog sumeora.
He swears he was on stage once. Says the lights were so bright they made him dizzy. Now he helps mop floors. Always smiling. Always tidy. He doesn't remember the music. Only the movement.
"I think this is my real life," he said yesterday. "I think I was dreaming before."
He meant the outside world.
Then there's Jong-su. Older. Maybe sixty? We don't know. He doesn't talk much. But he paints. Murals. Big ones. Faces with no eyes. Trees with too many roots. A woman holding a child that looks like a shadow.
Min-jae loves his work. Always praises him. "You're expressing healing," he says.
But we know it's not healing. It's remembering.
Jong-su never answers when you ask where he's from. But sometimes, he paints street signs from other cities. Real ones. Names scratched into the background like ghosts.
He paints every day. He never stops.
They haven't taken him yet.
Sometimes, I wonder who I was. I write names in my notebook just to see if any of them feel real.
Min-kyu. Taehwan. Joon-young. Hyunseo. Jung-woo. Soo-min.
I cross them all out. None of them belong to me.
I'm not allowed to remember.
I think about the girl with the sad eyes. The one who left. The one who made it out. I don't know her name either. Maybe she doesn't either.
Maybe that's how you survive.
Because those who remember, and try to do something about it are brought back.
And then, in the quietest corners, in the deepest rooms, there are names that still echo. The kids who remembered the real names.
Soo-min.
Eun-ji.
They're not here anymore. But the couple still talk about them like they live down the hall.
"They were our hardest to let go," Hye-won once said, wiping flour from her hands. "But they were beautiful."
"Still are," Min-jae replied. "We did well with them."
They don't talk like captors. They talk like parents.
They don't use force. They use absence. The absence of fear. Of rage. Of noise. Of memory.
And in the absence, they become something else. Something worse.
We are the missing that do not want to be found.
And sometimes, we don't even remember that we were missing to begin with.
At the very end of a corridor, where the sound of humming turns into silence, there are two empty rooms.
One with a music box that doesn't play.
And one with a mirror, still smudged with fingerprints.
We don't clean those rooms.
We're told they're waiting to be filled again.
Some of us still dream of those who left.
The boy who looked out windows.
The girl who never braided her hair.
Their names are forbidden. But we remember them anyway.
Only in pieces.
Only in song.
Kkogkkog sumeora. Meolikarag boila.
Even those who forgot everything still know the words.
Even when the couple smiles.
Even when the rooms are quiet.
The song never leaves.
And neither do we.