Each month, Jiho sent a letter. Sometimes a haiku — sparse yet full of meaning. Sometimes a pressed leaf, brittle and fragrant with pine. Once, just a sketch of the pine ridge — a quiet reminder of the space between definitions.
Minho kept them all, clutching them like lifelines in the city's relentless hum.
The letters arrived folded neatly, tied with thin twine, often scented faintly with the herbalist's tea smoke or with the earthy tang of dried ink. The envelopes were handmade, creased in irregular folds as if Jiho's fingers had hesitated for a breath before sealing them. There was something intimate in the way the paper curled at the corners, as if the air of Haedam clung to them like fog refusing to leave.
In his small apartment in Seoul, Minho kept the letters in a wooden box lined with scraps of hanji and pressed wildflowers from his brief walks through the city park. The noise outside was constant — scooters, vendors, music leaking through thin windows — but when he opened the box, the world inside became quiet. He read each letter slowly, tracing the brushstrokes, sometimes aloud, as if Jiho's voice might emerge between syllables.
In the city, he slipped back into his gender roles.
"You look so manly now," people said, as if it were a compliment. They meant well. Or perhaps they didn't. He didn't correct them. The words sat heavy on his skin, a weight like damp cloth pressed tight to the heart.
The expectations returned with a force he had not anticipated. Old friends called him by his given name and did not ask how he was. They asked what he did. How long he would stay. Whether he had found a new job yet. Some relatives noticed his longer hair and raised their brows, offering vague smiles that did not reach their eyes. One aunt pressed a hanbok into his arms during Chuseok and told him it was time to dress properly again. The stiff fabric itched at his wrists.
Minho smiled politely and nodded. But inside, he felt himself folding inward.
At night, he would hold Jiho's last letter, read it by the dim orange glow of the desk lamp, and close his eyes. He imagined Jiho's hands drawing those ink lines, the brush moving in smooth, deliberate strokes, the smell of rain-soaked pine in the air. The ink on the letter had smudged slightly near the edge, and Minho often touched it with his thumb. That imperfection felt like a whisper, a moment of closeness preserved in paper.
One cold morning, after a sleepless night filled with dreams of fog and quiet mountains, Minho visited a community center tucked between a grocery store and a laundromat. A small flyer had led him there. It read, "Gender is not a box. It is a journey." Something about those words had stirred something inside him, like a pebble dropped in still water.
He sat in a folding chair near the back, fingers curled tightly in his sleeves. The room was warm but unfamiliar, lit with buzzing fluorescent lights and lined with metal chairs. Around him, people spoke softly, their voices hesitant but filled with a kind of tired courage. The speaker at the front was a young nonbinary person named Areum who shared their story with a voice that shook only once.
They spoke not about answers, but about questions. About shifting ground. About labels as tools, not cages. About how gender could be movement instead of destination. Minho felt each word like a hand placed gently on his back.
After the talk, he slipped into the bathroom and sat on the closed lid of the toilet, his arms wrapped around his torso. The tiles were cold. The light overhead flickered. He cried then. Not because he had found the answer, but because, for the first time, he realized he might never need one.
His tears were warm against the cold tile, a small surrender to the vast, uncharted spaces inside her.
He used that word — her — not out loud, not to anyone else. Just to himself, in the quiet afterward. And it did not feel wrong. It did not feel right either. It just was.
When he returned to his apartment that night, he sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by the box of letters. The city pulsed just outside the walls, lights blinking in rhythm with exhaustion. He opened a new notebook and wrote slowly, using the brush Jiho had given him before he left. He dipped it in the ink he had almost forgotten he owned, and let his hand move.
He wrote his name first.
Then he wrote it again.
And then, with shaking hands, he wrote, I am here. Even if no one else knows where that is.
The next letter he sent Jiho was not poetic. It was not tidy. The ink smudged. The words stumbled. But it was honest. He wrote about the noise. The pretending. The tear in his chest that had opened and now refused to close. He wrote about the flyer. The bathroom tiles. The silence that followed.
He ended it with a sentence he had not planned.
I think I am more than one thing. Or maybe I am something that hasn't been named yet.
A week later, a letter arrived from Haedam.
It contained only a single line, brushed in soft black ink.
You are exactly the shape the mist was waiting for.
Minho read it again and again, pressing the paper to his chest like a charm. His breath caught, and this time, the tears came freely. They slid down his cheeks with quiet dignity, washing nothing away but allowing everything to be seen.
From then on, he began to dress differently.
Some days he wore loose shirts that blurred his form. Other days, he tied his hair back with silk and wore soft lip tint, letting the color sit quietly on his mouth. He walked through the market and bought fabric without reason. He changed how he sat, how he stood, how he wrote his name on forms.
Minho asked his best friendsnto use they and he when talking about him in private. He wrote they and him in the margin of his note book. It felt strange at first. A little vulnerable. But when he saw the words on the page, they shimmered slightly, like dew on a blade of grass. Temporary. Beautiful.
He stopped trying to explain himself to people who did not ask the right questions.
Instead, he wrote letters to Jiho more often.
He sent him small gifts — a city leaf pressed between wax paper, a bus token, a sketch of a cat sitting on his balcony. Sometimes he sent a blank page, only the scent of lavender clinging faintly to the paper. Jiho always replied.
His letters were always brief, sometimes cryptic, always patient.
The trees here miss your silence.
I brewed tea with your favorite root today. It asked about you.
The fog still walks beside me. So I am never alone.
Each one was a light held out in the dark.
And slowly, Minho stopped feeling lost.
He began to feel in motion.