I'll Be Right There Read Free Page A

passed with those words ringing between us. Back then, he and I were always waiting for each other. It was never too late at night for him to come see me, and there were no limits to when I could see him. We would tell each other to come over any time, day or night. We each get one life that is our own. We each in our own way struggle to get ahead, love, grieve, and lose our loved ones to death. There are no exceptions for anyone—not for me, not for the man who had called me, and not for Professor Yoon. Just one chance. That’s all. If youth were something we could do over, I would not be standing here today, answering my phone and listening to his voice for the first time in eight years.
    I hesitated a moment and then said, “No, I’ll figure it out.”
    He sighed and hung up.
    My last words to him left me feeling lonely. They were my words, yet they sounded strange to me. I should have told him I would meet him at the hospital. It was a harsh thing tosay. He had said the same words to me once, many years ago. By then, we were past the point of always knowing where the other one was and what we were doing. I had asked him what he was planning to do about something, and he snapped, “I’ll figure it out.” It seems that whether we are aware of it or not, memory carries a dagger in its breast. I had not been dwelling on his words all that time, and more than enough time had passed for me to forget about it completely, but in an instant, my subconscious retrieved his words and turned them on him. I was not the type to rebuff a friend like that. And if someone I had been feeling close to were to speak to me that way, I would likely start keeping my distance. His words had been roaming around inside me all that time, like lost puzzle pieces, before finding their way back.
    I returned to my desk and spent the morning slumped in my chair. After the difficult memories finally subsided, I was left with a cool breeze.
    Was it August? Or September? We were filling a basket with crab apples from the tree that grew in Professor Yoon’s yard when a cool breeze blew over us and we laughed. The tiny tree was barely tall enough to peek over the wall, but it was heavy with crab apples. Professor Yoon watched from the living room window as we filled the basket. I have forgotten why my college friends and I had gotten together to pick crab apples, but we must have been happy and at peace then, considering the way our laughter gushed forth.
    “Will these days ever come again?”
    My friend had meant it in an offhand way, but the comment cut deep.
    “Not the same days,” someone said sadly.
    We gathered up the laughter that had poured forth so easily a moment before and, to avoid one another’s eyes, looked at Professor Yoon gazing out the window at us, each of us lost in our private thoughts. Maybe we had already foreseen the future. After we finished picking the fruit, we returned to the living room and sat in a circle. Professor Yoon had fallen asleep with a book on his knee. Someone set the book down carefully on the table. Curious to see what he had been reading, I picked it up. It was The World of Silence . It looked old: the pages were yellowed and folded back. With my hand on top of the book, I stared at Professor Yoon’s socks hanging loosely on his too-thin feet.
    T hough I knew I should go to the hospital, I could not bring myself to leave my chair. I felt like I was floating, and I kept dozing off. By the time I was able to sit up straight and examine my desk, it was already noon. Books I was in the middle of reading were scattered about, and a memo pad lay facedown beneath some papers I had been editing. Two pencils sat askew in a pencil case I had bought at the Picasso Museum in Barcelona’s Gothic Quarter. I stared at the dove carrying a leaf in its beak engraved on the side of the case and then began to straighten up my desk. I closed the poetry books that were sitting open and put my scattered pens and pencils back