I stared at the man in front of me in silence.

Even though I was younger, it felt like he had grown up so well all by himself. The first thought that came to mind was that his biological parents would be proud if they knew.

All the time he’d been alive, every memory he carried must have been lonely and difficult – and yet he hadn’t been defeated by loneliness. He had endured it to this day.

“When I hear your voice, I feel calm.”

When I asked him if he still lived in a noisy, chaotic world, he replied as calmly as ever.

“Do you still see the ocean when you hear my voice?”

“I do.”

I used to think that when he looked off into the distance, it was because he liked to see the big picture.

But now I realized it must have been his way of identifying the color that the other person carried into his world.

Lee Seol-won added quietly.

“It’s a very deep and clear blue.”

He saw a clear, blue color when he heard my voice, and a pink spring when I played the Gayageum.

His world – a world he couldn’t share with anyone else – felt both tragically beautiful and achingly romantic. I couldn’t have imagined it until I heard it myself, but he said that for him I was both the spring and the sea.

He was projecting onto me everything that people usually call the beauty of the world.

“I heard the story. It turns out we were in the hospital in rooms right next to each other.”

He must have already guessed that Heo Yeonseo had told me everything. Lee Seol-won nodded without a trace of embarrassment.

“Whenever my relatives came to the hospital and made a scene, I could hear the sound of the gayageum. I found great comfort in it.”

“The time you were hospitalized was twelve winters ago. You really remembered me for over ten years just because of that one thing?”

Along with the question, a pang of sadness struck my heart. How lonely must he have been to give his heart so deeply to the sound of a gayageum played by someone he didn’t even know in the next room?

“You shouldn’t say ‘just that one thing. It meant much more to me than that.”

“When you have synaesthesia, you perceive a single experience from several directions at once – it leaves a much stronger impression. Such memories are hard to forget.”

“If I’d known you’d been waiting all that time, I would have played more for you back then.”

“It’s okay. I came looking for it and listened anyway.”

Knowing his personality, he probably didn’t mean it as a joke – but for some reason it sounded like one.

And even though it wasn’t the kind of moment where laughter felt appropriate, I couldn’t help but let out a short, awkward chuckle.

“I have to admit, it feels good to hear that my Gayageum playing brought you comfort. As a musician, that’s kind of the dream. Every musician starts out wanting to move someone with their music.”

The thought that there was someone – an audience just for me, without me even knowing it – was both touching and deeply humbling.

I couldn’t deny it.

After I finished speaking, we both fell silent at the same time, almost as if we had agreed. Despite the many couches scattered around the living room, neither of us sat down. We simply stood facing each other, leaving a vague distance between us.

Pushed by the weight of the silence, each of us began to take a step or two for no reason.

Come to think of it, the only one who had ever really sat comfortably in that room was Heo Yeon-seo.

“There’s something I’ve always wanted to ask you, Seol-won.”

I gathered my courage and was the first to break the silence.

“How did you meet Eun-sae?”

Now that I thought about it, I’d asked and learned how Eun-sae and Lee Jae-hyup met a long time ago. But I knew almost nothing about how she met Lee Seol-won.

I finally got the chance to ask.

And when I finally heard the story of Eun-sae and Seol-won’s first meeting, it was completely unexpected.

—”Hello. Um… you remember my face, right?”

Eun-sae said she was imitating me. Just like how I had once approached him pretending to be her.

She said it was the night of the palace performance.

I also remembered that day very well.

Since Eun-sae hadn’t had many opportunities to experience our country’s cultural heritage, I had given her one of the invitation tickets sent to our performance team. I told her to come, try on a hanbok, and take a look around the palace.

It was a program for a limited number of guests – they were free to explore the palace and then enjoy light tea and refreshments while watching a performance by our orchestra.

That day, Eun-sae had her hair and makeup done at the same salon as me.

Since she rarely wore hanbok, she wasn’t familiar with the kind of styling that went with the outfit. So I paid the extra fee and made an appointment for her hair and makeup.

In terms of appearance alone, Eun-sae and I must have looked almost identical.

“Hyun Eun-sae approached me as if she were the Gayageum performer. She must have noticed that I was watching you intently during the whole performance.”

Eun-sae had told me that she took the opportunity to talk to Lee Seol-won right after I left the stage.

—”I noticed you kept looking at me earlier… I’d like to get to know you too. Could we exchange names and contact information?”

He said that when Eun-sae held out her phone and asked, he looked her over slowly.
Then, without even pretending to accept her phone, he responded:

—”What’s your name?”
—”My name?”

After a brief moment of hesitation, Eun-sae gave him my name.

I happened to have a solo performance that day, so my photo and name were prominently printed on the flyer. I can only assume that’s why she couldn’t bring herself to reveal her real name.

—”Seo… Seo-hae. Hyun Seo-hae.”
—”You’re Hyun Seo-hae…”
—”Sorry?”

I could clearly see the expression on his face.

Lee Seol-won wasn’t the kind of man who smiled kindly, gently, or warmly. Even in my few encounters with him, I knew that his natural demeanor was cold and piercing.

He rarely smiled, and even when he did, it was probably just a faint, sardonic twitch of the lips.

—”Well. I may not have learned to play the gayageum myself, but I do know this: the hands of someone who has plucked those tightly drawn strings thousands—tens of thousands—of times simply wouldn’t be this smooth or this polished.”

Following the trace of his cold smile and the gaze that seemed to pierce right through her, Eun-sae must have noticed where his eyes had landed – on the shimmering Swarovski decorations on her perfectly manicured nails.

She had probably blushed with embarrassment.

“I guess we really are twins. The way we act is just too similar.”

In the end, it was a rather absurd conclusion.

Eun-sae had pretended to be me to attract the attention of Lee Seol-won, who was interested in the orchestra.

And I, who wanted to take revenge for Eun-sae’s death with my own hands, disguised myself as her.

The younger sister pretended to be the older sister, and the older sister pretended to be the younger sister.

That man had met both of us in turn and was probably stunned by our back-and-forth impersonations.

Still, I didn’t really feel like blaming Eun-sae.

People sometimes make mistakes on impulse, even when they know it’s stupid.

And I understood how Eun-sae must have felt.

She probably just wanted to find something in common with the man she fell in love with at first sight – the one she kept stealing glances at.

But saying that she was just the younger sister of the gayageum player might have felt too distant.

Besides, Lee Seol-won didn’t seem like someone who would let others get close to him easily.

So at that moment she must have given in to the sudden impulse to borrow the identity of the twin sister he seemed to be interested in.

Not that she could have kept up the lie for long, with her personality that wouldn’t have been possible anyway.

Since she’d met her heartthrob in such an unexpected place, she probably just wanted to make sure there would be a next time – and planned to reveal her real name then.

Lee Seol-won had seen through that shallow little lie, and our first meeting ended in utter humiliation.

“Because Eun-sae and I looked so much alike, people used to mistake us for each other when we were younger. There were even boys who, after being rejected by one of us, would turn around and confess to the other. After we went our separate ways – I went to the U.S. and Eun-sae stayed in Korea – this kind of confusion mostly stopped. But we both still struggled with this blurred sense of identity. We used to talk about it a lot…how it felt like we weren’t two different people, but one person cut in half. Like we were always in a three-legged race – tied together, moving as one.”

I just tried to defend her – like an older sister would.

“Who said that? That you two are the same?”

“Well, we are identical twins. Eun-sae and I really look alike. Even our parents mixed us up sometimes.”

When he heard my answer, he dismissed it without hesitation.

“You are different.”

“That’s the first time I’ve heard anyone say we’re different.”

He looked at me again, calmly, listening to my voice. Then, after scanning my face carefully, he said with certainty.

“Completely different. I never thought you two were the same.”