Written by Young Bean Kim
Illustrated by Seoyoung Ko
My dear X,
This letter, this entry in my private journal, is the only place I could call you “my dear.” But for
the fear of having my journal stolen and have its contents revealed, I will not call you fondly by your
name. I will refer to you as X. No, not because your name starts with the letter x. Not because you
don’t exist, neither because you’re wrong. It’s because life is simply an equation, where variables
lead to diverse results. And in my life, you, the variable X, had changed and shaped me into my current self.
I remember meeting you for the first time. At that time, I never knew I would actually get this sort
of feeling from you, or from anyone, for that matter. In fact, I was sure that we are going to end up
as mutual enemies. Yes, enemies. We had bits and pieces of something similar to a clash, Now that I
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think about it, I think we misinterpreted each other’s actions as aggressive. I am the one who should
apologize; I’ve never had anyone act so kind toward me, from the moment that we first met, and
your sweetness triggered my suspicion. Let’s just say that my emotions were just dried up and in bad
shape because of numerous broken hearts from past experiences. And the experiences weren’t even
relationships, and they usually went like this: I like a person and keep that fact to myself, I don’t do
anything except act nice(and devoted) to that person, and at last that person uses my kindness and
pursuits a relationship with someone else. It took me a long time to realize that you were actually
being nice to me.
After a while, we became friends, after I lowered my guard and stopped being so defensive. Turns
out, we had so much things in common. I felt that we could talk all day about those things and still
would not be done. The more we talked, the more subjects we seemed to find that were of both our
interests. Sometimes we went into unusual subjects, and together we would explore the forbidden.
Our conversation time was pretty limited, because we also had other business to do. We had met for
a social reason, and free talk could be mistaken for an idle chit-chat. Nevertheless, we did deal with
a lot of subjects. You taught me a lot, and I also taught you some things. And the best feeling was the
one I got when I introduced to you something I liked and you also knew about it, and liked it. I felt
that the spiritual bond grew stronger by the day, conversation after conversation. Sometimes I felt
that we were both a bit lonely in our own ways. You would have had relationships before. But I fantasized that maybe I was somewhat different from the other people you have met. Because you were
very special to me. And soon after that, I fell. For you. And I was afraid.
You don’t realize how easily you could change my mood. In days when I had a “fruitful” conversation with you where we both learned something new about each other, I would fall asleep happy.
When I could not speak to you, I felt so empty and hollow. I have always been a daydreamer, but I
never dreamt about a specific person. I would catch myself imagining things about you that was hard
to come true in real life. I had lucid dreams about having a conversation with you, and then wake up
to the reality. I looked for you everywhere I went. I would get very excited to see some features that