Chapter 9.1
He couldn't eat. There was no reason not to eat, but he simply didn't have an appetite, and every time he tried to eat something, he felt drained. It wasn't that he was sick, but he couldn't understand why he felt so down. It was as if he had been dragged into a threshing machine and spat out—both mentally and physically exhausted.
He stared at his silent phone endlessly, and then at the door that wouldn’t open. He took out his bow to practice, only to coat it in rosin. When he tried to play something on the violin, his fingers couldn’t find the strength.
He couldn’t remember the fingering or the bowing techniques. The sheet music he forced himself to lay out was unreadable. In the end, he skipped practicing. He needed to go to the symphony, but his willpower, which had been completely drained, couldn’t fight against the lethargy that weighed down his body.
Haewon spent the entire day sprawled out, as though someone had given him permission to do so. He didn’t want to do anything. Even though he wasn’t doing anything at all, he felt an overwhelming, intense desire to continue doing nothing, sinking deeper into this unbearable apathy.
He lay heavily on the bed, feeling like his entire body was weighed down by an oppressive fatigue. Staring out the window, he wondered.
"Did I get dumped...? Me? Moon Haewon? Really?"
He had never been dumped before. He had always been the one to end things, but this was the first time he had been rejected.
The overwhelming apathy, the unwillingness to do anything, and the bottomless feeling of sinking deeper—he realized, only now, that this emptiness was the aftermath of a breakup.
This was being dumped, this was the feeling of being heartbroken.
You can break up with someone, say goodbye. But if it’s not mutual, if one person is rejected unilaterally, then you end up feeling like this, Haewon realized, especially as he was approaching the age where everything felt so cold in the dead of winter.
What was hardest of all was that he clearly remembered how Hyun Woojin’s passionate flame, which had once burned for him, had instantly been extinguished. The image of his cold, hardened face suddenly made Haewon’s chest feel cold and hollow.
He curled deeper into his bed, but the chill wouldn’t go away. The warmth of his hands, which had once felt so comforting, now filled Haewon with a shiver of cold. The warmth they gave seemed to intensify the chilling emptiness he now felt.