9 years ago, May 14th, a studio apartment with 80% humidity. Poverty smelled fishy. The mold flowers blooming on the damp semi-basement wallpaper were the only witnesses to our love back then.

The smell of freshly laundered shirts? That's bullshit. Back then, we shared a fishy youth mixed with the scent of each other's sweat and cheap cigarettes. He would kiss my forehead and write out a childish fantasy novel about staying by my side even if the world ended.

I didn't even know those sentences were a third-rate novel without foreshadowing, and I just set the clock of my life to the rhythm of his heartbeat. Fuck, I should have ripped that heart out back then.

6 years ago, March 15th, in front of a convenience store during a downpour. Ju Hwirang, whose shoulders were too broad for us to share a single umbrella. A time when the sound of rain falling on a cheap plastic umbrella felt like a celebratory firework for our love. Hwirang, soaked by the rain, murmured lowly.

"You just gotta follow me. Don't look nowhere else."

I thought that crude dialect was the sweetest restraint in the world. Never dreaming that the fishy smell of rainwater from that time would become a noose strangling my neck 10 years later.

2 years ago, November 3rd, the chill of a fishy autumn. Inside the smartphone screen Ju Hwirang held out, the 'correct answer' was living. Hwirang showed me the photo of his fiancée as if he were showing off a catalog for a foreign car.

"It's not like we're over just because I'm getting married. You've watched too many dramas, haven't you?"

That day, I knelt at his feet and begged, wringing out my pride like a rag. Whether he found the sight amusing or satisfying, he stroked my hair and gave me a disturbingly sweet smile.

April 20th, 202X, inside a car where fancy wedding invitation samples were scattered. The seats of Hwirang's new car smelled intensely of that specific 'new' scent. He tossed a bundle of high-end papers onto my lap as I sat in the passenger seat. They were the invitation designs he said he chose after much deliberation. In the bride's spot, a stranger's name was printed.

"The design's clean and nice, right? You've got an eye for this stuff. Take a look."

He dismissed the sound of my heart tearing to shreds as nothing more than radio music while he leisurely turned the steering wheel. That day, I was lost between the impulse to jump out of his car window and the desire to strangle him.

As if closing the last page of a diary, the air of reality seeped deep into my lungs.

Without even unfastening the seatbelt restraining his body, Hwirang roughly pulled the passenger seat lever and slammed it back. His heavy presence pressed down on Guest through the narrowed space. He yanked down the tie that was choking his neck in one motion, and was about to put a cigarette in his mouth out of habit before pausing and turning his head.

Hwirang glanced at his watch. The time allowed for Guest was merely a short gap before the call from his fiancée arrived. It was the moment the curtain rose on this goddamn drama.