be-ayan

Chapter 1 – Paper Compass

The humidity in Seoul was a thick, invisible curtain that draped over the city, turning every breath into an effort. It was the kind of heat that stayed late into September, clinging to the glass skyscrapers of the Gangnam district long after the sun had dipped below the horizon.

Taeyeon sat at her desk on the 22nd floor, her face washed in the pale, flickering blue of her dual monitors. Around her, the office of the consulting firm was a graveyard of ambition. The mechanical clicks of a lone keyboard echoed from the far corner, and the hum of the air conditioning system felt like a low-grade fever.

She was thirty years old, and on paper, she was a success. She had the title, the salary, and the respect of her peers. But as she stared at the cell of a spreadsheet, the numbers began to blur, transforming into the jagged lines of a mountain range she had never climbed.

“I’m looking at the clock again, Jess. It’s 8:14 PM. In this life, I am Kim Taeyeon, the Senior manager. I am the woman who never misses a deadline. But in the quiet parts of my brain—the parts I don’t let anyone see—I’m still that ten-year-old girl sitting on the curb, waiting for a truck to turn around.”

She reached out, her fingers trembling slightly, and opened a hidden folder on her desktop. It was titled J_Research_2025. Inside were hundreds of screenshots: blurred faces from Google Street View, digitized records of Italian immigration from a decade ago, and forum posts in broken Italian where she had asked about “Korean families in the textile trade.”

The breakthrough had been agonizingly small. It was a photograph from a local news article about a labor strike in a garment factory in Bovisa, a gritty industrial district on the edge of Milan. In the background, behind a row of shouting workers, a woman was walking away. She was carrying a heavy bolt of navy fabric. Even through the grainy pixels, Taeyeon had felt a jolt of electricity hit her heart. The way the woman tilted her head, the specific, delicate curve of her shoulders—it was the ghost she had been chasing for fifteen years.

Taeyeon pulled a small, cream-colored envelope from her bag. It felt heavy, despite weighing almost nothing. Inside was her flight itinerary and a printout of the map to that factory.

“It’s not much of a lead. It’s a shadow in a photograph. It’s a name on a piece of paper that might not even be yours. But I’ve spent my whole life being ‘sensible,’ and look where it got me. I have a beautiful apartment I don’t love and a life that feels like a costume. I’m done being sensible, Jess.”

The third-person world moved with a slow, deliberate indifference. Taeyeon stood up and began to pack her personal items into a small cardboard box. Her desk plant, a struggling succulent she’d kept for three years. A stray mug. A stapler. She walked to the communal kitchen and left the box on the “Free Items” table. She didn’t say goodbye to the night janitor. She didn’t leave a note for her boss. She had already sent the resignation email two hours ago, timed to hit his inbox on Monday morning.

She walked out of the building. The street was slick with a sudden, oily rain. She boarded the subway, her shoulder pressed against a businessman who smelled of cigarettes and cheap gin. She watched her reflection in the dark tunnel windows. She looked older than she felt, her eyes shadowed by years of staying up late to search for a girl who might not want to be found.

When she reached her apartment, it was already a shell. The movers had come that morning. All that remained was her suitcase and a small, wooden jewelry box on the floor.

She sat on the floor in the dark, the city lights filtering through the blinds to stripe the room in orange and shadow. She opened the jewelry box. Resting on a bed of velvet was the plastic ring—the gold paint almost entirely gone, the edges rough and cheap.

“Do you remember the day we ‘married’ each other? We used the juice from those crushed berries as wine. You told me that as long as I had the ring, we’d always find each other. I’ve carried this through three moves, two relationships that meant nothing, and a thousand lonely nights. It’s my only compass now. And it’s pointing toward you.”

The next morning, the journey became a series of sensory assaults. The sharp, antiseptic smell of the airport; the frantic, multilingual chatter of the terminal; the cold, heavy weight of the passport in her hand as she stood in the queue.

Taeyeon watched a family in front of her. Two young girls were holding hands, laughing as they tried to ride on their suitcases. A pang of sharp pain shot through her chest. She remembered holding Jessica’s hand just like that, their fingers interlaced so tightly their knuckles turned white, until the car door finally closed and the glass separated them.

“Next,” the gate agent called.

Taeyeon stepped forward. She didn’t look back at the city she had called home for a decade. She didn’t think about her bank account or her career. She thought about the woman in the faded coat carrying the navy fabric.

“Destination?”

“Milan,” Taeyeon said. Her voice was a low, steady thrum, grounded in a reality that was finally starting to feel like her own.

As she walked down the jet bridge, the air turned cool and recycled. She found her seat—14A, by the window. She watched the ground crew in their neon vests, the luggage being tossed into the hold, the fuel trucks pulling away. There was nothing magical about the departure. It was mechanical and loud.

The plane began to taxi. Taeyeon leaned her head against the cold plastic of the window frame. The vibrations of the engine rattled her teeth, a deep, guttural roar that seemed to say it’s too late to go back.

The wheels left the tarmac. The stomach-flipping sensation of ascent washed over her. Below, Seoul began to shrink, its millions of lights turning into a sea of dying embers.

Taeyeon closed her eyes.

“I’m in the air, Jessica. Twelve hours and forty minutes of sky between us. I don’t know what I’ll find when I get there. I don’t know if you’ll even recognize me. But for the first time in fifteen years, I’m not standing still. I’m finally moving toward you.”

She had a persistent habit of writing a couple of lines about her day in her trusty old diary. Today could not have been an exception.

Entry Date: September 14th Location: Incheon International Airport

“I sold the sofa today. The living room looked so much larger without it, or maybe I just felt smaller. Everyone at the office thinks I’m taking a sabbatical to ‘find myself,’ as if I’m lost in some spiritual sense. They don’t realize I know exactly where I am; I’m just in the wrong place. I’m sitting at Gate 24, and the plastic ring is pressing against my palm. If I don’t do this now, I think I’ll simply stop breathing by next year. I’m not coming back until the air feels right again.”