Opening the piano's lid released a faint smell of dust. Seojin wiped down the fallboard. In the glossy black surface, her own face looked back at her—blurred, out of focus, as if it belonged to someone else.
She rested her hands on the keys. The touch of the cool ivory was familiar and foreign at once. Her fingers pressed down along the path they remembered. No sound came. She hadn't turned on the power. She went on playing that silent performance for a long while—Minjun's unfinished nocturne, the melody he had played for her a month before he left, the one that now only she knew.
The trouble was that even she didn't know it completely.
Her fingers stopped at the third measure. There was, without question, a chord that came next. She had watched it over Minjun's shoulder on the score, had heard his hands play it—a chord warm and solid, like the low strings of a cello. But now, in her head, that sound played back like an old recording thick with static. Which notes they had been, in what order they had stacked together—none of it was clear.
Blurred. Everything was blurred.
She tried to conjure Minjun's face. The way the left corner of his mouth lifted just a little higher when he smiled. The faint crease that gathered between his brows when he concentrated. When she closed her eyes, the overall outline surfaced, but the moment she tried to look closer, the image scattered like a photo breaking into pixels. His voice was the same. The rise and fall of his voice, husky with sleep, asking 'Did you sleep well?' in the morning. The short sigh he let out when a piece wasn't going well. It was like running her hand over the surface of memory, only to find nothing there but a smooth, hollow blankness.
Seojin lifted her hands from the keys and pressed her temples. The small device fitted inside the curve of her ear was sending out a faint warmth. The Solace Network access device. The machine that had become part of her three months ago, right after Minjun left.
The Solace Network was a broadband network for grief. It captured the neural signals of acute sorrow too heavy for one person to bear and dispersed them among millions of anonymous subscribers. The total sum of grief never changed, but the weight any single person carried grew as light as a single gram of dust. In exchange, you too had to carry, in the faintest measure, a sliver of someone else's grief—a low vibration of sorrow with no traceable owner, always present, like a city's background noise. It was bearable. Next to the suffocating flood of grief that had come before, it was nothing at all.
Thanks to the Solace Network, Seojin could sleep again, could swallow food again, could sit at the piano again. The system had saved her life from the brink of collapse. But it had taken something too. Along with the data packet of grief, it had carried off the high-resolution files of memory bound tightly to it.
When she turned on the screen, an email was waiting. It was from Park In-su, the aging conductor who had been Minjun's teacher—a letter about the memorial concert marking the first anniversary of Minjun's death, four months away.
"...I want you to take the stage with one of Minjun's compositions. Better still if it's the last piece he left behind. The best way to remember Minjun is to keep his music alive."
Seojin bit her chapped lips. Minjun's last piece. An unfinished nocturne. A piece only she could complete. But with memories this blurred, it was impossible. She couldn't even properly recall the first note—how could she possibly complete a piece that held his very soul?
She opened the Solace Network's settings screen. A simple graph hovered on the display—real-time data showing how much of her grief signal was flowing out into the network. The graph traced a stable curve. "Remaining within normal range. Psychologically stable." The system's message glowed in soft green. Beneath it, in very small print, sat the disconnect button.
In three months, she had never once considered pressing it. Her counselor had said staying connected was essential to a "stable mourning process." Cutting the connection, he'd said, was like leaping into rapids without a safety line—the entire scattered weight of her grief would come rushing back all at once to its original owner. The system's warning was terse. "Disconnection may cause acute psychological shock. Not recommended."
But there was no other way. To remember Minjun whole, she had to accept whole the grief tangled up with those memories. Seojin's finger hesitated, hovering over the button on the screen.
This is insane, her reason said.
I have to finish the music, her heart said.
She drew a deep breath, and the instant she let it out, she pressed the button.
"Disconnecting."
For an instant, the sound of the world vanished. No—it wasn't that the sound disappeared. A massive pressure filled Seojin's head and erased every other sense. Along with a ringing in her ears, as though she'd been dragged instantly into deep water, something crushed down on her heart. It was the weight she had forgotten for three months. Not a single gram of dust, but hundreds of tons of steel girders, collapsing onto her all at once.
She couldn't breathe. She leaned back against the sofa, but it did no good. Every muscle in her body screamed and clenched. Tears blurred her sight. Minjun's face, the last time she'd seen him at the hospital; his hand, gone cold; the smell of disinfectant at the funeral home; the moments when people's condolences had lodged in her like blades. The data that had been distributed across the network came surging back into her nervous system like a storm.
In the midst of the pain, though, something else appeared.
A single, vivid image rose up. Minjun's studio. He'd set down his cello and sat at the piano. Outside the window, rain was falling. He turned his head, looked at Seojin, and smiled.
"Seojin, what do you think of this part?"
His voice. Clean, without a trace of static. A faint huskiness, a soft resonance. Seojin had forgotten that voice. His face, too, was vivid—the way the left corner of his mouth rose a little higher when he smiled, the faint crease between his brows. He played the third measure of the nocturne. A warm, solid chord. Every note reached Seojin's ear with perfect clarity. Sol, ti, re. A low Do anchoring the bass. It was a perfect memory.
Seojin stumbled toward the piano. She set her hand, trembling with sobs, on the keys. She pressed the chord she had just heard. It was exact. It was Minjun's sound. The next measure, and the one after that. A waterfall of memory poured down. With pain. With beauty.
But she couldn't hold out even a minute. Her heart felt like it would burst. She practically crawled to grab the tablet. The screen blurred, smeared with tears. Her finger slipped, and it took three tries before she managed to hit the connect button.
"Connecting to the Solace Network."
The sensation of a steel girder scattering back into a gram of dust. The pressure drained away, and she could breathe again. Seojin lay collapsed on the floor, gasping for air. Her whole body was drenched in sweat.
Relief washed over her. And right after it, a greater despair arrived.
Minjun's face, so vivid just moments ago, began to blur again. His voice, which had reached her with perfect clarity, receded as if sinking beneath the surface of water. She turned her eyes to the piano keys. The chord from the third measure she had just played. What notes were they again? Sol, ti... what came next?
The memory was dissolving once more into a thin fog. She had just returned from seeing hell and heaven at once. And she understood now: to reclaim Minjun, she would have to willingly walk into that hell, every single time.
The next morning, Seojin opened the score. The chord from the third measure, salvaged from last night's agony, was written there faintly in pencil. As though yesterday's violence had been a lie, her mind was quiet again, and those notes were now nothing more than a string of symbols that stirred nothing in her. Sol, ti, re, and a low Do. Filtered through the emotions the Solace Network allowed her, she could not begin to fathom why these notes had once sounded so warm, so solid.
She sat before the piano as if performing a ritual. She set the tablet beside her, and readied a pen and staff paper. This was no longer mourning. It was a dangerous dive to salvage memory from the deep. She took a deep breath. The sensation of air filling her lungs felt strange. For the past three months, her breathing had been nothing but a stable pattern regulated by the system. The mere act of breathing deeply by her own will felt like a small rebellion.
Once more, she pressed the disconnect button.
The second shock was worse for being predictable. Her body reacted first. She retched at the sensation of stomach acid surging up her throat, and a cold spread from her fingertips as if the blood were draining out of her. Even as she sank into the darkness, she clung desperately to consciousness. Minjun. Minjun's music. The fourth measure of the nocturne. Remember how his fingers flowed over the keys. Remember.
Another crack opened in the dam of memory. Amid the fragments of emotion pouring down like a waterfall, a scrap of melody surfaced. A tender, brief arpeggio bridging the fourth measure into the fifth. She saw Minjun's face, grinning as he played that passage. "This is my favorite part. It sounds just like you, tossing in your sleep before dawn." His voice rang vivid in her ears.
Seojin pressed the keys. F-sharp and A, then D an octave up. With trembling hands she scrawled the notes onto the staff paper. Her head felt ready to split. Thirty seconds was her limit. Every nerve in her body seemed to be scorching under the overload. She staggered and pressed the connect button on the tablet. The system's intervention began, salvation itself, and the enormous grief scattered once more into millions of specks of dust. Crumpled on the floor, she heard the system's artificial voice murmur low in her ear.
'Warning: an unstable connection pattern has been detected. For the user's psychological stability, the disconnect function will be restricted for 24 hours. If anomalous patterns recur, related data may be forwarded to your assigned counselor.'
Twenty-four hours. Seojin laughed, hollow. One measure a day. At this rate she wouldn't finish even the opening of the piece, let alone have it ready for the concert four months from now. The system was a prison built to protect her. It labeled her every attempt to recover her memories an "unstable pattern," an "anomalous signal."
Just then, a call came in from conductor Park In-su. Seeing his name light up the screen, her heart dropped. She hesitated over whether to answer, but steadied herself and pressed to accept the call.
"Seojin, it's Park In-su. How are you feeling?"
The old conductor's voice was low and gentle, as it always was.
"I'm fine, Maestro." It was a lie. Her voice trembled, faintly.
"It's nothing urgent — I was clearing out the studio Minjun used to work in, and I found this." There was a pause, the sound of papers being shuffled through. "It's a composition notebook Minjun kept since his student days. On the last page he'd written something. 'The weight of the first note. For Seojin.' I think he meant to give it to you. I'll hold onto it for now — come by whenever you have time."
The weight of the first note. Seojin stopped breathing. Those were the words Minjun used whenever he spoke about this nocturne. Every piece, he said, had to carry its soul in the first note — if you couldn't bear that weight, you could never move on to the next. And the first note of this nocturne, he'd said, was Seojin. Her, herself.
"Yes. I'll come see you soon."
After hanging up, Seojin stared blankly into empty space for a long while. Minjun's notebook. Might it hold some clue to finish the piece? A sliver of hope wedged itself into the crack of her despair. But at the same time, the cold reality of the 24-hour connection restriction seized her by the ankle.
Two days later, Seojin made her way to the old record bar where they'd agreed to meet — a place Park In-su and Minjun used to frequent together. As she opened the door, the smell of damp wood mixed with the dust of LP records struck her nose. Park In-su, seated by the window, saw her and raised a hand.
"You came."
He handed her a worn, thick notebook. Seojin took it carefully into her hands. She could feel the cover, worn soft by Minjun's touch. It was a record that held, intact, the whole arc of his musical world — from the callow melodic sketches of his younger days to the intricate, mature compositions he'd grown into.
"Minjun... talked about you a great deal."
Park In-su said, tilting his glass of whiskey.
"He said his music grew so much deeper after he met you. Before, it was technically flawless but soulless — and you were the one who breathed a soul into that boy's music, he said."
Seojin could not bring herself to raise her eyes. Far from breathing a soul into his music, she now felt wretched — she couldn't even remember the piece that held his.
"That nocturne — how is the work coming along?"
It was a sharp question. Seojin wet her dry lips.
"Yes... little by little... I'm working on it."
"It won't be easy."
Park In-su said, his eyes seeming to see straight through her lie.
"That piece holds everything Minjun was. That boy's joy, his anger, his love, and... even his despair, at the very end. It's a piece you can only play once you've taken on the full weight of every one of those feelings."
Despair. The word lodged itself in Seojin's chest. It was one of the emotions the Solace Network had taken from her. She had tried to reclaim her grief in order to remember Minjun's joy and love, but she was not prepared to face his despair as well. A fear washed over her — that somewhere in the melody she could not remember lay hidden Minjun's final emotion, one she might not be able to bear.
"Don't let it weigh on you too much."
Park In-su said, setting down his glass.
"But I do want to tell you this. Minjun said that no one but you could ever understand that piece. It's like a final letter Minjun is sending to you."
The whole way home from the bar, Seojin's mind churned. The moment she reached her apartment, she opened Minjun's notebook. Her fingers wandered among the countless musical ideas and notes, until they stopped at the notebook's last page.
'The Weight of the First Note. For Seojin.'
And beneath it, in place of a musical score, a short passage was written.
"My beginning and my end. This piece doesn't start on the keys. It starts with the sound of your breath. The first breath you take before you call my name — that is the first note of this nocturne."
Seojin was stunned, at a loss. A note that existed nowhere on the score. A sound that existed only in her memory. Minjun's voice calling her name, the tremor in her own voice the instant she called his. If she could not recall that, she would never even be able to take the piece's first step.
A notification appeared on the tablet screen. 'Disconnection restriction lifted.'
Now she could dive back into that hell. But this time, what she had to find was not a simple chord or melody. It was the very air of the most intimate moment that had ever passed between her and Minjun — that tremor itself. It was bound, most likely, to lead straight to the deepest core of her grief. With the notebook and the staff paper laid before her, she brought her finger once more to the disconnect button. A fear greater than any she had felt before pressed down on her, and with it, an unavoidable sense of purpose.
Seojin closed her eyes. She held Minjun's notebook to her chest. His last words rang in her heart: "The first breath you take before you say my name—that's the first note of this nocturne." This was no mere salvage of memory. It was a ritual to summon back his soul, their time together, whole and undivided, before it could scatter into pieces. She lifted the tablet and, without hesitation, pressed the disconnect button.
This time she did not resist. She did not thrash to withstand the pain as she had the two times before. Instead, she let the flood of grief strike her with her whole body. Not a steel beam this time, but a towering wave. Seojin threw herself into it willingly. The sensation of drowning, of bones grinding to pieces. But she swam onward, toward the core of that pain, into deeper, darker water. In search of Minjun's despair. In search of that final emotion of his—the one Conductor Park In-su had spoken of, the one she had been turning away from.
In the depths of memory, that day's scene rose up before her. It was a rainy night, when he had been on the verge of finishing the nocturne. He suddenly stopped playing and turned around. It wasn't his usual mischievous face. It was etched with deep exhaustion and a shadow of anxiety.
"Seojin."
His voice had sunk low, like a leaf soaked with rain. She moved closer to him. His hand was cold as ice.
"If I... disappear, will my music disappear with me?"
Under the weight of that question, Seojin could say nothing. She could only grip his cold hand in return. His eyes trembled desperately. It was the fear of death, hidden behind countless notes.
"No. I'm here. I'll remember all of it."
She said it almost in a whisper. She wanted to set him at ease. In that instant, the short breath she let out. The faint tremor of that breath, just before she spoke his name. That was it. The first note of the nocturne.
"Minjun."
At the sound of her voice, he smiled faintly. It was the face of someone saved. He set his hands on the keys once more and began to play the final movement. It was a melody Seojin had never heard before, completed for the first time that very night. It was no mere nocturne. It was a promise of love beyond fear, a fervent prayer of defiance against oblivion. Sorrow and joy, despair and hope, danced together precariously within a single melody. It was a perfect piece.
Seojin opened her eyes. Tears ran down her cheeks and fell onto the piano keys. In her mind, Minjun's nocturne played from beginning to end, not a single note missing. The pain was still there. An ache like a blade carving out her heart wrapped around her entire body. But now that pain was a part of Minjun, and a part of herself. She no longer reached for the tablet. There was no longer any reason to connect to the Solace Network. There was no grief left that needed to be dispersed. This was hers alone to bear—the price, and the proof, of having loved Minjun.
Four months later, at the memorial concert hall.
Every light in the house went dark, and a single beam fell across the piano onstage. In the stillness, Seojin walked out. Her earlobe felt strangely bare without the Solace Network's接续 device—no, rather, without the Solace Network's接속 device—but the whole world's sounds seemed to ring clearer for its absence. She bowed to the audience, then sat down at the piano. The face reflected in the glossy black surface was no longer blurred. It was her own face, unfamiliar yet unmistakable, holding within it a deep sorrow and a quiet resolve.
She did not lower her hands to the keys. Instead, she closed her eyes and drew in one long, slow, deep breath. There was no microphone, yet that breath seemed to ripple through the entire hall, taut with anticipation. It was the first note—meant for Minjun, and for everyone who remembered him. A moment of silence. With the breath she let go, the first chord would sound.
Seojin's fingers moved. Toward the cold keys, descending, very slowly.
