beta
My lacking romantic aspirations is exactly because I think like Shinwoo and has never had the love meter to match Han's maturity.
I piled up chapters and really needed some time to absorb chapter 45. Ive cried from a few chapters early on but I was nearly hyperventilating just processing the words and emotions of ch45. Shinwoo's confession. Han's words which felt like words that spoke to not just Shinwoo but anyone who thought like him...basically like me. And it's like a rollercoaster of heartwarming embrace of validation and bitter awakening that this is fiction... it's an imitation of a "what if" or "couldve been", an "almost true but not actually tangible", a mimicry that has been looked down on by early philosophers because it is an imagined state of reality. Emotions are there, but it is as fleeting as a wishful thinking until a person in the tangible world sincerely utters the same words with the same sentiment to you and YOU alone..instead of a witnessed scene from a window, separate from you and never truly directed at you.