Kim min-joon

The water in the tank was always cooler than my skin—cold enough to make me shiver, but warm enough to feel like home. I’d press my palms flat against the glass, watching goldfish weave through sunlit bubbles like they didn’t carry a single ounce of worry in their scales. I’m kim Ha-neul—seventeen, with hair that falls in a mess over my eyes no matter how many times I try to push it back, and hands that are always stained with ink from the sketches I hide in the bottom of my backpack. My shoulders are hunched most days, like I’m trying to shrink into myself and disappear; after so many years of people looking at me like I’m broken, it’s become second nature to fold inwards. I come here every day, to the quiet pet shop tucked between a bakery that smells like cinnamon and a laundromat that hums with constant noise. Here, the silence doesn’t ask questions. Not like my parents did when they found those drawings—pages and pages of boys with soft smiles and strong jaws, lines I’d drawn so carefully I’d worn holes in to before I’d even found the courage to say what’s been sitting heavy in my chest since I was twelve, leaving me to feel like I’m drowning in a world that’s way too loud, way too bright, way too wrong for someone like me. I thought things would stay that way forever—just me, the fish, and the weight I carried everywhere I went. But then he met this boy that changes everything. He walked in one Tuesday afternoon,