/ˌanəɡˈnɒrᵻsɪs/

by the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken. for dust you are and to dust you will return.

[anagnorizein]

hey gang, it's juve ( s/h, 25+ )! in tow with me is son jaehee, a city boy who crawled his way to seomri after lots of grief, revelations, yadah yadah yadah! i've condensed his story under the cut since i clearly have a knack for speaking in riddles a la his app — if you find anything that resonates with you, feel free to give this a like so we can talk about it! xo

born to a university professor for a father & accomplished barrister turned stay at home mother following the birth of her — as she puts it — miracle child, jaehee! it's been jieun's lifelong dream to become a mother & after many, many years of being letdown, it's no surprise that jieun makes being jaehee's mom her entire personality

like any kid though, jaehee does long for his father's affection, so he puts effort into his studies which lands him admission into konkuk uni's vet science! no one was going to let him and his scalpel near a human with his grades, so vet science really was his next best bet. honestly doesn't feel any particular way about the job. as long as it pays the bills!

what this means is a codependent mother-son relationship and a kid who's literally been supported in every way imaginable. it's the best childhood a kid could ask for really — save the fact that he's still left to battle his father's towering expectations. donghoon is your typical grinder, works 9 to 5 then 5 to 9 and only respects people who do the same. because of this, his father's always been pretty unimpressed with jaehee academic-wise

& that, unfortunately, is how he finds out his entire life has been a lie. from the results of the tests, he learns that he's not actually related to his mother. he's devastated about it and starts to question everything about his identity, but of course he can't confront his mom or dad because a) she's literally dying, b) he doesn't have that frank of a relationship with his dad, and c) what if they affirm he's not their kid?

jaehee's life continues peachily with no complaints up until mid 2025 when his mother's slapped with a diagnosis for polycystic kidney disease. the drs say that it's genetic and aggressive and she needs an organ donor, fast. of course, jaehee volunteers without an ounce of hesitation

without a suitable organ donor, jieun passes on the eve of christmas 2025. jaehee starts to spiral — he moves back to his parents' house unannounced because 'his father needs the company', starts cleaning the whole house because his mom likes it clean, literally just anything, really. beneath the guise of keeping his father company, he's here because maybe his father will finally tell him about his adoption story. and beneath that guise, he's here because maybe his father will tell him that regardless of everything and anything, jaehee is still his son. donghoon does none of those, of course. instead, like many grief stricken men, his father throws himself at his job & barely makes it home. the few times he does, the indifference and silence that jaehee faces just makes this whole endeavour twice as detrimental as it was meant to be helpful

so without any confrontation or acknowledgement, jaehee leaves. because his mind needs to be on literally anything else, he's somehow latched onto this idea that all his problems will be solved and he can finally move on if he just gets down to the bottom of his parentage. so jaehee hires a private investigator who, after some digging, confirms his adoption and digs up that his biological parents are seomri natives

with this lead, jaehee puts in a job application for seomri veterinary hospital and promptly relocates. he again doesn't tell his father because part of him hopes the man will realise his son is missing and come running after him, but he's knee deep in seomri now so guess how that turns out :))

personality-wise, jaehee's relatively calm and collected but it's all smoke and mirrors. bro is genuinely not doing okay. i could tell you about how he can be sociable and down for anything but jaehee is, at present & at best, a shell of a man. he's never sitting still & he can never be alone because all that silence will leave him with no choice but to confront the fact that his mom is gone

considering finding out more about his biological parents is the real reason he's here the low hanging fruit for a plot is anything to do with his parentage. i honestly have grand ambitions for him to be a child of a love affair or some young dumb toxic love before they each grow up and get married. that said, i'd love any plots involving half-siblings! or hell, even just anyone who would be willing to help him out with his quest ( although this is a good time to say that jaehee isn't frank with why he's in seomri. if you ask him, he'll lie and say it was just a good job opportunity. he will also talk about his mom in the present tense )

on the topic of his job though, feel free to send any plots concerning pets / animals his way! jaehee also has his very own staffy who he rescued and is an in house vet for

i'm also a sucker for pre-est connections! so if your muse has ever been to seoul or is from there, i'd love if we could work something out!

[anagnorizein]

bitna:

( … ) ”Sorry! I didn’t mean to…” her voice falters, hand flying into her lap. Surely she’s red as a stop sign now. It just had been so easy to forget the way they’d ended when it’s always felt like they were just beginning. Her eyes catch his and hold fast, searching. For what? She’s not sure. 

it is oftentimes said that the mind controls the body, but there are ways in which the body understands independent of the mind. like how the hand recoils from a scald before the pain is felt. like how the body startles before the threat registers. for all intents and purposes, jaehee shouldn’t know bitna. the conversations they’ve shared are short, stolen moments between their friends’ roaring chatters, all summed up to the length of a night.

one single, fleeting night some decade ago.

in all honesty, son jaehee shouldn’t know much of anything about byeon bitna. and yet his hands know her. his eyes know her. his mouth knows her.

the red raw on the backs of her hands — he’d seen it. and perhaps it would’ve been right of him to have paused to tend to her injuries then, but his hands had known better. she touches him now and they’re staring at each other, drought and an ocean, and yet his eyes — they know better.

to stop is to fail, and byeon bitna doesn’t fail.

so his mouth, it pulls into an assuaging smile and his eyes, they look away. his hands, they reach into the bag he’d brought with him and he pulls out a lick treat, tears the sachet, holds it in front of him and he waits.

“you’re not doing anything wrong,” the words, a step louder than a whisper, cuts through the silence between them. jaehee keeps his eyes on cookie and pinches the treat. and like that, slowly but surely, the shorthair walks over to him. “cookie was the first stray i looked after since coming to seomri. he was scared and starving, bleeding from his right ear and he had mites all over. to be honest with you, i don’t think he ever had a home. not one he remembers, anyway.”

in some ways, cookie is not so different from the both of them. how his mother had found him as a child. how jaehee had found her from when they first met, quiet room with the pulsing lights.

“so when things — or people — approach him, he always thinks they’re looking to hurt him. he can’t comprehend the idea of being taken care of.”

here is how the body understands independent of the mind. jaehee pulls the inhaler from beside her and smears the last of the lick treat on the spacer’s mask. and now, the same hands that had recoiled from his arm — he scoops them from her lap, a featherlight touch and hovering lest he brushes against the scratches on the backs of her hands, and he guides her toward the inhaler. now, her hands on the inhaler and his, over hers. and like this, slowly but surely, cookie approaches for the treat and fits his nose into the mask.

jaehee looks at her, soft chuckle giving way to the smile.

“it takes time. but thanks to you, he’s got a lot of it.”

[idleminds]

[anagnorizein]

hyein:

( … ) "This must be Yuna then?" Her voice is polite, but her tongue feels heavy as she thinks of what to say next. Inept is no longer just a feeling but a fact about her as she demonstrates how maladroit she truly is, just like her mother had warned her not to be. "I don't know if you give her treats, but I baked some and brought enough for both of the dogs. They've got oats, sweet potato, carrot, and blueberry." Her mouth goes dry for a moment. Son Jaehee, despite how kind he is, ties her tongue in ways embarrassing for a woman at thirty-two. "Hodu loves them." She adds belatedly, as if trying to sell him on the snacks, "very healthy and all."

son jaehee grows up with the perfect mother. kang jieun is gentle and kind, with the sort of patience that is slow to anger. at every life stage she moves at his pace — from listening in to make sense of a child’s tantrums, to tempering down when he learns to raise his voice. consequently, son jaehee grows up kind and well-educated with a good job — the sort of character that most mothers can stand by.

kang jieun is the perfect mother, but try as she might, there is no perfect way to raise a child.

kim hyein is patient, accommodating, and entirely too humble for a woman of her station, and nam kyunghee is the sort of mother who only wants the best for her child. jaehee knows that hyein deserves better, and because he is his mother’s son, he knows that he can give it to her. more than this, there is some part of him that wants to. but kim hyein is to seomri as leaves are to a tree — neither serving a purpose unless they are bound to one another.

and son jaehee isn’t here to settle down. he is here for answers.

his motivations are perfectly selfish ones; because son jaehee is his mother’s son, and in this way he presumes that anything he says or does will be met with understanding. kim hyein is patient, accommodating, and entirely too humble for a woman of her station, and son jaehee will make good use of this.

“thank you. that’s sweet of you,” he smiles and despite the nonrelation, he looks so much like his mother — this kindness, or an approximation of, that he inherits from her, “yuna’s gonna love it. the ones i give her are usually store bought, but hey — they’re great for the teeth.”

he lets yuna guide him by her leash, along the trail and past the old houses on the left. there is a type of silence that hangs in the spring air, a steady tension characteristic of two people who are still getting to know each other. constantly overthinking their word choices. always overcalculating the sort of topics that are worth the others’ time.

“you’re sure there’s a dog park somewhere around here,” though absent of the inflection, his words are posed as a rhetoric as he takes in the state of ruin of the houses beside them. the corners of his lips pull into a teasing smile as he brings his eyes to meet hers, beside him, “just so you know, yuna and i are completely at your mercy. and hodu’s.”

there’s something about her nature that makes him bold enough to jest. kim hyein is kind and nice, with the sort of endless eyes that can dress a man down to his motives — and perhaps it’s with this that he convinces himself that she’d understand. mother would’ve liked her. it’s just a pity that kim hyein is to seomri as leaves are to trees. though suppose you can learn a lot about a tree by studying its leaves.

“i don’t think i ever asked you how the farm was coming along. we’re always so focused on the horses,” he confesses, and there’s this way his tongue shivers in his mouth as if at odds with the conversation. jaehee knows she can help him — he’s just not sure if this is the right way to go about it. yuna tugs at the leash as she beelines towards an adjacent bush, and he halts momentarily in his step to accommodate her. “what’s the competition like in this town?”

[anagnorizein]

the air is cleaner here in seomri. he can tell by the way it pours into his lungs, crisp and cold as it stretches within his chest and in consequence, how he feels more of himself. he thinks mother would’ve liked the magic of this town, so remote from the industrialisation of seoul that it spares itself from the rot.

and so the trees are left to grow, and they become tall and dense in number. the people here amble without purpose, each so absorbed in their leisure that they’ve left out the sorry eyes and hollow condolences they would’ve saved for him back home. and byeon bitna is here, in her home, leaving her door open for him to walk into.

“hold him like this,” jaehee demonstrates, an arm wrapped securely from behind the shorthair to grip his chin steady for the inhaler. they’re huddled in the living room, close enough that jaehee can feel her watching. still, he looks up to catch her eyes, and he tells himself it’s to make sure she’s paying attention. he rests his thumb over the canister just short of dispensing. “when you feel you’ve got a secure grip, press it and count to ten.”

perhaps in another life they’d be here in a home not unlike this one, fussing over something or another as a pot boils in the kitchen. in another life, she doesn’t leave and he doesn’t watch her go. but perhaps he’d gone about it all wrong. seoul is fast and loud with a tendency to ruin the things it touches. here in seomri, the air is cleaner. it is absent of rot.

jaehee pulls his arm gently away from cookie, reaches for his treat and holds the biscuit out. “you know, i never thought you were a cat person,” he confesses, a flicker of amusement in his eyes as he watches the cat struggle with his teeth, “but here you are in seomri, with cookie no less. it’s…”

nice? and what is? the fact that he knows so little of her? or that she’d left before they even had a chance to begin, and so he’d been left to expend all of his imagination just to fill in the gaps of her? or how, despite all of it, he’s here in her home, just content to pick up these bite-sized pieces of her?

perhaps it’s nice.

jaehee holds the inhaler out to her, hand a hair’s breadth away from hers and on his lips, he manages an encouraging smile, “think you can give it a go?”

MUCH ADO ft. @bergamor

[anagnorizein]

[flowerytale]

May Sarton, from “Contemplation of Poussin”, Letters from Maine