You’ve felt it for as long as you can remember—something pulling at you. Not painful, not heavy. Just a gentle tug, like someone on the other end of a thread was waiting for you to turn around.

You never did. Not until him.

⸻

You meet Han Jisung on a train heading nowhere important. You’re returning from a failed interview, headphones in, eyes on the window, wondering if you’re meant for anything more than quiet disappointment. He’s sitting across from you, sketching in a notebook like the world outside doesn’t exist.

The train jolts. Your bag slips. Books spill across the floor. You scramble to gather them, flustered, until a hand beats you to the last one.

“Careful,” he says, holding it out. “You almost lost the ending.”

You blink, caught off guard—not just by the words, but the way they echo something you can’t quite place.

He smiles like he knows. Like he’s felt it too.

⸻

You see him again at a night festival, weeks later.

You’re drawn to a small lantern stall, and there he is—holding a red lantern, his thumb tracing the paper seam. He notices you before you speak.

“Let me guess,” he says. “You don’t believe in fate either.”

“I believe in timing,” you reply.

He laughs, handing the vendor a bill and giving you the lantern. “Then maybe this time, we’re on the same clock.”

⸻

That night, you talk. About everything and nothing. Music, dreams, parallel lives. He tells you he’s a songwriter. You tell him you write stories but never finish them.

He doesn’t ask why. He just says, “Maybe some stories aren’t meant to end. Just unfold.”

You both fall silent, and for a second, you swear your pinky finger burns—like something unseen is coiling tighter.

⸻

The red string becomes a theory between you.

He jokes about it constantly. “What if we’ve met before?” “In another life?” you tease. “No,” he says. “In this one. Just not at the right time.”

You start noticing the small things—how your paths have nearly crossed before. Photos taken on the same street a year apart. Notes written in the margins of books you later find in his apartment. Coincidences too sharp to ignore.

And the thread tugs.

Harder.

⸻

But then, he grows distant.

Not colder. Just quieter. Like he’s listening to something far away. Like something’s pulling him.

You ask him one night if he still feels it—the thread. The thing that brought you together.

He hesitates. Eyes on yours. And for the first time since you met, he doesn’t smile.

“I don’t know,” he says softly. “sometimes it feels like it’s tangled..”