It begins quietly, too quietly for Joo Hojin to notice at first.

He has spent his life translating the world into manageable pieces. Words aligned with meaning, pauses accounted for, emotions softened into something comprehensible. Languages bend for him. People make sense when filtered through grammar and tone.

She does not.

She enters his world without permission, without warning, and nothing about her fits the systems he has built to protect himself. She never says exactly what she means, if she even means one thing at all. Her sentences drift. Her silences linger too long. When he asks a question, she answers something adjacent, as though the point were somewhere else entirely.

At first, he assumes it is carelessness.

Then he realises it is intention.

“Why do you always say things like that?” he asks her once, half smiling, trying to keep it light. “You know that is not really an answer, right?”

She only tilts her head, eyes unfocused, as if listening to something beyond him. “Answers are heavy,” she says after a moment. “They make things sink.”

He laughs, uncertain. “That is not how conversation works.”

She hums softly, unconcerned. “It works for me.”

And that is when it starts to frighten him.

He tries to keep distance after that. He corrects her phrasing in his head, maps her words onto meanings he recognises. He tells himself that misunderstanding is just another problem to solve, another gap to bridge.

But she is not a language.

When she speaks, it is not wrong, just untranslatable. Her words land somewhere behind meaning, striking a place he has never had to examine. She does not notice his confusion, does not realise that while everyone else sounds clear to him, she arrives distorted, like moonlight through water.

An interpreter is supposed to understand. He is supposed to make sense of things.

So he pushes her away.

Not harshly. Carefully. As though distance might preserve the world he has constructed, ordered, intact, safe from fracture. Yet every time he does, something splinters anyway. Not because she forces it, but because her presence reveals the fault lines already there.

Light slips in through the cracks she leaves behind.

One evening, when the air is cold and the moon hangs low, she stands beside him in silence for a long time before speaking.

“You look tired,” she says. “Like someone who keeps translating even when there is nothing left to say.”

He stiffens. “You know,” he replies slowly, choosing each word with care, “most people do not talk the way you do.”

She smiles faintly, as if that were a compliment. “Most people do not listen the way you do either.”

He swallows. His instinct is to ask her what she means, but he knows better now. Instead, he exhales, the truth pressing against his ribs.

“I do not understand you,” Joo Hojin says at last. His voice is quiet, steady, almost resigned. “Not the way I am supposed to.”

She turns to him then, surprised but not troubled. Not apologetic.

“That is alright,” she says gently. “I am not explaining myself.”

And in that moment, he understands this much, clearly and painfully.

Love is not about finally finding someone compatible enough to decode you. It is about collision. About standing before another soul with nothing but your unedited heart, offering it without subtitles or safeguards.

He looks at her, at the space between them, and speaks anyway.

“Then stay,” he says. “Even if I never catch up.”

She does not answer. She only looks back up at the moon.

But she does not walk away.