Yepp

Yepp

He found it in the gutter on his walk home from hagwon, wedged between a crushed milk carton and a shoe with no laces.

The mp3 player was scratched, the screen cloudy, but it still lit up when he pressed the button. The menu opened to a list of songs in English and Korean—none of them the pop hits his classmates liked.

The first track was slow, a woman’s voice with a low, steady vibrato, singing about rain. The second was a jazz piano piece, the kind you’d hear in an old café. The third was just called “Untitled.”

Hyeon-woo began listening to it every night before bed, lying on his side with the player tucked in his palm. He never told his parents, never mentioned it to friends. It felt like eavesdropping on someone’s diary.

After a while, he stopped wondering about who the owner was. He didn’t want to know their name, or why they had been carrying these songs, or how the player ended up in the street. Knowing would be like breaking it.

By winter, he could hum every melody in order. If the mp3 player died, he thought, he might still remember the songs, but not the silences in between.