The smoke from the ship was sharp and dry, but Gwan Sik didn’t smell the sea salt or the faint scent of rusted iron clinging to the deck like the others did. He smelled nostalgia. Or what used to be. Smoke rising from old, splintered logs stacked beneath a soot-stained pot, cooking the abalone her mother used to bring home after diving all day in the freezing water, her body shivering beneath her soaked hanbok, hair dripping, hands scraped raw from rocky seabeds while he was just the boy who counts the money for. That smoke lived in his bones, that bitter, earthy scent of labor and sacrifice. And as it drifted past his nose now, it pulled every memory out of him like threads unraveling from an old, worn garment.

He remembered how she used to scowl at the cooked abalone on their plate, not for its taste, but for what it cost her mother. Diving in the dead of winter. Coughing up seawater just to earn a few coins. All of it, just to feed her, the younger siblings, and Gwan Sik himself—even though he wasn’t really part of their family. They never treated him as a burden. Not their mother. Not her. He was just there, quietly accepted into their little life.

He used to bring back or stolen fishes, not always with permission. His parents had scolded him once, even if she told him he was meddling in other people’s business and need to stop. But he didn’t care. He brought six instead of five fishes, especially when he saw her basically being a maid at their uncle house. He brought them what he could—sometimes lean meat, sometimes the fatty belly of a pig or cow leftovers from his family’s kitchen. He remembered their mother’s expression when he brought it in: half worry, half gratitude, her hands always moving, always busy, never resting even for a second. She had no one to rely on, and yet she’d made space for one more hungry mouth, without asking for anything in return.

It hurt more than he could explain. The smoke from this ship should have smelled like a new beginning, like hope for the future in Seoul, but all it did was scrape against old wounds. He would’ve traded it all, this ship, this moment, even Seoul itself...Just to sit beside her again under a moonlit sky, to hear the sound of their mother’s worn hands stirring the pot, to smell that smoke again with her close, alive, and real. It made him ache in places he didn’t know could hurt. She was gone now, the woman who had kept them all fed, warm, and standing. And now, so was she. Not dead—but absent. Unreachable. The same as gone.