Miss, It’s Just a Cold

Chapter 48: Optimism

There’s a peculiar person I’ve come to know.

With crimson eyes and snow-white skin, her hair matches mine in color, and when she flashes a light smile, she looks incredibly adorable.

Though, it seems she doesn’t think highly of her own appearance.

She’s someone who comes from the same place as I do.

Perhaps someone slightly unhinged.

Someone whose circumstances evoke an unavoidable sense of pity.

A person who’s irritable yet fears inconveniencing others.

Someone who places others on an impossibly high pedestal while viewing herself with deep cynicism.

All of these words describe Emily.

She appears to have lived a rather successful life, unlike me.

I lived in an orphanage.

As a result, I never had school friends. The orphanage was small, and there wasn’t a single other child my age.

Looking back, I can talk about it casually now, but at the time, it felt like a deep, festering wound.

After all, I was ostracized at school.

Not severely bullied, but enough to notice—books slightly tattered, graffiti on my desk.

Words like “orphan,” “empty-headed,” “born this way,” “idiot,” thrown around casually.

Still, I think the school lunches were pretty good.

In any case, time passed, and I got into a reasonably okay university in a reasonably okay major.

It was the kind of school where people might recognize the name, but ask about its job prospects, and the answer would be, “Well, it’s hard to say.”

Unsurprisingly, given I got in through rolling admissions.

If you ask whether my life after leaving the orphanage was happy, the answer would be no.

I didn’t starve, but eating three proper meals a day felt like a luxury.

Most days, I bought cup noodles or rice balls from convenience stores.

Premade lunchboxes cost over 4,500 won, so they were out of reach.

When I didn’t feel like eating, I’d nibble on army biscuits.

If I was lucky, I’d find a bakery about to close and buy soon-to-be-discarded loaves or dried-out bread at a discount.

I thought I’d make friends in college, but I didn’t.

I wasn’t bad-looking, but people always said after talking to me, “You seem a little… off.”

Eventually, the only people who approached me were men.

And back then—just as I do now—I longed for love.

Not just the kind you read about in novels but the kind that could happen in real life.

In romance novels, a perfect prince often rescues a helpless but beautiful woman.

And I thought, maybe that could happen to me too.

It was a ridiculous notion, but when you’re eating cheap, dry rye bread three times a day, your mind starts to wander like that.

To be honest, the taste wasn’t great, but it was enough to fill my stomach.

Anyway, all of that is irrelevant now.

After scraping by, I didn’t die from a car accident but was instead hit by a motorcycle delivering food.

My last memory was of being struck by that motorcycle, so I’m pretty sure that’s how it happened.

Maybe a car ran me over while I was lying there—but that doesn’t matter.

After all that suffering, perhaps as a reward, I was reborn in a new world.

A world just like the ones I used to read about in novels.

I wasn’t unhappy here.

My parents loved me, didn’t restrain me like some others might, and let me do whatever I wanted.

Buy land, open a shop, host my own balls, meet new people, learn things I’d always wanted to try…

It might sound obnoxious to say, but even the slight changes to my appearance didn’t bother me.

After all, I was born this way here, and I wasn’t exactly unattractive in my previous life.

I felt like my future was set—one where I’d fall in love, have children, and live happily surrounded by them until I died of old age.

Here, I wasn’t just some useless girl with a pretty face.

I was a unique person, perhaps a bit eccentric, but that was all.

Though I didn’t have many same-gender friends, I was born into a good family, wasn’t tormented by anyone, and even made a few close friends.

Yes, I had everything I’d ever wanted:

Parents who loved me.

Even though Emily said servants couldn’t be friends, I believed I had some.

And besides the servants, I had Emily.

And a group of genuinely amazing people who admired me.

A sprawling mansion, an endless supply of money, a bloodline that commanded respect.

Until I met Emily, I thought I had it all.

At first, I couldn’t understand her.

How could someone who escaped such a horrible world be unhappy in this perfect one?

But that was before I understood anything.

For Emily, the pain hadn’t ended when she came here.

Could I help her?

Could I make her see this world as beautiful?

She asked me to get her a gun.

If I gave it to her, she would use it to kill those “family members” who always spewed hateful words at her.

Should I stand by and let her do it?

I was pondering this while asking the butler where one might acquire a self-defense pistol when a new maid came rushing in with urgent news.

Ernst apparently hurt his shoulder catching me.

Even though he hadn’t complained about it at the time.

Now he was being treated by the physician at Aria’s mansion.

As for me, I pulled the glass shards out of my body and was locked back in the room.

This time, there weren’t any sharp or dangerous objects around.

It seemed they had cleared away all the sharp objects in such a short span of time.

What is this, a mental asylum?

I pressed against the door, but the servants on the other side were using their strength to hold it shut.

What brazen commoners.

It’s no wonder their heads always end up smashed by mounted officers.

Feeling my mood grow colder, I sat in a chair at the table.

I sipped the now-cold coffee in front of me.

I hadn’t expected even the coffee cups to be blunt and sturdy.

They didn’t seem like something I could break with my strength.

After some time, Aria entered the room, her face tense and on the verge of tears.

“Why did you jump?”

“Because I trusted Ernst would catch me.

And he did, didn’t he?”

“What if he hadn’t caught you? You could’ve been hurt…”

Not just hurt—I would’ve died.

I hadn’t meant to say it, but the words left my mouth before I could stop them.

“Not hurt—dead. And if I survived with a cracked skull, that’d be its own kind of misery. Anyway, can’t you just let me out of here?”

“How can I, when I don’t know what else you might do!?”

“Then tell me, what do you think I’ll do next?

If locking me up were a real solution, why not tie me to a pillar and leave me there like my mother did?”

Though I’d been slightly cut by the glass, the injuries weren’t severe. I had roughly applied some ointment and covered the wounds with white bandages.

They stung a little when I walked, but it wasn’t unbearable.

“That’s not what I mean…”

“Aria, you seem… really happy with your life. It’s nice to see how positive you always are.”

“What are you even talking about?”

“I’m saying that sometimes, your view of this world and mine don’t align.

But, well, I do think this world is beautiful. That’s why I want to live.”

“If you want to live, then—!”

“What I mean is, living isn’t just keeping your heart beating and lungs working.

Right now, I’m as good as dead.”

For a while, I avoided looking at her, unwilling to confront these thoughts. But Aria forced me to face them.

That day—when my mother smashed all my instruments and no one stopped her. That day, yes, I was already dead.

I had tried to stop her, flailing and pleading, but a mere child can be easily kicked away.

As I stood there, helplessly watching the things that made up my identity be destroyed, I began to die inside.

So my mother is a murderer.

She’s already killed me, in every way that matters.

If I were to shoot such a person, would it even be considered a crime?

I’m not free. I’m rotting away, dying slowly.

Ignored so naturally, dismissed as cheap, incomprehensible.

And yet, I’m not demanding those things from you.

“If you just stay alive… somehow, eventually…”

Aria started to speak but faltered, breaking into tears.

There must have been a story, some reason behind it, but I didn’t particularly care.

We weren’t close enough to delve into such matters.

To her, being alive must mean clinging to mere physical existence.

Would she consider someone lying immobile in bed, unable to move, relying on others for everything—even for basic bodily needs—still “alive”?

“That’s… not right, is it?”

I took another sip of coffee.

The beans must’ve been switched because the bitterness was more pronounced.

Yet it left a pleasant, fragrant finish that added sweetness.

It was satisfying in its way.

Now that I think about it, there was something I was supposed to do this morning.

I can’t quite remember what it was.

It was probably nothing important.