"Choco Papa`s Health Note"

  The Woman I Stopped Talking To We'd been married for over thirty years, and somewhere along the way, we stopped having real conversations. I don't mean we fought. We didn't. I mean we stopped talking about anything that mattered. During my working years, I came home late most nights. Dinner was usually cold or reheated. I'd eat in front of the television, scroll through my phone, and fall asleep on the couch. On weekends, I was either recovering from the week or preparing for the next one. My wife and I shared a house, shared meals, shared a bed — but we were living parallel lives that barely touched. She'd ask how my day was. I'd say "fine" or "busy" or "the usual." She'd tell me something about her day, and I'd nod without really listening. I wasn't being cruel. I was just empty. Thirty years of pouring every ounce of energy into work left nothing for the person sitting across from me at the dinner table. I d...

  The Morning I Had Nothing to Do The first Monday after I left my job, I woke up at 5:47 AM. Not because of an alarm — my body just didn't know how to sleep past that time. Thirty years of early mornings had programmed it like a machine that nobody had turned off. I lay there for a while, staring at the ceiling. Then I checked my phone. No messages. No emails. No calendar notifications. No missed calls. Nothing. I got up, made coffee, and sat at the kitchen table. My wife had already left for her morning walk. The apartment was completely silent. I drank my coffee slowly because there was no reason to drink it fast. For the first week, I told myself this was freedom. For the second week, I told myself I deserved the rest. By the third week, I was watching television at 2 PM on a Wednesday and couldn't remember what day it was. By the second month, I was sleeping until 9, staying in my pajamas until noon, and feeling a heaviness in my chest that had nothing to do with m...

  3:17 AM. I know the exact time because I stared at it every single night for ten years. Not sometimes. Not occasionally. Every night. My eyes would snap open at 3:17, my heart already pounding, my brain already running through tomorrow's board meeting or next quarter's revenue forecast. I would lie there, staring at the ceiling, calculating numbers that didn't need calculating at three in the morning. During my years as a corporate executive, I slept four to five hours a night and called it discipline. My colleagues bragged about sleeping less. "I only need four hours," one senior VP used to say, like sleep deprivation was a competitive sport. We were all competing to see who could destroy themselves fastest. I was winning. Then I retired at 57. No more 6 AM conference calls. No more hoesik (회식) running until midnight. No more quarterly reports. And I still couldn't sleep. That's when I realized: the problem wasn't my schedule. The problem was that t...