Winged rumor

“It might be a sensitive topic… but is your whole family doing okay? I’m just asking out of concern.”

This was in an email from a friend. “A sensitive topic”? That caught me off guard. Still, since she’s not someone who usually writes long or flowery messages, I didn’t think too much of it and simply replied with a quick update about how things have been. Then she replied, 

“Actually, I heard something strange, and I was really worried. But I’m glad it seems like nothing’s wrong.”

Her message left me taken aback. But I didn’t ask for details, nor did I ask where or from whom she’d heard those “strange things.”

Over the years, I’ve been shocked several times by completely untrue rumors about my family.

Once, I woke up in the middle of the night to loud knocking on the door. I opened it to find a couple I knew standing there, looking at me with worried faces.
“We heard you were badly beaten by your husband, so we rushed over!”
The truth was, I had just been peacefully asleep. Not clinging to life after a beating, but deep in dreamland. That night, after waking up, I ended up setting the table for drinks and spent the night sipping in a daze.

Another time, my husband had gone to Korea briefly for some work. Then suddenly, the rumor was, “They got divorced, and he left her.”
Even I was shocked when I heard that one. One of the most ridiculous things I ever heard was a phone call from someone in Seoul asking,
“Was it true your mother took her own life?”
I was so stunned, I couldn’t even respond. None of these rumors had any basis in reality.

Because I’d been the subject of such baseless gossip myself, I used to take other people’s rumors with a grain of salt. But once, that backfired on me badly. At a polite social gathering, I asked an acquaintance,
“How’s your wife? Didn’t she come with you?”
His reaction was explosive—like a long-suppressed wound suddenly bursting open. Everyone around us turned in surprise.
“Why are you asking me about her?” he snapped.
“I’m sorry… I didn’t know. We actually got divorced a long time ago—I just never talked about it.”
He apologized the next day, and I ended up hearing a long story he’d never shared before.
Since then, I never ask about someone’s spouse if they show up alone. After all, they could be separated or divorced since the last time we met.

There’s now a rumor going around about a dear friend of mine—he separated from his wife and is now seeing someone else I’ve met a few times. But if he’s been through something painful and has now found someone who makes him happy, isn’t that something to be glad about? It’s not something I can fix, and unless he brings it up himself, I have no reason to ask.

Isn’t life just a constant tangle of threads—untangling, knotting again, and repeating that process, all for the sake of moments of happiness? And if, in the middle of all that, some lonely people find entertainment in gossiping about me—well, so be it. I choose not to waste energy asking, “Who said that? Where did it come from?”
Better to just live and let it pass.