Chapter 3
As my phone was charging, Dad and I ate a quiet dinner together in front of the TV. I didn’t recognise the show, but it forced the silence from the room.
Not long after, I headed up the stairs to the room I’d occupied for half of my life. Mum and Dad hadn’t done anything to it since I’d moved to London for university.
The walls were the same, faded floral wallpaper that I’d picked out on my twelfth birthday.
Underneath the small dressing table, specks of nail polish stained the cream carpet, a result of years of trial and error.
The bed was made up, as if Mum had always been prepared for me to come home at a moment’s notice, and I knew that if I looked in the tiny en-suite I’d find my favourite toiletries lined up on the little shelf above the bath.
One of my favourite things about my room was the window seat.
It wasn’t really a proper seat, not like the kind you always saw in Hallmark movies.
It was just a slightly wider windowsill, but my Dad had fashioned it into a bench with a length of plywood and padded cushions.
But it didn’t matter, it had allowed me to live out my teenage Wuthering Heights fantasies by sitting there, overlooking the moors by moonlight.
It also hadn’t mattered that it wasn’t the moors over the road; just field that was intermittently used to graze cows and sheep.
I sat there now, fitting neatly into the soft indents I had spent years making. And yet it felt too small for me now. I had grown since the last time I’d sat here. Not physically, but I was no longer the same person. I didn’t fit into that life anymore.
Through the windows, I watched the sky get progressively darker.
That was one of the many, wonderful things about living this deep in the countryside.
Night time was a different experience, which, once you got over any apprehension you had about it, became quite lovely.
The stars weren’t just present and visible, they shone.
I’d missed the stars while living in cities.
Sometimes you’d see the hint of them peeking through the clouds, but up here in the country, they splashed across the sky like splatters from a paintbrush, different colours discernible amongst the bright, white pinpricks.
Red, blue, purple. Constellations you could pick out. Planets you could recognise.
The sky felt different than it had in Seoul, and yet it appeared completely the same. Perhaps it was just that I was a different person now than the last time I had sat here, staring up at the same stars.
I looked down at my watch for what felt like the hundredth time and saw with some combination of apprehension and impatience that it was finally 10 pm.
Once I’d realised I’d been attempting to call Jihoon in the pre-dawn hours, I’d stopped, letting my phone complete it’s charge. Since then, I’d been waiting for a more palatable hour to call. Joon was now nine hours ahead of me.
Living in the future.
I checked I was connected to the WiFi before hitting call on KakaoTalk.
It took a moment to go through; the call hanging on a precipice before the ringtone sounded.
He answered almost immediately and when he did – his face filling the screen – it was so reminiscent of the first few months of our relationship that a feeling not unlike vertigo seemed to press me deeper into the cushions.
For a brief moment, I was back in my little bedroom in LA. It was like Seoul never happened.
I squeezed my eyes closed, trying to banish the feeling of erasure.
“Ky?” His normally smooth voice broke through my attempt to push the thought down. He sounded like he had just woken up.
I opened my eyes, locking onto his, trying to ignore that weird disconnect that came from two people staring at a screen – never quite able to make eye contact.
“Joon,” I breathed. His name was an exhalation of relief, and my lips quirked up at the way it felt to say it.
His coffee brown eyes softened as he grinned and I felt the corresponding tug in my belly. I already missed him so much.
Then, I noticed his surroundings. I recognised those sheets. And though it was irrational, I couldn’t deny the way my heart thumped painfully to see how he was back in his own apartment, and not the one we’d shared.
“You’re in your own bed.” I said, trying to keep my tone neutral.
“I moved my things when I got back from the airport,” he said. “I didn’t want to stay there without you.”
It made sense. Hell, I probably would have done the same thing. But despite the sense it made, the thought of the downstairs apartment being empty now made me feel hollow.
I remembered the day we’d gone to see it for the first time, before I’d known who it belonged to, before I’d known we’d be living there – however temporarily. I remembered how it had echoed in the way that empty places do, even when they’re full of things.
I wondered how long it would take before it would settle and sound like that again. Maybe it already did.
Echoes of the past, of the life we’d made there, the vibrations of our lives reverberating through the still air until they fell to the ground, undisturbed like dust motes.
Everything was going back to the way it was, except me. I had moved away and the life I’d left behind was shrinking, going back to the shape it had been before I’d ever been there.
“How's your eomma?” Jihoon asked, shaking me out of my morose thoughts.
I took a steadying breath.
“Dad says she’s doing okay. Her surgery went well. She might even be home tomorrow.”
He nodded, his hair falling in his eyes. It was getting long. “And how are you?”
I shrugged. It felt selfish to think about myself in the face of such overwhelming, life-changing events. I felt so many things, but none I’d stopped to really examine. Instead, they manifested in my bitten nails, and the constant twist in my gut.
“I’m not sure,” I said honestly.
A moment of silence fell between us, full of the last goodbye we’d shared.
“And you?” I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. “How are you doing?”
My question sounded so trite. It was like I was asking how he felt after I’d punched him in the gut. The words were weighed down with guilt. A part of me thought this was worse for him, because it had been my decision to leave.
Even though it hadn’t been a choice, not really, I couldn’t help but wonder if there wasn’t also a part of him that felt like I’d chosen this.
I was pulled down by the guilt of leaving, but also shame that I hadn’t left sooner. It was a wonder the gravity of it didn’t pull me to the floor, trapping me under the weight of it.
Jihoon looked away. It was just a brief glance, but I saw it then. The hurt, the way he tried so hard to hold it in. It was in the line of his jaw, the brief, but quick flutter of his eyelashes, the bob of his throat.
“I miss you.”
It wasn’t an answer, not really, but I knew it was all he could say.
“I miss you, too.” I took a shaky breath. “It feels so weird being back here. It feels like…”
“Like what?” he prompted.
I couldn’t meet his eyes.
“It’s almost like the past year didn’t happen. Being back here. It’s like, maybe I just moved back home after I finished uni. Like I never went to LA. Never met you.” I swallowed. “It feels like an erasure of the past year.”
“An erasure of me?”
“Never,” I said vehemently and immediately. I shook my head as I forced my eyes to meet his.
He nodded, but said nothing for a moment, until – “I felt the same when I carried my bags upstairs,” he admitted. “It felt like a loss, like defeat.”
“We didn’t lose,” I said quietly, barely hearing the words over the thudding of my heart, a sick feeling churning in my stomach.
He took a shuddering breath. “I don’t know how to do this without you, jagiya.” His eyes shone, even in the dim light of his – not our – bedroom.
“Me either,” I said quietly.
He sniffed, dragging a hand through his tousled hair, and I could tell he was trying so hard. Watching him struggle and not being able to offer any real words of comfort, no assurances for my return, was a kind of agony I had never experienced before.
We’d thought we had made it. We had done the hard part; the months of long-distance, the time differences, only to be right back to where we’d started.
“We’ll be okay,” I said, injecting a beat of bravado into my tone.
Everything was too new, too raw. I felt too much.
Jihoon nodded and took a deep breath. “We’ll be okay,” he echoed.
But it felt like the kind of echo I now associated with our apartment.
Empty.