Chapter 25 #2
We didn’t talk. Or, rather, I didn’t because every time I opened my mouth, I felt a burning sensation behind my eyes, my throat tightening.
So, Mum talked. She talked about little bits of everything, culminating in not much of anything.
Scraps of life, from how many leaves were blowing into the garden, to how the new hand sanitiser dried out her hands, to how this person or that person from her cancer support group was having an affair.
Real life stayed behind the door. We didn’t talk about her own cancer. We didn’t talk about… him.
We spent so long passing time, that I almost didn’t notice when the light took on an orange tint, but Mum glanced out the window and looked down at her watch.
“It should be okay to call Becka now, love. I really think you should. Do you feel up to it?”
Did I? The self-care ministrations – and my mum – had helped me regain some clarity, and the more I thought about calling Becka, the more I felt the desperate urge to hear her voice.
“Yes,” I said, voice cracking.
“Shall I get your phone?” She moved to get up, but I halted her, my hand shooting out to grab hers.
“No.” I cleared my throat. “No, I’ll use my laptop.”
Mum’s eyes ran over my face, eyes narrowing. She made a noise in her throat, but nodded.
“Alright, love. Shall I get you another hot drink?”
I’d drunk enough hot chocolate to satisfy even fictional little boys in magical chocolate factories, so I shook my head.
“I’ll leave you to it, then.”
She moved towards the door and then, fingers brushing the handle, hesitated before turning to look at me.
“I know it’s not okay right now. I understand. But when it gets to the point where it hurts less, we can talk. I get it. I’ve been where you are. You don’t need to be alone.”
She didn’t hover, for which I was glad, because her words were a vice around my throat.
She closed the door behind her, and I let out a shuddering breath. The effort needed to fight the tears was almost too much. I was so exhausted from balancing on a knife’s edge. I was fine for minutes at a time, until I wasn’t.
I looked up to the ceiling, trying to resist the tears that were always just on the brink of falling, but eventually I gave in, swiping at them in frustration.
I blew out a breath.
One thing at a time.
I changed into a clean set of flannel pyjamas. Thick, and a little Christmassy for November, but they were soft and warm.
I sat at the vanity that was pretending to be a desk, and opened my laptop. I had plugged in my phone to charge, but I hadn’t yet worked up the courage to turn it on. Instead, it sat there, a silent victim of blame.
I took a breath, my fingers hovering over the mousepad until I forced myself to press ‘call’ on Becka’s picture.
She picked up immediately, and it was like our roles had reversed with the click of a button.
She looked a mess. Her hair was unbrushed and swept up into a top knot, her eyes were red-rimmed, and she looked as though she’d slept on the floor.
I recoiled even as I stared at her, running my eyes over every part of her that I could see, looking for wounds or visible signs of injury.
After a moment… she just burst into tears.
“Oh my God, what’s happened?” I cried in alarm, watching as my best friend dissolved into tears with the same efficacy as a biscuit being dunked into a cup of tea.
She kept trying to take a breath, and kept getting stuck halfway with a hiccup.
“I-I sh-should be a-asking y-you that!” Becka wailed as her face crumpled.
I inhaled sharply, a pang in my chest taking me by surprise.
“Are you?” Becka went on. “Okay, I mean? Oh god, of course you’re not. Are you okay?”
She didn’t seem to have realised she’d repeated the question. I wanted to smile, but the muscles in my cheeks felt rusty.
Tears ran down Becka’s face, and I watched them in an almost, but not quite detached, sort of way.
“Oh, Becka,” I sighed.
“I’m sorry,” she cried, smearing a limp tissue over her face. “I c-can’t stop!”
“I can see that.” My voice was strangely monotone. I wanted to care, but it felt like there was a layer of fog between me and… everything else.
“Are you safe and well?” I asked.
“Uh huh.” Becka’s voice heaved with a hiccup.
I sighed as I absently rubbed my chest. “What’s wrong, then?”
She snapped her head up to look at me, hiccups shocked into submission.
“Huh?”
My eyelids felt heavy. My whole body felt heavy.
“Why are you upset?”
Becka wiped her eyes with the tissue and ran a hand over her hair. She leaned closer to the screen, and I saw the pinch to her lips as her eyes took me in. I couldn’t bring myself to care.
“Babes,” she said quietly, “I’m upset for you.”
“Me?” I asked doubtfully.
“Of course, you!” She seemed affronted I would even need to ask.
“Okay,” I began, “so to clarify – you’re crying, and looking like… that, because of me?”
“Well, now I don’t think you deserve it,” she sniffed.
Impossibly, my lips twitched, and I felt it there, a little spark that wanted to break through the fog.
“I know what it feels like,” Becka said. “I guess I got carried away.”
I nodded. Everyone kept telling me they understood how I felt
“Won’t you tell me how you’re doing?” She asked, a tinge of desperation in her voice.
I shrugged, because how could I articulate this feeling? I was hollowed out. Shelled. I was what was left when an entire future suddenly disappears.
“I’m fine,” I said.
Becka’s chin wobbled.
I shut my eyes to not see it.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Know what?” She replied, sniffing loudly.
“How did you–” The words cut off before they could reach my mouth and I shuddered.
“Oh,” Becka said quietly. “I, er. I saw him. On social media,” she clarified quickly as my eyes darted to hers.
“I was just scrolling a couple of days ago, and there was a live stream. One of those gossip outlets was following someone through Incheon airport, and – it was him. They practically chased him all the way to security. I saw his face.” She said the words like they should mean something to me, but all I heard was that while I’d been here, falling apart, he’d been living.
I rubbed my chest again, trying to relieve some of the ache that had gathered there.
“He looked like… I don’t know how to describe it, babes.” Becka shrugged helplessly. “Even under a facemask, Jihoon looked… wrong. If someone had told me he was flying to attend a funeral, I would have believed it.”
When she said his name, my gut twisted. It brought me no joy to hear that he’d been visibly suffering, and it frustrated me to realise that hearing that sparked an immediate impulse to check on him.
But I would not.
“So, then I tried calling you, but your phone was off, so I just kept sending you messages. Didn’t you see them?” She asked with a tinge of frustration that would have been scolding on any other occasion.
“My phone was off.”
“For days?”
I shrugged, absentmindedly twisting my ring around my finger.
“Oh, babes,” she sighed. “Will you tell me what happened?”
“No,” I said quietly.
“Ky, you can tell me,” Becka’s tone was gentle. The tone you took with a scared animal or the mortally wounded.
“No,” I said again. “I can’t. I can’t tell you in the same way I can’t…” My chest tightened.
Breathe, just breathe.
“I can’t say his n-name. And I need you to not ask if I’m ‘okay’.”
Becka frowned and opened her mouth, but I cut her off.
“Because if you ask me that, I don’t think I can lie, so I need you to just… not. Can you do that?”
She closed her mouth and nodded.
“We’re not… it’s not.” My shoulders heaved under the weight of a suppressed sob. I pushed it down. Took a breath. Exhaled. Did it again. And then I pulled my shoulders back.
“We’re done.”
Becka sniffled, her mouth turning down, but I saw the way she bit her lip, and I was grateful she was trying.
Silence fell, neither of us knowing what to say, and the weight of it pressed against me.
I hadn’t realised until too late what having this conversation would mean. That telling Becka would make it a thing that had happened.
Would make it real.
Breath pushed itself through the lump in my throat, too fast. I squeezed my eyes closed as my mind raced to think of something – anything – that wasn’t this. Wasn’t him.
“I’m so sorry, babes,” Becka said in a strained voice, providing the distraction I needed.
I forced my eyes open to look at her. To really see her.
She was so disproportionately upset about a situation not her own, I thought perhaps this was referred pain for her.
Like when you break a rib, but sometimes it’s your shoulder that hurts when you breathe.
Injured in one place but hurt in another.
She’d never really grieved the end of her relationship with Ben.
Her attitude had very much been to move on immediately.
Perhaps grieving it through someone else was cathartic for her.
I couldn’t fault her for it. If I could feel the pain second-hand, I might take that option as well, because right now, I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to survive this.
“What can I do?” Becka’s voice trembled.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I admitted, looking up at the ceiling, blinking furiously. “I don’t know how to… I don’t–” My voice caught and I swallowed. My eyes slid closed, and I allowed two heavy tears to trail down my face, getting to my chin before I brushed them away with my sleeve.
“I don’t know how to go back to how I was before. I don’t know how to be who I was before.”
“Then don’t,” Becka said softly. “Be someone new. Be whoever you want to be.”
“As simple as that?”
“No.”
I waited for her to elaborate, but she didn’t, and we fell silent for several minutes.
Until, eventually, we did the only thing we could, thousands of miles apart, but always together.
“Wanna watch Supernatural?” Her grin was tremulous, but I nodded, and so, we pulled ourselves back together as we watched the world almost end, and be saved in under an hour.