jess

After an hour of this, she couldn’t hold it in anymore. “You don’t have a healthy relationship with anything,” Nayoung stated as they both absently stared at the TV screen. She remembered this race, Shanghai 2019. He’d kissed her square on the mouth after the podium ceremony in the paddock, careful media training be damned, and she’d laughed against his cheek and told him he tasted entirely of champagne.

The sun was beginning to rise outside, casting a light blue glare across that same cheek. Jeonghan turned to look at her from where his head was laying on the couch headrest. "I have a healthy relationship with you."

Jeonghan looked at the groom instead, then wished she hadn’t, because even as his best man began to sing he was stealing glances at Seungcheol like he couldn’t believe his luck.

“The other intern is funny,” Seungcheol was saying, her voice fading between yawns. “He’s tall but he texts like a teenage girl.”

“His family’s dog is really cute too,” sighed Seungcheol.

Jeonghan stared across the room at the half-open closet door. If Jeonghan squinted she could see the shape of their high school uniform jacket, hanging behind the hoodies and the flannels and the nice work blouses.

Before she left Jeonghan picked up the pieces and smoothed them out the best she could. She hung them back in the closet and she turned off the light.

But Seungcheol is looking straight at her. Smiling her easy, guileless grin, and her dark eyes are full of love. She still believes in Jeonghan. Thinks the world of her. So Jeonghan puts the smile back on her face. Narrows her eyes like she’s teasing.

“Seungcheollie,” says Jeonghan, “you’re the most beautiful woman in the world tonight.”

jeonghan got the invitation in the mail like everyone else. tasteful cream cardstock, heavy weight. seungkwan had sorted the mail for once, left the embossed envelope on top of the stack – then left jeonghan in the apartment alone. so it’s that obvious, huh.

It reads a little trite, Junhui’s professor said. The airport confession scene is too stereotypical, no? There are some good lines, but the buildup is too weak to sustain the drama of the ending you’ve written. Does it have to be a love story, or was that simply the convenient choice? It feels like it’s actually about something else. Think harder about what you’re trying to say, all right?

He’d been bundled up in two coats because he hadn’t allocated his luggage space correctly. Sweating through the Shenzhen airport on his way back to a Korean winter.

The first time he’d flown from Shenzhen to Seoul he had felt like he was stepping out into thin air, leaving behind a vital organ called home.

Wonwoo had already declared a focus in creative nonfiction—he talked to people, listened carefully to their stories, and his writing glowed with an articulate warmth.

Junhui spent the drive peppering him with questions, and in return Wonwoo distilled world politics for him in his steady baritone: Agricultural policy and the long shadow of American occupation, free trade and unfree labor. The hand that wasn’t on the wheel kept fidgeting with his bangs.

“It’s just a school paper,” said Junhui, looking over at Wonwoo’s furrowed brow.

Wonwoo was quiet for a moment. “But it’s her entire life.”

Junhui had the privilege of fiction. He chased what felt good, what felt beautiful or meaningful, carving his stories out by intuition. What if it was all in his head? What if there was nothing behind the pretty words? He wished he could take some of the burden off of Wonwoo’s shoulders. Write about something real or serious for once.

• at the beginning of the story, jun feels unmoored in this foreign place and language, and leans into his dreams and fantasies as material for his writing, with the anxiety that there will never be anything real or stable in his life. to him wonwoo appears as this source of stability, normalcy, and serious, real meaning, and someone who looks out into the world as an attentive observer while jun is lost in his own head.

• by the end of the story, jun realizes that his writing and daydreaming is a way of making sense of the “real” of his own life (working through ideas of home and belonging via metaphor). and that wonwoo, despite his facade of realness and stability, is also a flawed person guided by fantasies and hopeless ideals – particularly his doomed love for junhui.

the other thing is that wonwoo doesn’t seem like the type to really get close to people easily. i mean. if you watch his interviews, he says a lot of really smart stuff, really profound or meta things that make me think “oh wow you think critically about things, you reflect on your life and experiences” but never is any of it personal. he tells us a lot…about nothing. or at least, nothing about himself?

Junhui picked up the cat. It was sweet-tempered with a pink nose and a soft swirl of tabby.

There’s a cat. The cat has a home already. The cat has a family to provide for. The cat’s home is destroyed by neoliberal economic policy. The cat can leave or stay. Each one has a price. What’s a cat to do about that?

Wonwoo’s face was asking a question but Junhui couldn’t get the answer right. There was a theme or a message here but he hadn’t done the reading carefully enough to grasp it.

Wonwoo looked up at him still. His face anguished, his eyes too bright to simply be reflecting the room’s dim light. But he looked resigned, too, like he already knew where this was going. “Don’t you know I would follow you anywhere?”

It’s early in the morning. The sky gray and golden overhead, the world hazy.

It’s a love story, Junhui knows now, but not a romance. The timelines intersect but don’t converge. The cat makes its choice and pays the price.

His future self is waiting for him on the other side, too, the ticket booked, the jet bridge down.

Looking back at what I was writing 5 years ago, the themes are about childhood friends separated by circumstance and navigating that distance, and about the transition into young adulthood/out of childhood and how relationships change. All of which of course makes a lot of sense because I was really rehearsing my relationship with [redacted], whom I will always love but also mourn the days when we felt like carbon copies of each other, even though I know it’s also beautiful and wonderful that we are different people now.

And so it makes sense that when I go back and read my old work the strongest parts are about the experience of yearning for something you know deep down is impossible – and why the ultimate reunion and confession scenes ultimately fall flat, because I was so clearly writing in the mode of denial/wishful thinking.

But now based on the two things I’ve written in the past 2 weeks I think I’m more interested in a more ambivalent take on distance and change – I mean literally, what happens when college ends, with college as shorthand for the circumstances that facilitate proximity? What do we accept and what do we fight for, even if it’s a losing battle? And what are kinds of love that can survive that change, even if they’re also tinged with grief? Can they also be hopeful? I certainly hope so, but I’m figuring this out myself, of course.

Angel, calls a voice from the entryway. A voice that limns the contours of Jisoo’s dreams.

To his credit Jisoo manages to keep his expression in place, but the speed with which his head snaps up gives him away. The stablehand takes it as confusion: Angel, he says, gesturing to the horse. Lord Choi’s steed. Thought you’d known her a long time the way she took to you.

And then there’s Seungcheol, backlit by the midday sun.

The spicy musk of his scent. The weight he’s put on, the fine cloth draping his figure. For a moment time wobbles and refracts, like they’re teenagers again and Seungcheol has come by after axe training to pick up the academy’s resident troublemakers. But then Angel noses at Jisoo’s hand and brings him back to this place, this moment, the muddy hay soaking his knees.

Jisoo arrived at the Officers’ Academy in the midst of a downpour with only the clothes on his back, and the dampness of that night followed him around for weeks even after he had scrubbed himself raw in the baths and donned his strange new uniform.

Jeonghan showed Jisoo all his favorite dishes in the dining hall and how to sneak out of the dorms after curfew. Taught him how to hold a lance. Always shared his care packages from home. Explained the history of the kingdom off the top of his head, though he was always cutting class, and then over the years all of his inside jokes with Seungcheol, so that they became Jisoo’s inside jokes too.

Now they negotiate a fragile peace over a still broken continent, fifteen years out. Jisoo floats in and out of the proceedings like a ghost. Politics aren’t within his purview, but that’s not why he’s there. Most of the nobles don’t even notice when he’s in the room, because some things never change.

And Jeonghan’s gentle hands, the steady flame of his presence, for the wounds that bled and all the wounds that didn’t.

Tell me how to help you, he wanted to beg when Jeonghan scoffed, but he knew that was a pointless request. Instead Jisoo said, I’m not joking. I stopped praying years ago.

A face you loved and knew like your own became a face you couldn’t bear to imagine, one you assembled a bypass for in the staging ground of memory, until one day you woke up and saw only yourself in the mirror.

The greenhouse was Jeonghan’s second favorite spot in the monastery, because it was warm even in the dead of winter. The first was the fishing pond. Jeonghan loved fishing, though Jisoo rarely saw him catch anything—skipped class to lounge on the dock with the pole balanced in the crook of his elbow, and more often than not a book Jisoo could have sworn he’d last seen in the library’s restricted section.

Jeonghan was in good spirits on the day it happened.

Jisoo gave up faith a long time ago. In the goddess, in the kingdom, in the fundamental goodness of the world. But he still has to admire it, the kind of stupid faith Seungcheol has that could raise a ghost from the dead.

Seungcheol will never understand him, but Jisoo has never wanted to be understood.

Jisoo says: I hear the ginkgo trees on the Yoon estate are most beautiful in the fall.

Maybe next time we can go together.