The Venn Diagram | FINAL - 1934
( previous parts )
(1) the meeting | (2) the declaration
(3) the reveal - 1934 | (3) the reveal - 2014
(4) the bloodbath
The Venn Diagram
by #angstcircle 2014
Part 5: The End
1934
My love,
I saw a bird today that reminded me of you. It followed me around all day, trying to be sly even though I kept seeing it around my peripheral vision. You might hate it to know that a scruffy pigeon makes me think of you but I don’t really care if you don’t like it. I spent most of my life trying to please other people and we decided I wouldn’t do that anymore.
I’d like to keep that pigeon as a pet though. That is if I could catch it, but I know I won’t. It deserves to be free, to live…
Like us.
~*~*~*~
BoA takes to writing letters three weeks after successfully moving to a little ding of an apartment in Chinatown, Manhattan, NY. It’s small and reeks of dirt and heavy floral scents because of the flower shop downstairs but it is theirs, and after over half a year in America, she is ready to live on her own two feet.
Sooyoung’s contact and a friend of Siwon’s going by the name of HanGeng meets her by the docks once her ship arrives, smuggling them out of the vessel with little to no trouble with the Immigration system. No one in Little Fuzhou questions the appearance of a Korean face in the midst of a Chinese-American population. They are nobody here, a ghost, and BoA thinks this is exactly where she wants to be in life.
“I’ll move you elsewhere once I get you new papers drawn up,” HanGeng tells her, smiling warmly as he fluffs a pillow. She sees the specks of dust floating around the yellow light, dancing to some silent tune she wasn’t privy to but seems to know by heart. Dum-da-dum, da-dum. The song goes, playing in her head and she smiles despite the exhaustion in her limbs, only half-listening when her caretaker continues speaking, “Would you like to change anything? For the new papers, I mean.”
BoA nods, lips still upturned into a tiny soft smile. “Yes. I’d like to be known as Jung BoA. If you don’t mind.”
HanGeng understands (of course he does) and bows his head in reply, “Not at all.” He leaves her alone to her thoughts after a while, handing off a blanket into her hands as though it were a child. He knows as well as she that she’ll need the practice.
After all, she’ll be a mother soon.
~*~*~*~
My love,
You have to stop following me.
(And yes, I mean get off that windowsill and fly.)
~*~*~*~
(( They make it as far as the exit to the freeway when Yunho recognizes the sleekly colored cars following them immediately from a mile off and turns early into another exit miles off where they should be going. He knows it’s risky to veer off course but he had expected them to catch wind and follow. The family has never given up when they should-and it is unlikely they would start now when the daughter of the kingpin is at stake.
“Yunho-” BoA stutters, eyes wide as she looks back and sees the cars coming in closer and closer, “They’re gaining on us.”
His foot presses down on the acceleration, dodging the few cars slowing them down and overtaking them in a blur of dust. BoA holds on for her life, one hand clutched on the armrest while the other grips his forearm-trembling as the engine rumbles and shakes louder beneath her feet. Yunho shakes her hold off of him for only a second, grabbing onto in on the next as he steers past another car-a white truck this time, carrying cages of chicken in the back-and speeds further and further away.
“We’ll lose them.” He tries to assure her, his tone flat and unconvincing. It doesn’t help but it makes her smile, and the fact that it does makes it so much easier for her to believe it to be true. She squeezes his fingers and nods, looking out resolutely at the open road.
“We’ll lose them,” she echoes, grasping his hand on the steering wheel. They’re awful liars and it isn’t enough but it has to be. “We will.”
Yunho drives on, glancing behind and winces as the cars they’d hoped to dodge stick with them still. He moves the hand she’s holding into the gear shift, and pulls down so fast their heads spin as Yunho makes a U-Turn and speeds past their tails, leaving them blubbering in the dust. It gives them just enough time to be on their way to the right exit. To the docks where the ship Sooyoung told them to be in will be. To freedom.
Yunho laughs as BoA does, throwing her hair back. Freedom is close, they think. It is. They can taste it.
He brings her knuckles to his lips and kisses them, feather light and brimming with all the love in his heart. His eyes twinkling as he mutters against her skin, “Hold on tight, baby.”
And she does. Tight and sure. ))
~*~*~*~
My love,
The sweet old man downstairs gave me a bouquet of the most beautiful peonies today.
They smelled as sweet as his disposition so I had to give him a little kiss.
You don’t mind, right?
~*~*~*~
She fills an old shoebox with her letters and keeps it under her bed.
Sometimes they are long and winding, ranging from five to ten pages depending on her mood. Other times they are only a few sentences long, a random thought or quote written in longhand and in the darkest ink. The words smudge sometimes when she finishes and arranges them behind one another, leafing through the cards and envelopes in the box before shutting it and lying on her side. The shades are drawn by then and only the very faint light from the street corners can get through the room.
Her hand skims from her sternum down to below her belly button and sighs.
She’ll write again tomorrow. That as much is certain.
~*~*~*~
My little love,
You are late.
~*~*~*~
HanGeng visits sometimes, making his famous fried rice on nights when it is too warm to cook anything else. He’s often carrying a message, little tidbits of information that makes her stomach turn-
“My friend is foolish for letting her slip away. I know she would have said ‘Yes’ to his proposal. Don’t you think so? …I suppose nothing ever does last.”
-and flutter into flight.
“But the thug did finally wear down the dancer. They are marrying in the fall on the roof of her nightclub. Isn’t that just ironic?”
BoA craves this little visits, these little flashes to a life she could have lived in another world (another time), more than she likes to admit.
~*~*~*~
My love,
Don’t you think YoungMin is a strong name?
I thought it would be clever to pay tribute to our past life.
Jung YoungMin.
Sometimes I wonder how it would be if we’d stayed.
But then I remember that I never wanted that, so I don’t.
~*~*~*~
(Nobody knows her in Little Fuzhou but they come when her water breaks.)
~*~*~*~
My love,
The pigeon and I came home to find you asleep, flat on your back and dreaming.
Your breath is warm and it calms us both.
We love you.
~*~*~*~
(( The celebration dies the second they arrive at the docks.
Jaejoong is already there, dressed impeccably. His eyes are gleaming and he is alone.
“Shit, shit, shit!”
Yunho curses as he swerves the car, pulling BoA’s head down just as a bullet pierces the windshield and he drives off the pier. Flecks of red spraying her cheek and then darkness.
Down, down, down they go- ))
~*~*~*~
Her son is seven when he sprains his arm trying to reach the shoebox on top of the closet where she keeps it next.
The letters litter the ground when she finally comes up into the room, too panicked by the wailing of her son to care about the mess he’d made. He is given a splint and stitched up by the local Chinese medicine man across the street two hours later, when she asks why he’d gone into her room.
“I want to read the letters, Mama.” He says in an English-accented Korean, eyes wide and so so clear. He doesn’t speak Korean or Chinese all that well but he tries and she loves him so much more for it. “You always write at night and then put them in that box. You never send them. Are they for Papa?”
“Ah, so Little YoungMin became too curious for your own good?”
“I’m not little!” He huffs, running away and wiping at his cheek where her kiss connected on his skin. Her heart warms at the sight of him, arms crossed awkwardly because of the sprain and pouting, looking so much like…
~*~*~*~
My love, I-
~*~*~*~
A letter visits her a month after YoungMin is born instead of HanGeng.
It is addressed to him (Mr. YoungMin Jung, 1282 Little Fuzhou, Chinatown, Manhattan, NY), dated a few months before in familiar handwriting. She rips it open without a second thought and reads, hand on her heart.
“BoA,
Jaejoong is dead. He put a gun to his head after grieving your and Yunho’s death. It must be out of guilt. After all it was his gun that… anyway, we wouldn’t have known he’d do this if he hadn’t told Changmin not to pick him up after dropping him off at Yunho’s old apartment.
Needless to say the family is in shambles now. No one seems to want to head it after everything.
Your father retired after Jaejoong’s funeral and moved to Europe. He is still hoping to find you there but of course he won’t.
That’s all. I thought you should know the most important of things. Everyone else is alright. Changmin and Yoona are shockingly happily married and I am seeing someone new.
I’m not sure when you will get this but I trust that Siwon will come through for me still.
I miss you, my sister.
Good bye.
--Sooyoung”
A minute later she drops the letter in the fire and watches it burn into ash.
Then she repeats the words, her spirit lifting into the void-the silence. A tribute somewhat as her babe begins to cry.
“Good bye.”
BoA waits just once more before moving on.
~*~*~*~
My love, my Yunho, I love you.
~*~*~*~
(( The water is almost too much as she fights her way against it, pushing and kicking her way to the surface. She struggles underwater, reaching for the light overhead when she is pulled aside and up-ready to sputter obscenities when a hand is clamped over her mouth.
“Shh.” It is Changmin holding her aloft, keeping her hidden as he paddles his way as quietly as he can to a dingy boat a few yards away. She blinks, too stunned to speak, and lets him lead her far, far away from where the crash occurred, her mind spinning with questions and-
“Yunho! Where is he?! Where is-”
“I said be quiet!” Changmin scolds her, clamping her mouth shut again and swimming behind the boat. From yards away she can hear people cursing and yelling, water splashing to and fro as her father’s dives trying to find her. Them. Yunho.
“Changmi-”
Changmin’s words come out muffled, filled with despair, “You have to leave. I’m supposed to be looking for you with the others.” He lifts her up and to the arms of-she blinks again, shuttered and recognizes a sorrowful Siwon-and kicks back and away from the boat. “Siwon will take you to another ship to America. He’ll explain the plan to you on the way.”
He stops for a moment, eyes wetter with something besides the sea water and chokes on the final words she’ll ever hear him say.
” I just-BoA, I swear, I tried. I couldn’t-He made me promise.”
It clicks.
Flecks of red spraying her cheek.
And she shatters. ))
~*~*~*~
My love,
Wait for me. I’m almost there.
~*~*~*~
“Your father wanted a little girl, you know.” She wheezes, smiling wide despite the grey-ashened appearance of her face, “He wanted a little girl named Soojung.”
“Shh, Mama, I know, you told me a thousand times before.” YoungMin grins in response, wiping at his eyes as his wife looks on from behind him. She is clutching a little girl in her arms, crushing her into her chest despite the tell-tale bump hindering the embrace. “We already told you we’d name our second daughter Soojung, remember?”
BoA nods, patting his hand. It was a caress more than a reprimand, her touch leaving too little of the warmth he was accustomed to while growing up.
“I thought Little YoungMin needed a reminder.”
YoungMin lets out a sob instead of a huff this time, kissing his mother’s hand.
“I’m not little, Mama.”
She smiles, agreeing. “Will you do one last thing for Mama?”
“Yes, anything.”
BoA breathes in, one last, and then lets it leave her as she closes her eyes to the light that comes all too close.
“Burn my letters.”
~*~*~*~
My love,
I’ll see you.
~*~*~*~
YoungMin burns all but one letter and leaves that on her grave.
~*~*~*~
My daughter Soojung was born today and she is beautiful. I wish you could have met her.
But it’s alright. Finally, you are both where you are supposed to be.
Your son, YoungMin.
FINIS
( read The Venn Diagram | FINAL - 2014 )