SHINee Duets 2012: royalwisteria & sansunparapluie (part two)
Part One
Why?
She doesn’t let herself dwell on it too much, but every night that she spends staring at the parallelograms of light projected onto her wall, she can’t help but bring a hand up to her chest. Her fingers curl up on their own accord and her blunt nails leave white scratches against her skin.
She rolls over onto her side.
What is this thing curling up into the recesses of her ribs?
Under her pillow, her fist closes over something colder than her fingertips. She pulls it out and stares at it, then opens the clasp and winds the silver chain around her wrist. She puts the bracelet to her lips as if the weight of it, the taste of it - cheap metal and a bit of her own sweat - could somehow give her answers.
Well-timed glances. Carefully sculpted expressions. Calculated words.
It’s the first time she has used a girl’s cunning to get something from him. But even now she isn’t sure why she was after the bracelet, if the bracelet was what she was after. She presses the plastic-studded stars into her wrist and the sterling warms up against her palm. That barely registers on her mind though; for the most part, she’s recalling the sheen of sweat beneath her scratchy new blouse when he studied her for a second or two too long before he reached for his wallet.
She remembers wanting to count out the change for him, to remind him he had enough in the right combination to get an unbroken 5000 won bill back. She remembers wanting to brush those too-long bangs out of his eyes as he leans over the glass counter, to grab a pair of scissors and cut them away. Even though she loves that new color, even though she thinks he looks more like a celebrity and less like a child that way.
She doesn’t know what is wrong with her.
He still lets her hold his hand, except whenever she counts out all his calluses like battle scars the way she used to, he’s staring down at his hand too. He still has the same twinkle in his eye, except whenever he catches her staring, he gives her a faint smile that she’s got no dictionary for. He still uses his old bike, except whenever they go to places together, he suggests they take the bus instead. It’s dangerous to ride in the back, he says, especially without a helmet.
The corners of his mouth still lift the same way in the same old grin. His voice still follows along to whatever song that comes on the radio. Upstairs, he and uncle still grumble and fight over his not so fickle fancy.
He still has the same dream.
But his strides are longer now.
She thinks she might feel better if he’d scoffed at the bracelet and said it wasn’t all that pretty, said it looked cheap enough to tarnish quickly in this sort of sweaty weather. She thinks she might feel better if they’d sat down for patbingsu and turned out to be a few coins short of two servings and ended up ordering a large together.
He orders his coffee-flavored though.
And it makes the hazy day a little clearer somehow.
…
A week passes before he calls her and she doesn’t expect it. It’s Sunday and she’s on her way home after buying groceries for the upcoming week. One of those environmentally friendly bags is hanging heavily from her hand and she’s thinking of calling up Donghae from back home, only if just to remind herself of what life used to be like. After Jinki, when he was supposed to be permanently out of her life and she had moved on, Donghae had meant something to her. Donghae still means something to her. He means something to her that Jinki doesn’t, because Donghae was never like Jinki.
He didn’t take a one-way bus away from her.
Then her phone rings and she’s startled and actually drops the bag. Minjung holds her breath and counts herself lucky when nothing rolls out or spills. Rushing to pick it up, she fumbles with her phone and doesn’t check caller ID when she flips it open and answers, moshi moshi.
“Hello? Minjung?”
Minjung’s fingers, just looping around the handle, squeeze. “Yes? Jinki, right?”
He laughs and it sounds just as right and full over the phone as it does in person. “You’re good at guessing.”
She smiles and continues walking. “Or maybe you were the only one I was expecting to call.”
“That makes me think that things aren’t going too well for you here.”
Minjung raises her eyebrows and bristles slightly. “Why? Because people don’t call me?”
“Well, yeah. What kind of life are you living if you don’t have friends who call you?”
Minjung doesn’t answer. What kind of question is that? Is he seriously judging her social life based on how often she is called? What if people just text her instead? (Not that they do. Maybe she just doesn’t want to admit to Jinki that it’s been difficult.)
“So what’re you up to today?”
And that moment where she could say something to him about that, how he’s wrong about her, about how he’s been continuously wrong about her, passes. She thinks she’s probably not going to get a good moment like that again, a chance to say it on the phone and not have to think about looking him in the eye when she says it. It’s much harder to confront him face-to-face about anything. Though now that Minjung thinks about it, she’s never really confronted him about anything.
“Grocery shopping.”
“Whoa, since when have you become so domestic?”
Minjung opens her mouth angrily, about to splutter the best insult that came to mind, but Jinki beats her to the punch. He tends to do that, she thinks as she closes her mouth.
“Anyways, domesticity aside, I’m actually in your area. One of my jobs, you know. Want to get together for lunch?”
“One of your...jobs?” She echoes, relieved when she spots her building’s door close by. “You have more than one?”
“Not the point,” Jinki mutters. “Are you ready to take an address?”
“Text it to me?” She offers, trying to dig for her key with the hand that’s carrying her bag. “I’m just getting home now.”
“Okay, okay. Got it. I’ll be expecting you.”
She hangs up, tucks her phone into her pocket and fishes out her key with much more ease. She waits in front of her door, weighing her key in her hand, until her phone beeps. There’s the miniature envelope at the top of her screen, the yellow far from the truth, indicating the new message.
They didn’t text all that often when they were in high school. This sort of feels like a new start.
…
Words are made of matter, she thinks.
Words take up space and - the weight of them, of even unspoken words - they sit on her shoulders like elephants. She’s surprised her bones aren’t broken and her feet don’t sink into the ground. She’s surprised she fits through the door of the taxi and the man sitting at the wheel doesn’t accuse her of trying to wreck his vehicle. She’s surprised that while she is stuck between their mothers, no one complains about being unable to breathe.
She feels like the words are coming, although she doesn’t know what sort of words they would be. The answer? Maybe. Probably. The answer to all the whys that she has been carving into her wall with her eyes. The explanation for what’s been filling her lungs with lead.
In the taxi, she notices the slant to his mouth. The light furrow between his brows. She’s sure they’re coming once their mothers have found an excuse to leave them alone in line at the bus station - gate 14 - and his jaw finally unclenches.
She waits, but his lips just tighten again. And she makes an excuse herself and goes to find their mothers. When the three of them come back, he’s smiling again.
And so she sends him off with a smile.
She’s relieved. Happy, even.
She waves and waves, and the words never come.
But then while she’s calculating the hours and figuring out when he’ll be able to get back to the dorms, her phone goes off.
Hello?
Hi.
Hi.
He goes quiet after that single syllable.
You’re just past halfway there, aren’t you?
The bus is running a little behind schedule. We’re still at our halfway stop.
Oh.
Yeah.
She tries to think of what to say that she hasn’t already said.
Minjung?
Yeah?
Listen.
Yeah?
It’s not fair, she’ll end up thinking later on.
At least elephants falling from the sky warn you with their shadows.
Let’s break up.
Oh, she thinks. Are these the words?
Oh... she says.
Let’s break up, he repeats.
Oh, she echoes.
She forgets for how long the silence stretches on. She thinks maybe he’s hung up already. (It wouldn’t exactly be uncharacteristic of him.) But she then can still make out the soft noises of his breathing. The knowledge of that makes her heart feel funny.
Bye, he finally says.
And she never really knows why.
Except she’s got deep, deep imprints of plastic-studded stars circling her wrist.
…
They meet for lunch, and then that Wednesday they meet for dinner. They go and see a movie, Jinki laughing and an arm casually slung around her shoulders, and Minjung has to tell herself that this isn’t meant to happen. Five years ago proved that. This isn’t meant to be. But that doesn’t stop her heart from doing obscene things such as beat faster. How ridiculous. She thought she was past this school girl romance nonsense. Donghae proved that. Changmin - Changmin, the antithesis of heart-pounding love - proved that.
Maybe it’s a first love thing. Maybe it’s nostalgia of trailing after Jinki, memorizing the angles of his fingers and then figuring out the degrees while he was away. Maybe it’s because they’ve been best friends for so much of their lives that she - like a tadpole new to the idea of breathing air - still hasn’t figured out why she’s able to live apart from him.
Two weeks later, Minjung’s heart goes cold when she calls Jinki and a woman picks up instead. Her voice is high-pitched and pleasant, bright like Jinki’s but in a different way. She imagines the two of them singing a duet and, oh God-
“Hello... Minjung-ssi?”
She’s silent. She’s not sure if she’s breathing.
“It’s what the caller ID says,” the woman mutters in Korean - in Korean! - her voice fading somewhat as if she’s moving the phone away from her face. “Minjung-ssi! Are you there?”
“Ah, yes,” she mumbles. Her voice sounds rough, not as smooth and elegant.
“Jinki’s in the shower right now, would you like me to take a message?”
“Um... yes. Wait, no. Just...” Minjung wants to wring her hands together, but one of them is holding a pencil, stuck on a half-drawn guitar, and the other is glued to her phone. “Ask him to-You know what, never mind.”
“Okay.” The woman sounds warm. Friendly. She should have known better than to think that Jinki was still unattached. “Before you go, Minjung?”
“Yes?” Her mouth feels dry; she doesn’t digest the fact that the woman has dropped the formalities.
“Thanks for agreeing to be friends with Jinki again. He’s been much happier since he got to see you.”
“Happier?”
“It’s been a few years since we’ve settled here, but I know he’s still having a hard time. Our circumstances were...a little complicated. Although long story short, I kind of forced the move on him,” the woman chuckles.
Minjung doesn’t even know her name, but somehow Jinki told her about Minjung.
That woman probably knows everything, everything that she’s ever treasured, everything that’s ever been hers.
And that makes her feel awfully naked.
“I had no idea. Well...I-I have to go.” She scrambles for excuses like she would if they were clothes. “Wash dishes.”
“Okay! Have as much fun with that as you can. Bye.”
She presses the end call button and the lead on the tip of her pencil fractures from pressure.
…
She’s been listening to him sing above love and dreams, goodbyes and forevers, for as long as she can remember. And yet she doesn’t know if this is what heartbreak is supposed to feel like. He’s been her first for everything. He’s been her first. He’s been her everything.
But her feet are dry; there is no lake of tears
The time that he should be getting back to his dorms comes and passes. And there is nothing. Just the fading dips in her skin and that one stupid astroid that she never finishes drawing on her graph paper. Her sister calls her for dinner and she goes, a little stiff in the joints but otherwise nothing worse for wear.
She sits at the table and eats silently. She watches her mother’s hands move as the woman piles kimchi and pork into her bowl, her sister’s bowl, her father’s bowl. They are a pair of hands that have seen too many years of dishwater, of laundry detergent, of soap and dirt and grease. They are older than the face of the woman who owns them. There is no ring, but everyone can tell: these hands belong on a wife, on a mother.
She volunteers to wash the dishes that night.
Each dish is reborn smooth and white and warm, and she hands them over to her mother, who is standing next to her and a whole head shorter. There is a natural wave to her mother’s hair and it’s been half a year since the woman started dying her white hairs black. The lines at the corners of those eyes that she inherited, they’re unexpectedly deep. She wonders if time will carve those same lines into her face one day.
The twenty-two and a half minutes that she spends next to her mother-they make her want to cry more than anything ever did in the hours she spent alone inside her room.
But her feet stay dry.
She doesn’t know if that is what people call strength.
…
Five voice mails, twenty-seven texts and a letter later.
He’s clearly learned how to keep in touch with someone, Minjung bitterly thinks, staring at the unopened letter.
His handwriting is unfamiliar.
Then again, it’s in Japanese. The sharp katakanas of her name and the messy kanji of her address look strange.
She runs a finger along the edge of the envelope, over and over, until it goes soft under her touch.
The vibrations of her cell phone finally startles her out of her reverie and she hastily tucks the letter away, unopened, into the belly of her copy of the Town Page.
…
School starts again and the classrooms are made up of the same rows of desks, scuff marks on the floor, a familiar rhythm. There is math, which she is good at; physics, which she gets by in; chemistry, which vaguely makes sense; biology, which seems stupid; English, which he has always been good at-
Her nails sink into her palms as she looks up at the person in front of her.
Why is he asking her these questions?
These scary, scary questions?
Potential career path.
A list of preferred colleges.
What will you do from here on out?
She stares at the stacks of pamphlets and manuals of information he has on either side of his elbow. She stares at the printout of her academic records to date, and that sheet of paper with all its gaping blank spaces.
It’s already rather late to be thinking about this, her homeroom teacher says.
She knows. Because everyone around her already knows - where they are, where they’re going, what they want. But she realizes that she’s never really had the same sort of ambitions. She’s never looked forward to the same sort of things. She’s never dreamed. Or maybe that’s not true. (She thinks back to her mother’s hands.)
She gazes up at the soft-spoken man sitting across the table from her with wide, wide eyes.
Her fingers uncurl in defeat.
He has never left her anything in the cement that paved their way home.
…
The memories. They are hers.
They are the only things that she’s entitled to.
But why is there a third person who’s privy to her most beloved secrets?
Why is there a third person at all?
There are vague memories swirling in front of her eyes. Sitting in class, waiting for the clock to slowly wind down to the end of the day. Hot cement, flimsy flip flops protecting her feet. Using pepero to stir her hot chocolate.
She knows things change. But at work, Minjung has the habit of pressing her watch to her ear and listening to its tick-tocking. She still wears flip flops all through summer. And in a couple months she’ll be restocking her pepero stash because nothing beats the flavor of her country (even though pocky is just a few dozen steps down the street at the convenience store).
So what has changed?
(She remembers that Jinki was her first boyfriend and that up until Donghae’s persuasion tactics finally wore her down, she’d as good as sworn that she’d never date anyone else. It was a sort of pact with herself, because it seemed right, but clearly Jinki has never made any sort of promise with himself.
Wait. Had she been expecting him to remain celibate for life for her? Out of regret?
God. She bets he’s married or something.
She pauses.
Am I the third person?)
…
She doesn’t tell anyone the first week, or the week after.
She chooses tight-lipped smiles over the truth for long enough that their yearbook, for the second year in a row, has their names written next to each other. It’s one of those silly ‘The most likely to...’ things, something that people get a good laugh from maybe even twenty, thirty years down the road, but never really expects to come true, twenty, thirty years down the road. (One of her friends is on the yearbook committee and she gets to see the proofs before the teacher advisers sign off on everything. It’s printed in ink, a beautiful permanent black. By the end of lunch break, the paper has dips in it from the moisture of her skin, but the names, they are still there.)
She doesn’t tell anyone the first month, or the month after.
Let’s break up.
How did he manage to say those words out loud?
Because she can’t.
Because that’s like sawing off her own arms and legs and saying, there, I’m parting ways with my limbs. Like digging out her own heart and liver and lungs and saying, ha, who needs organs to live?
…
“Hey.”
Minjung feels blindsided. Her right hand shoots across her abdomen and grabs at the seams of the tote bag that she has slung over her left shoulder.
“Wh-what are you doing?”
“Waiting for you.”
It’s the same harmless smile, with his eyes crinkling and full, white teeth from when they first met.
“Why are you waiting for me?”
“You’ve been ignoring me, so I decided to do a stakeout.” He answers like it’s the most natural thing in the world.
Minjung studies at him carefully, eyeing the heavy bags underneath his eyes and taking note of the fact that his smile is already wilting around the edges. That smile used to never wilt; it was a light that never went out. She feels pleased, in a sadistic sort of way, that it might be because of her.
“Do you know why I’ve been ignoring you?”
He takes a deep breath and takes a step towards her. A hand reaches out and grasps her shoulder. It’s always times like these, when he’s close, that she remembers that he’s only a little taller than him. Jinki used to say it didn’t matter, but she has always thought that that was a lie.
“Can you tell me?”
Oh god. He doesn’t know? He’s not even going to bother guessing?
She tries to shrink away from his touch. “Why are you in Japan again?”
“To expand my horizons,” he says the slogan-worthy answer out loud without missing a beat, confusion written across his features because they talked about this a month ago.
“And that’s it?”
“Pretty much.” His shoulders shrug upward and seem to stick.
“Are you sure?”
Minjung can tell that he’s starting to lose patience; he’s always hated playing verbal hide-and-seek back when they were in high school.
“Yes, I’m sure. What is this about?”
“Did you come alone?”
Aha, she thinks as he sucks in a breath. It sure makes an awful lot of noise, a breath does, when it perfectly measures out the distance between their faces.
“You didn’t know?”
Now she’s the one breathing through her teeth. “No. I didn’t.”
There’s a look that might be called understanding if he still didn’t look so confused. “So you’re ignoring me because of Sooyeon?”
“Her name is Sooyeon?” Minjung asks. She can’t help herself.
“Yeah, a pretty name isn’t it?” He grins for a moment, leaning in so that they were even closer than a breath. She blinks and she can almost feel her lashes brush against his skin. “But that’s besides the point,” he realizes, stepping back and taking his hand off her shoulder. He does it almost cautiously. “Have you been ignoring me because of Sooyeon?”
“Yes. I have.”
He sighs deeply; his eyelids droop and he suddenly drops into a crouch. “Shit, this sucks.”
There is a faint quiver to his voice. She tenses.
It’s a reflex that she has spent her most of her life honing.
“What does?” She hears herself asking.
“Sooyeon kicked me out,” he murmurs, looking up at her with a-what kind of smile is that? The line that dips in between his forehead worries her and and unsteady corners of his mouth reminds her of when they used to hold hands and the only calluses on hers came from her pencil and the only calluses on his came from his guitar.
“And?” She doesn’t dare to risk something longer, something such as Why should I care?
Minjung is scared. She’s terrified. Because this is too familiar.
Here he is, the boy who is hers. The boy whom she hasn’t seen since her junior year of high school, since that day he fell into her arms and curled up on her bed. He needs her to love him, and she does. Minjung still remembers the promise she made to herself. She promised that she would protect him, that when no one else is there for him, he would still have her. That he’d always have her.
“I have nowhere else to go.”
Please?
The words, waiting, skip off her tongue. As if she’s been practicing how to say them all these years.
“Want to stay with me then?”
…
tbc