who i am.
Guests spill out, Yuri’s estate of a loft feeling like a studio apartment with two hundred people in it. She marks her bedroom as forbidden with a lock and key, secured under a vase of flowers in the hall she’s certain no one will think to look for, considering the booze and drugs are being dispensed like party favors in the living room.
They end up close to her bedroom-- the guests, that is; couples looking for privacy, addicts playing sober looking for privacy as well. She lets them; they’ll look elsewhere if they really want to be behind a closed door.
Yuri plays nice, she smiles the necessary smiles and bores herself with chitchat, observing with a keen interest she hasn’t experienced in months. Her senses were sharp, like a razor against a chalkboard. She didn’t take the sounds well, people’s laughter shrieking across the walls, the music giving her more of a headache than any intoxication she ever had. Her eyes stung her like they were exposed to smoke, colors vividly searing themselves so deeply in her mind she saw them even when she blinked. There was no refuge here and her determination was a faulty institution.
She grabs the first drink she sees, not caring where it came from, whose it was, as long it could dull her just a little bit.
“I’d be pissed but it’s your house so technically, your drink.”
The guy is tall and has a wonderful smile but it seems much too honest for a model. He’s built like steel, maybe an athlete.
“Technically that means I own you,” Yuri says impassively, little care for him, his smile and muscles, to what he must think works on every girl.
“I’d like to think I have more value than a little buzz.”
“Do you?”
He’s interested, she can see that much, but she’s not nearly drunk enough to submit. The girl she was tugged at her, pulling her from him, and she muttered, “Sorry,” before walking away.
Coincidentally, or perfectly planned, she walks straight to Yoona.
Yoona’s outside, by the pool, with a few smokers puffing away at habits less volatile than the ones they truly want to pursue. Yuri takes two full champagne glasses and joins Yoona, surprised at the chill and quickly despising the sense of alertness it jolts within her.
Yoona takes the glass when Yuri offers but keeps her eyes away from Yuri.
“People are going to talk.”
Yuri sips, the fizz tickling her nose and lip, as she picks Yoona apart and immortalizes in her memory the way Yoona is standing at the pillar, the pool’s water bouncing flashes of light across her body. Maybe they don't love each other anymore, but Yoona is still nothing but divine.
“They do no matter what,” Yuri says, letting her arm hang beside her with the glass. “It’s been a while.”
It feels a little like high school again, when they tried to repair their relationship for the first time, both of them so willing and naïve. Except this time, Yuri’s heart isn’t as pure with its intentions, her blood poisoned with regret and cynicism.
“It has.”
Yoona isn’t forthcoming but Yuri can’t believe she’s here for pleasantries or the party. She won’t play around; it might feel like high school, but it’s not.
“Why did you come?”
Curiosity? Morbid curiosity. Yoona doesn’t know if Yuri tries to hide the flirting she does, but then again Yoona doesn’t know if she’s simply watching Yuri more than anyone else would. There were no answers to get, nothing to resolve-it was dumb of her to think so.
“I’m not sure. Moth to a flame, I guess,” Yoona blurts, possibly purposely considering their connection to the phrase. But the words bring her pain more than anything and she wished she could take it back, the words, this afternoon when she decided to go, this hope for…something.
Yuri might’ve entertained the saying with a response before, say a platitude along the lines of “We both got burned,” but it sounds so stupid and trite it’s laughable. She’s not that person anymore, no matter how much it scratches to get out. Yuri has dealt with worse scars.
“Honestly,” Yoona starts, knowing for sure she’ll regret what she’s about to say even more, but Yuri’s gone, how could she lose her again, “I can’t believe we got here. Again.”
This isn’t the Yoona Yuri wanted to remember, to embed in her mind; this version is too sad and Yuri is too much the cause of it.
“Love isn’t a fact. It comes, it goes. How’d you get by?”
“What do you mean?”
“You said once, you couldn’t live without me.” Silence. “Yea, we say things we don’t understand half the time when we’re in love.”
This would be so much easier if Yuri could finally suffocate who she once was because apparently it wasn’t enough to just leave that girl behind.
Yuri throws the rest of her drink in the pool, along with the glass and goes back inside. The party continues, but it has lived up to its use and her attention for it dies. She grabs the key to her bedroom and retreats to a more peace of mind.
When someone knocks, she hesitates, because her past self relishes in the excitement it brings to think Yoona was behind it, the chance for a dream she’s held onto longer than anything in her life.
She cracks open the door and sees his smile, the so-she-thinks athlete and his disposable body and personality.
“I’m not bothering, am I?”
A leading question so she’ll say no. She follows accordingly and lets him inside.
It was time to destroy who she was.