[mblaq] the mountain
the mountain
mblaq, seungho/joon
pg-13, 3211w
every time, changsun thinks it will be different; every time, it's the same.
--first person pov; written for kpop_olymfics 2013.
Maybe nothing ever really ends. Even our group never officially broke up; it just went on hiatus. You left for the army after our sixth mini album failed, and it was one or the other that did MBLAQ in. The hiatus hasn’t ended either, and there’s still a picture of us on J.Tune’s website, frozen in time.
You sent me an e-mail while I was in America and at first I thought it was an accident, like how you sometimes used to text me when you wanted Cheondoong because the names were right next to each other in your phone. It was the first time I had heard from you since you’d left. I was discharged today, it said. I made the calculation in my head, but didn’t bother remembering the answer. I heard you’re coming back soon? Let me know when you’re here. It will be good to see you. Good luck with the movie.
I deleted the e-mail as soon as I finished reading it, but an hour later when we took a break I went into my trash folder and opened it again, something you had once taught me how to do. It made my stomach hurt to look at it, to see the two small blocks of your name at the bottom of the message and know that you had written them and that they were real.
Nothing really ends. It just recedes, and you wait for it to return. And sometimes it comes back to you right away and other times it leaves you waiting, but the shadow of it is always there.
---
I have a dream that you live at the top of a mountain, like the wise women in my grandparents’ town did. I visited them once with my mother when I was young. Maybe you have long hairs growing out of your chin like they did, too.
The villagers are old and stooped and no matter what question I ask, the answer is always the same. Seek Seungho, they tell me, pointing gnarled fingers at the mountain. Tell him what you desire, and he will give it to you.
You live on the top of the mountain and I am standing at the bottom, small and insignificant. I know you are up there, and I can just make out your hanok in the distance.
I begin to climb, and then I wake up.
---
It was September 29, at a music show taping in Manila. I don’t even remember which station it was for, but I can remember the date. We had nothing new to promote, but as long as they would take us, we went.
The performance wasn’t our best. Cheondoong’s mic kept cutting out during his lines in “This Is War” and you nearly ran into a backup dancer. The dinner after the taping finished felt like a wake. Afterward we went to our hotel room and you and I went to lie down in our separate beds and sleep it off, and then you said, “Come here.”
I could’ve played along. I could have pretended I didn’t know what you meant, or that I knew exactly what you meant and didn’t want it. Maybe that was what you were hoping for, and you would have taken the rejection lightly and woken up the next day feeling tired but contained within yourself.
But you already knew the truth. This hadn’t come out of nowhere, after all. I had kissed you before, drunk or pretending to be, backstage at concerts and in the kitchen of our dorm. There were all those times you would squeeze my leg for reassurance in the van or before an interview, and I would look at you when you took your hand away. There was that relationship talk we did together for our DVD, where I pretended the camera didn’t exist and calmly gave away everything while you smiled and nodded thoughtfully. So why waste time?
It took you longer to drop the pretense. I lay down next to you and I waited, but you kept your hands to yourself. You talked a lot in little sentences, filling time. I only remember one thing you said: “It’s nice, like this,” your voice landing softly in the quiet, and then you rolled your head to look at me. When I think about it I still get a phantom pain in my chest, thinking of how much I wanted then, how desperate I was.
Finally you touched me and it burst, and I felt so light, like I could be crushed in your grip at any moment. You pulled me in to your body and your hands on me felt like they could slide right underneath my skin. I closed my eyes and wished they would, and wherever you touched me it was almost like they did.
We didn’t talk about it afterward. I had so much I wanted to say. But the next morning when we woke up facing each other and you smiled at me like I was the thing that made you most happy in the world, all the words rushed up in my throat and got stuck there, and all I could do was smile back.
That was the first time, and it’s important that I remember it this way. Perhaps you think of a different time, or more likely, you don’t think of it at all. But it’s important for me to remember that we were happy.
---
I have a dream where you live at the top of a mountain. You live on the top of the mountain and I start at the bottom and I climb.
I climb for a long time, maybe days, maybe weeks. My legs become sore. I eat rocks and dirt to keep myself going. But I don’t stop walking until I reach the top. I can see your hanok in the distance, and behind the white wall I can picture you sitting on the floor, knees folded, a serene expression on your face. You know, too, that when something goes away it only means it will come back.
---
I don’t know what I expected after that first time. For it to continue like that, maybe, quiet and nervous and new each time; or for it to end, and things would go back to the way they were before.
Instead, we kept going, and it became part of our lives, and it changed. We promoted a new single, and every time I moved to the centre of the formation for my part I became aware of your eyes on my back. The fans would cheer no matter what, and truthfully I had lost the fear of failing them a while ago. But now a good performance meant the difference between getting you as our leader, responsible for all four of us, smiling and calling us kids with a distant look in your eyes, and getting you all to myself, seeing the sweat drip into your eyes because I made it drip and hearing you say my name and knowing you weren’t thinking about anything else.
When I look back, I think that I could have prevented it, or at least slowed it down. But I couldn’t help myself. I was getting what I had always wanted.
And then one day you turned to me in the morning and you said, “This is the last time.”
My hands paused on your chest and my insides became cold all of a sudden. “What do you mean?” I could feel the smile frozen on my face.
“This can’t continue. People are going to find out. Things are bad enough for us as it is without a scandal.”
Words, words, words. I pressed into you again. “Come on. We’re being careful. Things are fine.”
You pushed my hands away, and your grip around my wrists was crushing. “Changsun, you know that I’m not...” You didn’t need to say it. I didn’t want to hear you say it. “It’s not going to go anywhere. It was nice, but it needs to end.”
Nothing ever really ends, I wanted to tell you. “You started it,” I said. “You end it.”
Secretly, you had been asking me for my strength. That still makes it your fault. You should have known by then that I had none left.
---
Sometimes I wonder what your memories are like, the things you’ve chosen to forget and the things you really can’t remember. The second last night before your enlistment you went out and got drunk with Byunghee and while he was in the bathroom you called me for the first time in a few weeks. I wasn’t really sleeping. I answered. I would always answer for you.
You came over two hours later and when I answered the door you stared at me, took a deep breath, and then you fell onto me.
You fucked me on the couch and gripped my waist in your hands and afterward you said, “What am I going to do without you?”
I resisted for about two seconds, and then I let the fantasy soak into my skin, get into my nose and eyes. “You can’t do anything without me,” I said.
“I could be...” I waited for you to find the words. “I could be married if it wasn’t for you. I could have children.”
That wasn’t what I had wanted to hear. I settled beside you and let you stroke my hair. “Doesn’t that mean something to you, then?”
You didn’t answer.
Two days later, I stood on the sidewalk with Byunghee and Cheolyong and watched you and Byungki put your bags in the back of a taxi. Once you left, it would be a fresh start for all of us: Byunghee and Cheolyong would promote as a subunit, and I would take on more acting roles. You would go through basic training that would aggravate your old injuries, and you’d be placed in an office for the next three years, where you wouldn’t be able to contact me.
As we watched the taxi drive away, the license plate getting smaller and smaller in the distance, I told myself that this was it, that after it turned the corner and I no longer saw you it would be over and I’d be free.
I don’t think I lasted two hours. The three of us went out for lunch and I spent the whole time in the bathroom throwing up. When Byunghee came to get me, he said, “You must’ve eaten something bad,” and he meant something else and we both knew it.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. I may as well have been telling myself, This is the last time.
---
In my dream, you live on a mountain in a hanok, low to the ground and quiet but proud. For whatever reason, these are the buildings I dream about, not the grey skyscrapers of Gangnam or the concrete office blocks and mirrored basements we used to practice in or the big, square houses of L.A.
It’s not what I would choose to see again, if I could control my dreams. If I could control my dreams, I would choose a hotel room in the Philippines on a late-summer night. I would be a piece of fruit sitting in your hands, waiting for the moment when your thumbnail breaks through my skin and your thumb slips under and you peel me patiently and thoroughly, turning me over and over until I’m nothing but tender flesh in your palms. I would always wake up before this moment ever came.
---
You went to the army. I went to America, to L.A., for a movie.
The producer, Mr. Silver, remembered me from Ninja Assassin, or so he said. “Rain’s kid,” he said, and I agreed. “How’s he doing, anyway?” In America nobody knew or cared about Jihoon’s scandal. I didn’t tell him. It was nice to act like it didn’t exist.
“He’s good,” I said. “Married.”
“And he didn’t invite me?” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I smiled, and Mr. Silver smiled too. “So that means you’re next, right?”
I didn’t want to think about you but of course I did. Sitting next to you at a wooden table in front of a tripod and a crew and still only seeing you when I said, I once imagined what it would be like if I were your wife. The way you couldn’t look at me when you said, I could have children if it wasn’t for you. “Not yet, sir,” I said, and Mr. Silver laughed.
In the movie I played a mob boss’s henchman, the rich kind in suits and leather shoes and sunglasses. It felt good to fill my days and my head with memorizing instructions and taking directions, putting my body through its paces. Even though I was in a foreign country, it was the closest to normal I had felt in a long time.
I worked on the movie with Kang Sungho. “Just call me Sung,” he had emphasized on the first day we met, “not hyung or anything. You don’t need to do that here.” He played the police mole embedded with our gang. I said I remembered him from g.o.d’s video and he screwed up his face, but he seemed to like it. He made it seem sometimes like it was the two of us against everybody else: the non-Korean actors, the crew, America, the world.
On the second-last night of shooting we got drunk in Koreatown, beer and then soju in shots. The food was good but it lacked something crucial, something that could only come from home; or maybe I had already decided that.
Sung and I took a cab together back to the house I was staying at. He wouldn’t stop talking, but he had nothing meaningful to say: the baseball game on the radio, the weather forecast, the scenes we’d be shooting the next day. Lists of things in little sentences. My head felt heavy and I wanted to sleep.
But when we were close to my address he stopped talking, and he looked into my eyes for a moment. And suddenly my stomach started sinking, because I could recognize the glint in his eyes, the way a tourist recognizes someone from his home country abroad. I swallowed against it. “Sungho,” I said, careful to form the vowels correctly.
The car braked at a light and we lurched forward with it. Sung put his hand down on the seat between us to steady himself, but he didn’t move it once the light changed and the car started rolling again. I stared ahead at the freeway, but I could sense his hand there, tensed like a spider over the seat.
We arrived at my house. I took my wallet out of my pocket, squinting at the identical bills in the streetlight. Then Sung wrapped his fingers around my wrist. They burned, but in a different way from yours, like they were leaving marks on me.
“Come with me,” he said.
It wasn’t come here. The letters of his name were not the same as yours. I could see then, very clearly, that this was the movie version of my mistakes, and I had no desire to star in it again. So I smiled and said, “I’m tired,” gave him some American money, and I got out of the cab.
On set the next day he didn’t mention it, so we didn’t talk about it. There was nothing to talk about, anyway. The only way to end something is to ensure it never starts.
---
I have a dream where you live on a mountain and I climb to see you. I climb for days and days until I reach your hanok at the top.
The inside of your hanok is not like the outside, not like the wise women’s houses at all. The inside is a condo in Seoul, in Cheongdamdong, blue and black and chrome like when you and I shot the “Y” video. And just like then, you are sitting in a chair, and I have the feeling that you are surrounded by men, by women, everyone we have ever known and seen. But you are alone, and it’s just you and me and the chair.
I walk up to you and the walk to you takes maybe seconds, maybe years. There is music playing but I cannot recall it now. In the video I had a gun, but in the dream I have nothing. My clothes fall away as I walk and when I reach you I am naked, and I know that if I kept walking my skin would fall away and my muscles too, until nothing was left of me but the pit.
You smile at me and you beckon me to come closer, until I am right next to you, and now everyone else has gone and it’s just you and me, alone.
“Tell me what you want,” you say, and I take a deep breath.
---
Today is September 29. It’s been four years since the last time I was in Manila. I’m in the car, coming back from a taping of a talk show called The World is Flat. The show is new, but the routine is familiar. The four of you are missing; the car has gotten smaller too, erasing the spots where you should be sitting.
I’m listening to Jaemin going over the schedule for the next few days. It’s as much to keep himself awake behind the wheel as it is for my information. When the phone vibrates in my hands it feels like an animal waking and struggling to escape. I stare down at it for a few moments, listening to the thin buzz. It’s from a number that’s not in my phone. It’s a number that isn’t in my phone for a reason.
Jaemin trails off. “Are you going to answer that?” he asks.
“No.”
The phone keeps buzzing. “It sounds important.”
It’s not, I want to say. But my heart is beating quickly, and it’s no longer only a phantom pain in my chest. I don’t know where you are, but I can see you sitting in a chair, maybe in a condo somewhere, with the phone pressed to your ear, and you’re waiting. I can leave you waiting, pretend you never existed, pretend it’s over.
But nothing ever really ends.
So I pick up the phone. You talk, and I listen.
Then you stop, and you wait for my answer.
---
You say, “Tell me.”
I take a deep breath.
I spit in your face.
mblaq, seungho/joon
pg-13, 3211w
every time, changsun thinks it will be different; every time, it's the same.
--first person pov; written for kpop_olymfics 2013.
Maybe nothing ever really ends. Even our group never officially broke up; it just went on hiatus. You left for the army after our sixth mini album failed, and it was one or the other that did MBLAQ in. The hiatus hasn’t ended either, and there’s still a picture of us on J.Tune’s website, frozen in time.
You sent me an e-mail while I was in America and at first I thought it was an accident, like how you sometimes used to text me when you wanted Cheondoong because the names were right next to each other in your phone. It was the first time I had heard from you since you’d left. I was discharged today, it said. I made the calculation in my head, but didn’t bother remembering the answer. I heard you’re coming back soon? Let me know when you’re here. It will be good to see you. Good luck with the movie.
I deleted the e-mail as soon as I finished reading it, but an hour later when we took a break I went into my trash folder and opened it again, something you had once taught me how to do. It made my stomach hurt to look at it, to see the two small blocks of your name at the bottom of the message and know that you had written them and that they were real.
Nothing really ends. It just recedes, and you wait for it to return. And sometimes it comes back to you right away and other times it leaves you waiting, but the shadow of it is always there.
---
I have a dream that you live at the top of a mountain, like the wise women in my grandparents’ town did. I visited them once with my mother when I was young. Maybe you have long hairs growing out of your chin like they did, too.
The villagers are old and stooped and no matter what question I ask, the answer is always the same. Seek Seungho, they tell me, pointing gnarled fingers at the mountain. Tell him what you desire, and he will give it to you.
You live on the top of the mountain and I am standing at the bottom, small and insignificant. I know you are up there, and I can just make out your hanok in the distance.
I begin to climb, and then I wake up.
---
It was September 29, at a music show taping in Manila. I don’t even remember which station it was for, but I can remember the date. We had nothing new to promote, but as long as they would take us, we went.
The performance wasn’t our best. Cheondoong’s mic kept cutting out during his lines in “This Is War” and you nearly ran into a backup dancer. The dinner after the taping finished felt like a wake. Afterward we went to our hotel room and you and I went to lie down in our separate beds and sleep it off, and then you said, “Come here.”
I could’ve played along. I could have pretended I didn’t know what you meant, or that I knew exactly what you meant and didn’t want it. Maybe that was what you were hoping for, and you would have taken the rejection lightly and woken up the next day feeling tired but contained within yourself.
But you already knew the truth. This hadn’t come out of nowhere, after all. I had kissed you before, drunk or pretending to be, backstage at concerts and in the kitchen of our dorm. There were all those times you would squeeze my leg for reassurance in the van or before an interview, and I would look at you when you took your hand away. There was that relationship talk we did together for our DVD, where I pretended the camera didn’t exist and calmly gave away everything while you smiled and nodded thoughtfully. So why waste time?
It took you longer to drop the pretense. I lay down next to you and I waited, but you kept your hands to yourself. You talked a lot in little sentences, filling time. I only remember one thing you said: “It’s nice, like this,” your voice landing softly in the quiet, and then you rolled your head to look at me. When I think about it I still get a phantom pain in my chest, thinking of how much I wanted then, how desperate I was.
Finally you touched me and it burst, and I felt so light, like I could be crushed in your grip at any moment. You pulled me in to your body and your hands on me felt like they could slide right underneath my skin. I closed my eyes and wished they would, and wherever you touched me it was almost like they did.
We didn’t talk about it afterward. I had so much I wanted to say. But the next morning when we woke up facing each other and you smiled at me like I was the thing that made you most happy in the world, all the words rushed up in my throat and got stuck there, and all I could do was smile back.
That was the first time, and it’s important that I remember it this way. Perhaps you think of a different time, or more likely, you don’t think of it at all. But it’s important for me to remember that we were happy.
---
I have a dream where you live at the top of a mountain. You live on the top of the mountain and I start at the bottom and I climb.
I climb for a long time, maybe days, maybe weeks. My legs become sore. I eat rocks and dirt to keep myself going. But I don’t stop walking until I reach the top. I can see your hanok in the distance, and behind the white wall I can picture you sitting on the floor, knees folded, a serene expression on your face. You know, too, that when something goes away it only means it will come back.
---
I don’t know what I expected after that first time. For it to continue like that, maybe, quiet and nervous and new each time; or for it to end, and things would go back to the way they were before.
Instead, we kept going, and it became part of our lives, and it changed. We promoted a new single, and every time I moved to the centre of the formation for my part I became aware of your eyes on my back. The fans would cheer no matter what, and truthfully I had lost the fear of failing them a while ago. But now a good performance meant the difference between getting you as our leader, responsible for all four of us, smiling and calling us kids with a distant look in your eyes, and getting you all to myself, seeing the sweat drip into your eyes because I made it drip and hearing you say my name and knowing you weren’t thinking about anything else.
When I look back, I think that I could have prevented it, or at least slowed it down. But I couldn’t help myself. I was getting what I had always wanted.
And then one day you turned to me in the morning and you said, “This is the last time.”
My hands paused on your chest and my insides became cold all of a sudden. “What do you mean?” I could feel the smile frozen on my face.
“This can’t continue. People are going to find out. Things are bad enough for us as it is without a scandal.”
Words, words, words. I pressed into you again. “Come on. We’re being careful. Things are fine.”
You pushed my hands away, and your grip around my wrists was crushing. “Changsun, you know that I’m not...” You didn’t need to say it. I didn’t want to hear you say it. “It’s not going to go anywhere. It was nice, but it needs to end.”
Nothing ever really ends, I wanted to tell you. “You started it,” I said. “You end it.”
Secretly, you had been asking me for my strength. That still makes it your fault. You should have known by then that I had none left.
---
Sometimes I wonder what your memories are like, the things you’ve chosen to forget and the things you really can’t remember. The second last night before your enlistment you went out and got drunk with Byunghee and while he was in the bathroom you called me for the first time in a few weeks. I wasn’t really sleeping. I answered. I would always answer for you.
You came over two hours later and when I answered the door you stared at me, took a deep breath, and then you fell onto me.
You fucked me on the couch and gripped my waist in your hands and afterward you said, “What am I going to do without you?”
I resisted for about two seconds, and then I let the fantasy soak into my skin, get into my nose and eyes. “You can’t do anything without me,” I said.
“I could be...” I waited for you to find the words. “I could be married if it wasn’t for you. I could have children.”
That wasn’t what I had wanted to hear. I settled beside you and let you stroke my hair. “Doesn’t that mean something to you, then?”
You didn’t answer.
Two days later, I stood on the sidewalk with Byunghee and Cheolyong and watched you and Byungki put your bags in the back of a taxi. Once you left, it would be a fresh start for all of us: Byunghee and Cheolyong would promote as a subunit, and I would take on more acting roles. You would go through basic training that would aggravate your old injuries, and you’d be placed in an office for the next three years, where you wouldn’t be able to contact me.
As we watched the taxi drive away, the license plate getting smaller and smaller in the distance, I told myself that this was it, that after it turned the corner and I no longer saw you it would be over and I’d be free.
I don’t think I lasted two hours. The three of us went out for lunch and I spent the whole time in the bathroom throwing up. When Byunghee came to get me, he said, “You must’ve eaten something bad,” and he meant something else and we both knew it.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. I may as well have been telling myself, This is the last time.
---
In my dream, you live on a mountain in a hanok, low to the ground and quiet but proud. For whatever reason, these are the buildings I dream about, not the grey skyscrapers of Gangnam or the concrete office blocks and mirrored basements we used to practice in or the big, square houses of L.A.
It’s not what I would choose to see again, if I could control my dreams. If I could control my dreams, I would choose a hotel room in the Philippines on a late-summer night. I would be a piece of fruit sitting in your hands, waiting for the moment when your thumbnail breaks through my skin and your thumb slips under and you peel me patiently and thoroughly, turning me over and over until I’m nothing but tender flesh in your palms. I would always wake up before this moment ever came.
---
You went to the army. I went to America, to L.A., for a movie.
The producer, Mr. Silver, remembered me from Ninja Assassin, or so he said. “Rain’s kid,” he said, and I agreed. “How’s he doing, anyway?” In America nobody knew or cared about Jihoon’s scandal. I didn’t tell him. It was nice to act like it didn’t exist.
“He’s good,” I said. “Married.”
“And he didn’t invite me?” I wasn’t sure what to say, so I smiled, and Mr. Silver smiled too. “So that means you’re next, right?”
I didn’t want to think about you but of course I did. Sitting next to you at a wooden table in front of a tripod and a crew and still only seeing you when I said, I once imagined what it would be like if I were your wife. The way you couldn’t look at me when you said, I could have children if it wasn’t for you. “Not yet, sir,” I said, and Mr. Silver laughed.
In the movie I played a mob boss’s henchman, the rich kind in suits and leather shoes and sunglasses. It felt good to fill my days and my head with memorizing instructions and taking directions, putting my body through its paces. Even though I was in a foreign country, it was the closest to normal I had felt in a long time.
I worked on the movie with Kang Sungho. “Just call me Sung,” he had emphasized on the first day we met, “not hyung or anything. You don’t need to do that here.” He played the police mole embedded with our gang. I said I remembered him from g.o.d’s video and he screwed up his face, but he seemed to like it. He made it seem sometimes like it was the two of us against everybody else: the non-Korean actors, the crew, America, the world.
On the second-last night of shooting we got drunk in Koreatown, beer and then soju in shots. The food was good but it lacked something crucial, something that could only come from home; or maybe I had already decided that.
Sung and I took a cab together back to the house I was staying at. He wouldn’t stop talking, but he had nothing meaningful to say: the baseball game on the radio, the weather forecast, the scenes we’d be shooting the next day. Lists of things in little sentences. My head felt heavy and I wanted to sleep.
But when we were close to my address he stopped talking, and he looked into my eyes for a moment. And suddenly my stomach started sinking, because I could recognize the glint in his eyes, the way a tourist recognizes someone from his home country abroad. I swallowed against it. “Sungho,” I said, careful to form the vowels correctly.
The car braked at a light and we lurched forward with it. Sung put his hand down on the seat between us to steady himself, but he didn’t move it once the light changed and the car started rolling again. I stared ahead at the freeway, but I could sense his hand there, tensed like a spider over the seat.
We arrived at my house. I took my wallet out of my pocket, squinting at the identical bills in the streetlight. Then Sung wrapped his fingers around my wrist. They burned, but in a different way from yours, like they were leaving marks on me.
“Come with me,” he said.
It wasn’t come here. The letters of his name were not the same as yours. I could see then, very clearly, that this was the movie version of my mistakes, and I had no desire to star in it again. So I smiled and said, “I’m tired,” gave him some American money, and I got out of the cab.
On set the next day he didn’t mention it, so we didn’t talk about it. There was nothing to talk about, anyway. The only way to end something is to ensure it never starts.
---
I have a dream where you live on a mountain and I climb to see you. I climb for days and days until I reach your hanok at the top.
The inside of your hanok is not like the outside, not like the wise women’s houses at all. The inside is a condo in Seoul, in Cheongdamdong, blue and black and chrome like when you and I shot the “Y” video. And just like then, you are sitting in a chair, and I have the feeling that you are surrounded by men, by women, everyone we have ever known and seen. But you are alone, and it’s just you and me and the chair.
I walk up to you and the walk to you takes maybe seconds, maybe years. There is music playing but I cannot recall it now. In the video I had a gun, but in the dream I have nothing. My clothes fall away as I walk and when I reach you I am naked, and I know that if I kept walking my skin would fall away and my muscles too, until nothing was left of me but the pit.
You smile at me and you beckon me to come closer, until I am right next to you, and now everyone else has gone and it’s just you and me, alone.
“Tell me what you want,” you say, and I take a deep breath.
---
Today is September 29. It’s been four years since the last time I was in Manila. I’m in the car, coming back from a taping of a talk show called The World is Flat. The show is new, but the routine is familiar. The four of you are missing; the car has gotten smaller too, erasing the spots where you should be sitting.
I’m listening to Jaemin going over the schedule for the next few days. It’s as much to keep himself awake behind the wheel as it is for my information. When the phone vibrates in my hands it feels like an animal waking and struggling to escape. I stare down at it for a few moments, listening to the thin buzz. It’s from a number that’s not in my phone. It’s a number that isn’t in my phone for a reason.
Jaemin trails off. “Are you going to answer that?” he asks.
“No.”
The phone keeps buzzing. “It sounds important.”
It’s not, I want to say. But my heart is beating quickly, and it’s no longer only a phantom pain in my chest. I don’t know where you are, but I can see you sitting in a chair, maybe in a condo somewhere, with the phone pressed to your ear, and you’re waiting. I can leave you waiting, pretend you never existed, pretend it’s over.
But nothing ever really ends.
So I pick up the phone. You talk, and I listen.
Then you stop, and you wait for my answer.
---
You say, “Tell me.”
I take a deep breath.
I spit in your face.