Möbius Strip (YongSeo)

[warmboys]

Möbius Strip
Seohyun/Yonghwa
800 words

Looking back offered a second chance, a bird’s-eye view of the same scenes she’d molded in her head to her liking while egged on by eight other cheers (some more enthusiastic than others). Girls, she realized later, were too forgiving, wanting to believe in the best, especially when believing was their only viable option. At first she didn’t know how to trust; later she hurled her entire self into the act of trying. Not really for his sake, either. If she rewatched the old episodes she’d notice that her smile stretched too wide, bordering on overcompensating, even if at the time she had wanted to mistake it for happiness. Unbridled. But it was never. She was naïve, and maybe a little desperate, if in an unusual way.

If she read their story like a book, one that could be finished in a day, then the natural progression, the downturn would’ve been obvious, but theirs was built up-pattered out-in over a year, and even if one looked at herself in the mirror every day for the rest of her life she couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment that she became an old woman. At the time she only understood that he was tired, but who wasn’t? If she noticed that he laughed less, that even a grin seemed to thin out his features, she brushed it aside as a passing cloud shrouding up an otherwise bright day. She feigned ignorance to the changing weather. The girls offered her an endless well of excuses, hands unusually gentle on her shoulders and hair, ears unusually open to the worries they knew, in their wise older-sisterly ways, she must have been harboring. Perhaps they were afraid because firsts were always the most delicate. Perhaps he was afraid, too.

What made it most difficult-which she would find later was always the case-was the way hope clung to her, him, the image of them together, uneven as it rippled. It was true that he broke her heart on several occasions, gently at first and then with an unforgiveable reckless that left her paralyzed for weeks-and it was true that he pieced it all together again, with a tenderness she couldn’t ignore. “That’s what they mean by love,” Hyoyeon murmured before clicking off the light and turning over in her bed. Seohyun took shallow breaths with her nose against the comforter, the heat distracting from the way her head pulsed. She had slept poorly that night and many nights after. She’d worn the scarf to bed. Now it carpeted the bottom of her trinkets drawer, the one least often touched.

“Every time I think I know, something happens. Something doesn’t happen. And it starts all over again.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Jinwoon said. “But you deserve the best.” He didn’t say “better.”

She thought, and then she posed, and she kept thinking. She kept on the smile. Because even if he drifted she was still present, and needed to be even more so for the both of them. She began to understand that this was as much a job for her as for him, and she thought-was told-that that would make it easier. It did not, but that too was part of the process. Objectively she knew she was growing up. This would make her stronger. Subjectively, there were days that she wanted to go to bed and never wake up again.

She didn’t ask him anything directly. “You shouldn’t have to,” explained Hyoyeon. “You should know from watching him,” said Tiffany. “He’s either too fat or too skinny,” said Taeyeon. “You can do better.” Taeyeon wasn’t like Jinwoon.

“I don’t care what he looks like,” she said. And then she buried her face in her hands, because she didn’t know why she cared at all.

He was gaunt on the last day. She knew it wasn’t the makeup but the crazy schedules, the unnatural dieting, the pressure. She’d seen it all before, and if she could’ve, she would’ve done anything to give him strength. It didn’t matter how much or little he really liked her. She wanted to be kind to him as she would’ve a stranger. He wasn’t, of course.

“I look good, don’t I?” the grin pulled tight across his features, and for an instant she imagined the skeletal structure beneath all the skin and flesh, and blood, and what she saw frightened her, but she only nodded, not wanting to hurt his feelings. She wasn’t really present anymore at that point. She felt herself a relic, but that could’ve been wishful thinking.

To him she said, “Thank you. I’ve learned so much,” and when he looked back into her eyes she felt the familiar awful tremble in her chest, the most dangerous and telling, but it only lasted a moment and then was gone.