Chapter 535
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Spring was happening outside the window with aggressive optimism.
Spring. She is twenty-seven and something has shifted: she knows what she feels. The question is no longer whether but who — or whether who is even the right question.
She cried at commercials. She laughed too loudly at her own jokes. She could parallel park perfectly on the first try and she considered this the most impressive thing about herself.
She was at the gallery on Insadong-gil where Ha-Eun had a show opening and four people had appeared uninvited, which was either where she’d meant to be or where the day had carried her, and lately the distinction had been getting harder to make.
She thought: this is fine. She thought: this is not fine. She thought: I will think about this on Sunday when I have bandwidth.
Seoul was doing its autumn/spring/summer/winter thing outside — the city had, she’d found, a season for every mood — and she was doing her thing, which was noticing everything and writing it down and not yet doing anything with all the noticing.
Feelings journal, 11:22 PM: *He said something today that I keep replaying. Not even a big thing. Just my name, in that specific way. It keeps arriving in my head at inconvenient moments. I have been offered no defence against this.*
“You remembered,” she said.
“Of course I remembered.” He said it simply. Like there had never been a question. She had to look away.
She picked up her coffee and her phone and her bag and her feelings and carried all of them toward the rest of the evening, which was how she got through most evenings — not by resolving the feelings but by carrying them until they became familiar, until they were part of the weight she was used to.
She thought: this is fine. She thought: this is not fine. She thought: I will think about this on Sunday when I have bandwidth.
The city was very loud. She was, she thought, very alive inside it.
She walked home through Seoul — eleven PM, the city bright and warm and indifferent to whatever was happening inside her chest — and thought about the evening and the person and the specific quality of the warmth she was carrying home.
She opened her feelings journal. She wrote it down. She closed it. She made tea. She went to bed still carrying it.
Some things you didn’t put down. You just learned to carry them better.
She walked home through Seoul — eleven PM, the city bright and warm and indifferent to whatever was happening inside her chest — and thought about the evening and the person and the specific quality of the warmth she was carrying home.
She opened her feelings journal. She wrote it down. She closed it. She made tea. She went to bed still carrying it.
Some things you didn’t put down. You just learned to carry them better.
She thought: I would like to be less affected by this. She was profoundly affected by this.
She filed this in the mental folder labelled ‘things to examine when less overwhelmed,’ which was getting quite full.
‘The problem,’ Sooji said, ‘isn’t that you have feelings. The problem is that you have feelings about multiple people simultaneously and you are treating this as a logistics problem.’ ‘Isn’t it?’ Ha-Eun said. ‘No,’ Sooji said. ‘It’s a Ha-Eun problem. Which is different.’ ‘What’s the difference?’ Sooji put down her pen. ‘Logistics problems have obvious solutions,’ she said. ‘Ha-Eun problems require you to be honest about what you actually want.’ A long pause. ‘That’s terrifying,’ Ha-Eun said. ‘I know,’ Sooji said. ‘That’s how you know it’s the right direction.’
Sooji said: ‘You’re avoiding the question.’ Ha-Eun said: ‘What was the question?’ ‘Which one of them do you think about at three in the morning?’ Ha-Eun opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. ‘All of them,’ she said, very quietly. ‘I know,’ Sooji said. ‘That’s the question.’
Feelings journal, 11:55 PM: *Sooji showed me the spreadsheet. She has seventeen data points for this week alone. I looked at the data. It is, objectively, a lot of data. I closed the spreadsheet. I opened it again. I need more cereal.*
She was, she realised, smiling. She had been smiling for approximately three minutes without noticing. This was data.
Feelings journal, 11:08 PM: *All four of them were in the same room today. It was fine. It was completely fine. Nothing happened. I am writing this at eleven PM because I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. I need to start going to bed earlier.*
Feelings journal, 11:22 PM: *He said something today that I keep replaying. Not even a big thing. Just my name, in that specific way. It keeps arriving in my head at inconvenient moments. I have been offered no defence against this.*
She fell asleep on the couch and he put a blanket over her. She wasn’t fully asleep. She didn’t say anything. She kept her eyes closed and felt the particular warmth of being cared for by someone who thought you didn’t know, which was, she was finding, a specific and overwhelming kind of tenderness.
