In Another Life

In another life, this may have been different.

She finds you kneeling at the riverbank, hands black with the soil of twelve fresh graves you dug alone. The water tells her your name. Tells her everything. Parents. Lover. The village — swallowed by evil, even willows won’t speak of.

You walked five days without crying. Your eyes are pure. Your grief is not.

Yeojin kneels in the shallows. Her hair drinks the light. Petals collect at her wrists.

“I can give you another life,” she says.

You look up.

She lies, kindly. “It will be true. I promise. I’ll keep trying.”

It smells like your mother’s cooking.

You wake to the sound of your sister humming in the next room. The cherry tree outside your window blooms, three weeks early, and you don’t notice. You run to the kitchen and your mother turns from the stove and her face is exactly hers. You cry into her shoulder for an hour while she strokes your hair and tells you you’ve had a bad dream. You believe everything she says. You eat three full bowls.

Months gone by and you’re happy.

Heejin finds you in the fields one afternoon and kisses and pushes you into the long grass. The boys you played stones with as children come for dinner. Your father teaches your nephew to wield a sword, the way he taught you. The widow asks for your mother as if your mother is not standing right there, and you don’t notice. You don’t notice your pet that died of old age before the monsters came is back too — fat and demanding. You don’t notice the harvest is the same harvest as last year. The same number of bushels. The same bruise on the same peach.

You ask your mother for soup with the radiant tomatoes, the way she used to make it for you when you were sick. She makes it without. You ask again the next week. She forgets again. The cherry never fall, even into deep autumn. The blacksmith tells you the same joke about his daughter’s suitor twice in three days, word-for-word, laughing both times like it is the first.

You notice. You don’t say anything.

You cut your thumb on a knife. The blood is the wrong color.

You start to understand.

You notice Yeojin watching from afar — defeated. She tries again.

She tries by letting herself in.

She gives you no village. No Heejin. The grief is folded behind a curtain so soft you don’t know to look for it. You meet her at a crossroads in the land of Wysteria. Petite. Dark hair. Watching. She looks at you like she has been waiting, and you have the strange, blooming thought that you have always known her.

You travel together for a year.

She steals bites from your share and complains about the cold. She laughs at your jokes before you finish them. She tells you about the river she was born in. She does not eat fish. You don’t notice she does not tell you her name. You think she is shy. You think you are happy. Your hand finds hers in your sleep, and you don’t know what to do with that.

You build a cabin by a stream. East-facing windows because she loves the morning. You kiss her like you are afraid she will dissolve in your hands.

She does not.

She does not.

She does not.

She learns the shape of your laugh from the inside. You learn the way she goes very still when she is thinking. You don’t think about the future. The future has already arrived.

You wake one morning in winter. The bed beside you is empty. There is frost on the windows. There is dirt under your fingernails that should not be there. There is the faint, distant smell of a river you almost remember.

You find her in the doorway, looking out at the snow.

You ask her, gently, what her name is.

She opens her mouth.

She closes it.

The sound that comes out is the sound of running water.

She tries again. Her sigh runs long.

This life is the longest.

She is openly in it now. You meet her at the riverbank where she found you the first time, and you do not ask why she remembers and you do not. She has never told you her name and you have never asked. You marry her under a paper-lantern arch and the air smells of running water. You build the house with your hands. You plant cherry trees. You have a daughter with your eyes, and then a son, and then a grandchild. Decades breeze by. You bury your father a second time, with the same hands you used the first. You did not weep.

You love her so completely it frightens you sometimes — in a way you do not name.

She watches every fracture before it forms and closes it in the darkness while you sleep. You feel her doing it. You do not utter a word. You let her. You are grateful. You have always been grateful.

One winter evening, in the eighth decade, you are sitting on the porch and the light is the color of honey. You put your hand on hers. You say her name. Yeojin. The one she never said aloud, the one you have always known.

She does not move.

You say, gentler: thank you.

You die smiling, in her arms. She holds you until the warmth has gone, and longer.

She returns to the river.

Your body is still kneeling where she left you. The soil under your nails. Graves behind you. Three days. You never moved. You were never going to move. The river has been telling her this the whole time and she has been refusing to listen.

She kneels in the shallows beside you, streams of tears flow from her eyes.

In another life, this may have been different.