In No Mood to Find Another

It should be a coincidence. It needs to be.

Because if not, you’ll fall into another spiral that makes you want to recover all the photos you deleted from your gallery and strum the songs that remind you of her. Little things you keep away from you in fear that you’ll start hoping again, because hope is fucking useless and you’ve seen how this played out before.

But this is how fate shows it: you and Hanni meet again at a crappy airport in the middle of nowhere, and to your irritation, she still has the supernatural pull that makes a flickering customs light cinematic. 

And she’s not even dolled up. No makeup on her face, no contacts—just a pair of glasses and the lipbalm she swears by. God, she’s in a fucking mom cardigan and she still looks strikingly beautiful. Her eyes find yours before you can find an exit and it’s over.

“Oh,” she says, brows raised in surprise. She clearly didn’t expect to see you here. Well, she certainly didn’t expect to see you ever again.

And to be honest, neither did you. A girl like Hanni belongs on a stage, adored by millions, not here.

But things happen. Life happens and lawsuits break bonds apart and the media likes to say shit. That’s just the way things go.

She deserves better. But you deserve better, too, so you should really just go and pretend you didn’t see her. 

“Hi,” you say. There’s crowds pushing past you, security guards from all stops eyeing you snarkily for standing in the flow of passengers, but you stay still. You can’t move. You can’t speak. You just want to ask her:

“Are you okay?”

Hanni blinks at you from behind those cherry red specs. Seeing her without all the highlighter cleverly placed on her face, without the lighting of a photoshoot makes you realize how she’s still young even with everything that’s happening. Years have passed and court trials have been delayed but she’s the same, little Pham Ngoc Han you vowed to protect.

She smiles. “No,” she says, “but that doesn’t matter. Let’s get a drink.’’

-

Let’s face it: you are devastatingly in love with Hanni Pham. 

So by now, you’ve learned to see the telltale signs that point to whatever stirs in her soul. A smile that melts up into her eyes when she’s happy, the cold shoulder when she’s mad (and it’s so out of place because you can hand Hanni a microphone and she wouldn’t stop talking into it until the power goes out), and the blank look in her almond eyes when she’s sad. You thought this would change considering you haven’t caught up with her in a while, but don’t you get it? Hanni is a constant factor in your life. She’s everywhere—on your screen, in your bed, on stage. She’s sort of like the sun, see here; you wake up everyday with the knowledge that it’ll still be there in the sky above, shining brightly.

“Oh, and I forgot to ask—what brings you here?’’ Hanni claims she doesn’t want to get drunk—got in trouble for that before, she says, and you decide it’s wise to not tell her that you know. You’ve seen it blown out of proportion in K-pop tabloids and the details of the photos down to the pixel of her fingertip analyzed to death. You allow her some secrecy. God knows you’ve kept things from her, too. Thus, you agree to just one casual martini over scones.

“I’m visiting my family for Easter,” you reply. It’s, what, a few thousand for a flight to your province and twenty for the guy who still watches your hometown car. A concrete jungle can be suffocating sometimes. 

But hey, it brought you Hanni. 

“I thought you said you don’t pray anymore.” 

Hanni remembers correctly, as usual. The curious jut of her bottom lip guilts you. “Kind of, yeah. Sometimes prayers go unanswered, and sometimes I feel like I’m let down.” 

It feels blasphemous to say it on Black Saturday. But you feel that honesty with a bit of repentance was fine with the Lord. You prayed a thousand times that you’d see Hanni again. You prayed a million times that the judges in charge of her trials would see reason—recognize the fact that they were five young girls in a nightmarish position. The night sky provided no hopeful answer. 

But that’s the thing with culture, you know. You have a rosary on your rearview mirror and a cross necklace close to your heart. You stick by it because that’s just who you are. Moving to a big city doesn’t change that you’re your mother’s son.

“What about you?” you ask her. “I’ve only seen tidbits of where you are on Threads. Facebook, if I’m lucky.”

Hanni snorts unprettily, covering her mouth with her hand. “God, you’re old. You use Facebook?”

“Just to keep in contact with my parents,” you defend yourself, and add to your losing argument with “and the occasional birthday reminders!” to make Hanni laugh harder. You’ve always loved her laugh. (Okay, yes, of course you do; you’re in love with her)—but she just makes it look so charming with her nose wrinkling up and the biggest cackle unexpectedly drawing out of her small body. She makes you want to laugh, too. So you join in happily, relishing the tinkle of laughter you haven’t heard from her in so long and letting her slap your shoulder.

You wish you could freeze time. You wish she could stay happy forever and protect her from the world that moves too cunningly. You wish you could stay in this airport forever with her and have the smiles frozen on your not-quite-young-but-not-quite-mature-yet faces. You can live off the self-proclaimed Italian pizza down the hall and get drunk off soda and ridiculously expensive liquor. You can find something to wear in the high-end fashion houses near the waiting areas that nobody seriously buys from anyway. You wish you could just stay here.

But that’s not how things work. Life happens and time flies by and Hanni says she’s going to meet a guy she’s been talking to who’s apparently really interesting and sweet.

The smile disappears from your face.

“A guy?” you ask. 

Hanni gives you a weird look. “Yeah. Did you expect it to be a girl?”

“No— not that I’d mind because I’m not against it or like homophobic— but—”

“But what?” Hanni’s cheeks are red. She’s waiting for you to spit it out or she’ll make you. People underestimate what she’s capable of. She’s starting to think you’re one of them, and oh, does it break her heart.

“But why?” 

It just doesn’t make sense. It has been a while, but surely it hasn’t been that long. You’ll willingly take accountability for not texting her as long as she’ll admit you weren’t in her thoughts at all when the group took flight. And even with that aside, there was still something between you. The glint in her eyes as she thanks the people behind the scenes who supported her from trainee days to debut can’t be a reflection of the stage light. The years you spent giggling under covers, texting until dawn, and sharing boba straws can’t be all for nothing.

Hanni looks so offended she might just punch you. She leans forward to make sure she’s hearing you correctly, the kitten heel of her shoe hanging from the stool. “‘But why?’”

You draw yourself up. “Are you just gonna repeat what I’m saying and hope you make sense?”

“I don’t know. Am I?”

The reunion was going so well. It was running smoothly in spite of the distance you know you had until the topic of a mystery boy came up. Fucking immature shits, the two of you. You ruined it. No, wait a minute, she ruined it. It might be Easter in a few hours but you don’t think you can muster forgiving her.

And what did she do wrong? She’s Hanni Pham. Her name is a stand-in word for attractive. It’s not her fault that people like her. But you’re so upset that you want to ask for another shot. Then another. Then another and another until security announces your lifetime ban from this airport.

“Hanni,” you say, realizing this is the first time her name has made a crisp syllable in your mouth and now it tastes bitter, “that is such a dumb fucking decision and you know it.”

She can be very scary for a girl barely five-three. “Give me one reason why I should even listen to you.”

You don’t mean for your laugh to sound so condescending. You’ve never once talked to her like this. You knew better. “Fine. In fact, I’ll give you three.”

Hanni raises a brow while you raise a middle finger to start the list. It’s so absurd you want to crawl out of your own body and lie in a slump. Allow the doctors to trouble themselves at how gorged out you look. Let the records show that your burst heart only ever beat for her. The irony and cheesiness but the awfully true pain of it all sticks to your words. “First of all, you have a life-ruining lawsuit at your heels. It’ll leave you shit-poor in the streets eating ice cubes for dinner. It’s incredibly stupid to use whatever money you have left for a flight. In this airport of all places, too. Even the local airline charges less. Second of all, you have to focus on gathering papers and evidence because you know damn well that company has every court in Korea under their paycheck. They’re a billion-dollar conglomercy—”

“Conglomerate.”

“Whatever the fuck they are, I don’t care. It’s the same goddamn thing. God, I hate English. The point is they’re worth a billion dollars, you think they can’t bribe some corrupt senior citizen to ruin your life? You have to have a mountain of evidence even they can’t deny. And third—”

Your knuckles pale at the edge of the bar. Your voice cracks. The airport is the only place you can drink at midnight and can’t be judged for it or anything for that matter but you feel fucking stupid and humiliated and a worthless piece of shit anyway.

“A guy,” you murmur. “Hanni, really?”

Hanni goes radio silent for a while. You guess she’s used to that: not saying anything for years until Holy Week rush hours bump you into each other. You’ve got a lot of nerve, she thinks, to ruin a perfectly good thing. Each word is a bullet ridden through her already tired body. 

She raises a shaking hand to pull her glasses off. The bridge drags down a single tear. 

“You think I don’t know that?” she asks quietly. “They don’t care if Hyein’s barely eighteen or if Dani’s mum is alright. They’re heartless.”