Salt in the wound we chose

“Hey.”

“Yes?” He replied, looking at her directly in her eyes, he always loved looking at her eyes. They were something, but not the kind of “something” you would expect.

It was pure, terrifiying, destructive, unrequited love.

Why? He couldn't find the answer, all he does is follow her, all he does is listen to her. Listen to her talk about something that wasn't even that important to her, yet he still listens, because to him it's always about staying, being there, present.

“What would you do? If I disappear completely, and love someone that isn't you.” Minjeong says, her eyes roaming around his face and down to his hands, it flinched, it can pass as unnoticed but she still noticed.

He opened his mouth, and then closed, and then opened again. And for one second, he breathes long enough to find the proper answer in his mind.

“If you think that's what's best for you, your happiness matters.”

Because loving her was not always about being loved in return.

He was here, she was here, that was enough for him. He knew she couldn't love him the way he loves her, but he still loved her anyways. People change over the years, Minjeong changed over the years he met her, when they were kids, when they were teens, now they're old enough.

The young Minjeong needed someone to play, interact with.

The teen Minjeong needed someone who understood her.

The adult Minjeong needed someone who listens to her, who pays attention, who stays, who offers sanctuary despite everything.

People do change, even the woman he loved, but he never failed to learn how to love her everytime she did.

3 years later she left, now she's with someone, someone he doesn't, wouldn't want to know.

The first months were okay-ish, he was still trying to process how, why, or what, and comes the first year. He knew he was falling apart, it came in the way of his work, he didn't know how to cope, he tried alcohol, cigarettes, none worked.

Then comes the third year, he was empty, hollow enough to put something in it and it still wouldn't fill the void inside him.

He became a writer, just to feel the emptiness within him, to cope, to accept the fact that he wasn't the one she chose, he was happy that she was happy.

His one story, is about someone who stayed, someone who loved each other with extraordinary equality that transcends love and passion itself, people who wasn't able to read it will think it was a cheap copy of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, but the people who read will automatically recognize it's his just by the title, his greatest work, his magnum opus, it was featured on billboard, on New York Times, it became the best selling book of the year. It was inmortalized as one of the best written works. An adaptation series was also in the making and people were highly anticipating it.

Journalists and other prominent persons complimented his work. People thought he had a beautiful mind, that he was someone special, he accepted it.

But he never had the heart to tell them that he was only writing down what her existence did to him.

Despite the achievements, despite countless hours of writing down, despite being called someone great, being someone great, receiving recognition.

But why? Why does he feel empty?

Something's missing, someone.

Then he realized, he was never really okay, he really never accepted the fact that she's gone and won't come back. It was selfish of him, and he despised himself for it.

Five years after she left, Minjeong found the book in an airport bookstore, its spine catching the light before its title did.

She almost didn't pick it up. Her flight was delayed, she was tired, and she'd already heard people talking about it in line at the coffee counter.

“Have you read it? Everyone's read it, the ending destroyed me.”

She bought it anyway, mostly to have something to hold.

She read the first chapter standing at the gate. By the third, she'd missed the boarding call twice.

It wasn't the plot that undid her, not at first. It was the boy who stayed. The one who learned to love a girl over and over, every time she outgrew the last version of herself. Play, then understanding, then simply presence, he adapted to all of it without once asking to be chosen. She found herself slowing down, rereading paragraphs, just like how you slow down when a stranger's face on the street looks almost like someone you used to know.

Then came the scene.

Her coat. The exact color, the exact year. The thing she'd said about happiness, meant as a kindness, tossed off so easily she couldn't now remember if she'd even looked at him when she said it. And his hand, flinching, so small she'd told herself she imagined it.

She hadn't imagined it. He'd kept it. Five years, and he'd written it down so precisely it felt like being watched from the future, like he'd known even then that this moment would need to be preserved, that she would need it back one day whether she wanted it or not.

She read the paragraph three times. Then she closed the book and sat with her hand flat on the cover, like she could keep the rest of it from getting out.

Around her, the gate emptied. Filled again. A new flight, a new crowd, none of them looking at the woman on the floor with a book in her lap and her boarding pass crushed in her other hand.

She opened it again because she had to know.

The middle chapters were worse in a quieter way, not one scene she recognized, but a hundred small ones. A joke she'd made once about the rain. A song she used to hum without noticing. The specific, useless way she twisted her rings when she was nervous. None of it was important. None of it was supposed to matter.

That was the cruelty of it, he had built a monument out of the parts of her she herself had never thought worth keeping.

The dedication page had no name. Just a date. It's set on March 20th.

She went still.

That wasn't the day they met. It wasn't the day she left. She turned it over in her mind for a long time before it surfaced, nineteen years old, his kitchen, the smell of something burning on the stove that neither of them got up to fix. She'd asked him, voice light because she hadn't meant anything by it.

“What would you do if I loved someone else?”

She remembered laughing afterward. She remembered changing the subject before he'd even finished answering, because his answer had made her strangely uncomfortable in a way she didn't have language for at nineteen. She remembered forgetting it by dinner.

He had not forgotten it. He had built a book around it. He had taken the most careless five minutes of her life, five minutes she couldn't even fully reconstruct without effort, and made it the center of his.

Minjeong sat down on the terminal floor, coat still on, and didn't move when her flight was called a final time. She thought about the years after that kitchen, the years he never once brought it up again, never once asked her again, never once made her feel the weight of the question she'd tossed at him like it cost nothing. He had simply kept loving her, kept showing up, kept adjusting to whatever shape she needed him to be, and she had let him.

She thought about his eyes. She used to catch him looking at her sometimes, years ago, an expression she never had a name for and never tried to find one. She had it now. She'd had it the whole time and never once looked long enough to read it.

His love had cost her nothing. That was exactly why she'd never noticed she was spending it.

She didn't call him. She scrolled to his name in her phone and let her thumb hover there the way his hand had hovered, once, at a door she was walking out of. She thought about what she would even say.

“I read it. I finally saw you. I'm five years late.”

There was no version of that sentence that didn't sound like asking for something, and she had already taken enough.

She thought about the interviews she'd seen online, months ago, without knowing why she was watching them. Journalists asking him about the girl in the book, was she real, was she someone, praising his work and recognizing him as one of the writers, and him saying, finally coming up with an answer, for the first and last time.

“Some people don't write because they are talented, some found the courage and ability to write because there was something rotting inside them that silence could no longer hold. She's no longer here. But wherever she is, I hope she finds happiness.”

And the audience taking it as literary distance, as craft, when it had been the truest sentence he'd ever said in public.

He had already grieved her. He had already published her. He had already let her go, in front of the entire world, without once writing her name, protecting her even in the act of finally, fully telling the truth about her.

He hadn't needed her to come back. That was the last and worst of it.

He'd already said goodbye. On paper. Where it was safe. Where she couldn't disappoint him one more time by leaving twice.

Minjeong sat on the terminal floor until the lights dimmed for the night shift, and understood, with the cruelty of undrstanding too late, that she was the only one left who hadn't said goodbye at all.

She cried.