No Surprises

It’s loud. All of it. It’s all so fucking loud.

You’re sitting in your car, alone, one hand on the leather of the steering wheel, the other somewhere between your knee and hip, just staring into the three-in-the-afternoon haze outside that’s hot enough to make you see in waves. You grip the wheel. You drum your fingers against your thighs. You breathe—at least, you try to.

Then it all comes crashing down at once.

“You’re not available? Why? Did you inform HR about it already? You do know this is an important event, right? They WILL cut your salary for this, yeah?”

“When can I finally meet you with to discuss your performance for this semester? No, I don’t do online consultations. Meet me at my office some time next week.”

“You doing alright, son? Your mother and I haven’t heard from you in months. We’re just worried. You’re always … out of reach. Physically. Mentally. You can’t blame us for worrying …”

“Babe, we have dinner this weekend with my boss and his wife. We already discussed this two weeks ago? Where are you disappearing to again this time?”

You can’t stop it. It won’t stop.

You try to drown out the noise in your head with a twist of your wrist, but the key experiences some resistance. You twist it again in place, revving the engine up for a few seconds, giving you a false glimmer of hope with a whir before it peters out.

Yanking the key out of the socket, you beat your fist repeatedly onto the horn of your white 2011 Honda Civic—the hand-me-down from your lawyer cousin, which was a hand-me-down from his parents to yours—blaring it out to the innocent emptiness of the street. Beads of sweat drip down your face as the afternoon heat is beginning to waft in, and your lack of air-conditioning is becoming blatantly present.

And for a moment—just for a second—you swear you see hear her voice.

“You can tell a lot about a guy based on how he treats his car: he’ll treat you the same way—if not worse.”

“Ga … -eul?”

You see the mirage of her sitting on the hood of your car, waving at someone in the distance, stretching her arms out to receive an invisible person before slamming backwards fully and giggling under the afternoon sun.

You blink again and she’s gone.

Trembling, you return the key to its socket, twist gently, and sure enough, the car alights and the engine turns on.

Slotting your phone into its stand conveniently placed beneath the rearview mirror, you leave your parking slot and begin to drive out of the narrow alleyway just outside your apartment. You don’t need to turn on maps or directions. You know where you’re going. You’ve been there too many times to count. Instead, you flick open your notifications as you turn left onto the main road.

There are seventeen of them. And they are all from Wonyoung.

Babe you didn’t eat breakfast? But I made you your favorite?

Babe you didn’t eat lunch either?

Where the hell are you going?

Babe???

You know you’re being petty right now right? Can you at least reply to me?

I’m just worried

Babe

Babe

Babe

At least be back before eight. Dinner reservation’s at ten

You are still coming with me for dinner right?

Right?

Babe?

In between those strings of messages, you missed her call around four times. You should be feeling a sinking feeling in your gut. A taste of remorse on your tongue. But it doesn’t come at all.

There are some things you can’t tell your girlfriend of five years. Because there are some things she wouldn’t understand even if she tried. There are some things that a woman raised with a golden spoon, who lives in a penthouse suite, and has flights to Paris or New York or Milan every week, wouldn’t understand.

Because there are some things you would very much rather tell someone else.

And you’re taking the next two hours to drive to her place right now. 

It doesn’t take long until you’re on the highway. You’re past the toll and you’re currently speeding up to match the pace of the other vehicles around you. It’s just a straight and seemingly endless drive from here on out. Until you have to take the proper exit, at least. But until then, you can just turn your mind off.

But you know that’s a lie. It only gets louder from here.

And there’s nothing you can do but entertain your thoughts.

You take a glance at the your reflection in the rearview mirror. There’s a pump of shock that courses through your veins. For what stares back at you is the image of a man you don’t even recognize anymore.

Surely, this isn’t you. This can’t be. How … did you turn into this?

You look so … tired. So … unhappy.

But even then that’s an understatement.

Your eyebags drag heavier across your face than the resting position of your mouth—of your supposed smile. If you can even call it that anymore. The years you spent slaving away at the office dried your skin, grizzled your hair, drained the light from your eyes. Your pupils are nothing but voids that simply exist. They don’t devour, they don’t claim, they don’t desire anything. They’re just there. Empty pools of nothingness. So vacant that you could barely even remember what used to occupy them.

Was it a hobby or two? A pastime of yours? A goal? A childhood dream?

You can’t glean anything. How could you? Dying stars often leave very little behind.

“We’re going to need some money. For the rent. For food. For school. Oh! And we’re going to need to do our own promotions as well. Maybe hire someone to make the cover. I can try to learn some Photoshop, but then that’s less time trying to write too. What do you think, baby?”

You close your eyes, lips twitching in but the slightest of waves as you exhale through them. “I … I don’t think it’s realistic, baby. All of this … what if it doesn’t work out? All those years just … wasted. All for what? A silly dream of ours? It’s one thing to hope for something, but … making it happen? That’s … that’s difficult. That’s scary.”

You remember every single word you said in reply to her all those years ago. And you very much so remember what she said to you in response as well.

“But isn’t that the fun part? Going through it together with you?”

Your eyes dart open when you hear the sound of a car getting dangerously close to your side. When you come to consciousness, your vehicle’s deathly near a black van going the same speed that you are.

The driver rolls down the passenger window and starts screaming obscenities at you. You pay it no mind. Say nothing in complaint. Keep looking straight ahead. You deserve it.

You instead wait for him to speed off before taking another shaky breath. “Fuck.”

You flip open the radio.

The news is nothing but a shot of bullshit through your skull. Something about war. Something about inflation. Something about rising temperatures. You’re already awfully aware about these things. You’d rather not think about them any further. But at this point, anything’s better than the muck that’s pooling in your head.

But you decide to turn the radio off and instead tune into your thoughts once more.

When? When … did things begin to turn out this way?

You could have sworn you were just a high schooler dreaming of a better life, excited to head into university. You had pockets filled with dreams and hope for the future like bags of stardust bursting and spreading wanderlust across the halls of your alma mater. You remember a hint of the distant past in between your bated breaths—of the times when your biggest worries were what game to play or what movie to watch when you got home, when your worst fear was not having someone to take to the prom, when your greatest thrill was being able to chug more than four or five cans of beer in under two minutes at the weekend’s party.

Now?

Now, you can’t figure out for the life of you which concern of yours is more taxing: figuring out where to invest your money for passive gains or whether to continue further into higher education or not. Your worst fear is not having enough time to cycle between your routines—revising your copywriting outputs for the extra money in the mornings, preparing for lectures and departmental meetings in the afternoon, squeezing what little you have left to stay awake for your nightly coffee dates and shopping sprees with Wonyoung in the evening.

You should be happy. At least, you believe you should. You have an undergraduate degree, and you’re finishing up on your masters. You somehow manage to maintain the upkeep for your current apartment. You have a lovely, beautiful, and successful girlfriend. What more could you ask for in this life?

But that’s the thing, isn’t it? That’s the cruel thing about it all.

You aren’t happy.

You aren’t happy at all.

“I kinda like moments like these, you know?”

“What …?”

“Just the little moments I can spend with you,” Gaeul explains as she places a hand on your thigh, and you swear to god you can almost feel it. Her slender fingers caressing just above your skin. The occasional flutter and squeeze of her palm flat against your knee. The warmth of her touch even through the fabric of your jeans. “I know it’s not much, really, but it means a lot more to me than you think, baby.”

“But … but I want more than this. I want to give you more than just this. I-I … I want to be more than this. For you. I-I-I … I promise … I promise I’ll do my best to make you happy.”

She chuckles, and it’s almost like hearing a choir of angels serenading you. “You already do that, silly. You already make me happy. That’s all I need.”

“Just you.”

Before you can choke up on the memory playing out before you, your phone blows up. You fail to notice how many notification pings you’re getting, but when you finally do, you realize who it’s from.

Wonyoung.

You try to silence it with one hand, but it’s hard enough trying to keep your eyes on the road and drive while managing your phone screen off to one side. You have the hairline crack down the corner of your phone to blame for this. Because of it, your fat fingers instead accidentally press on the call that’s ringing, forcing you to be on the receiving end now of her scolding.

“Babe, where the hell are you?” her voice erupts from your busted speakers, grating your ears. “You have a lot of explaining to do. Did you go out with your college friends again?”

“You … you could say that—.”

“Why won’t you just answer me directly?” Wonyoung grunts, and you can sense the utmost distaste and displeasure in her tone. “Our dinner is in about five hours—wait. Wait, where are you? Why are you driving so fast?”

“I … I’m just …”

You can’t tell her. You can’t tell your girlfriend that you’re going eighty down the highway, far away from her, to meet your fucking ex-girlfriend again. 

“Whatever. Just make sure to get back in time. If you aren’t here at least two hours before we have to go, I won’t hesitate to leave you behind.”

Don’t threaten me with a good time, is what you want to say, but you hold your tongue and refrain from blurting out anything you might regret. “Loud and clear. Anything else?”

And of course, Wonyoung takes the invitation and stretches it for a mile.

She’s rambling, ranting, hounding on your sorry ass. She’s jumping from topic to topic. At first, she berates you for your lack of communication, how she feels like she has to tell you what to do every single time, and questions your lack of sincerity in your relationship—in life as well as a whole. Then she’s telling you about last week’s trip to Italy, and how the hotel wasn’t what she expected, and the woe of being served ‘poor quality lobster’. Then she’s telling you about this new sponsor who wants to meet her, and how she might not be able to meet you on your daily dates for a couple of days next week—much to your delight and relief. Then she’s asking you about whether you’re still aiming for a promotion, cleaning up your thesis, or considering moving to a better paying job as a professor at another university. Then she’s hinting at meeting her parents when they come over from Korea during the winter, about the possibility of marriage between you two in the next year or so, and how you might want to find a bigger apartment for the kids.

And it’s so. Fucking. Loud.

You have thought of those things already. But do you have any answers to them?

You love Wonyoung. You really do. Any other man out there would kill to be in your place and to be dating her. But there’s just something that’s painfully and unmistakably absent in your relationship.

Something that’s … missing.

You’d be lying if you said Wonyoung didn’t make you feel so insecure. Even just sitting right across her every night at the dinner table already extols a heavy tax on your psyche. She’s got it all: the looks, the brains, the competence, the affluence, the success. She’s got all that you could ever dream of—all that you could wish for in life.

Worst of all, she’s already got it all figured out.

Who are you to someone like her? You’re not quite sure.

Too old to get into hustle culture and make your first million by a certain age, to be considered a prodigy despite all the effort and sacrifice you had to make to get to where you are, to feel like you’ve still got a lot of years left ahead of you when the deadlines to achieve life milestones come speeding at you faster than you’d like them to, to start over with all the knowledge and mistakes and what-ifs you’ve been carrying around with you, to still ‘take it easy’ and keep telling yourself that ‘life isn’t a race’ when in reality you’re running out of time—you know you already are.

Too young to feel like you really know what you’re doing in your life, to be certain about the trajectory of your career and your future, to be a mentor towards others or even to just give advice to the younger generations, to have a say in anything that the boomers throw at you during parties, get-togethers, and reunions.

You’re neither here nor there. Then again, were you anywhere to begin with?

Where did you want to be at your age? You’re not even sure.

Where do you want to be in ten years? You can’t even begin to think about making it that far.

Where do you want to end up in life? You’d rather not fucking ask. You’d rather not fucking know.

But Wonyoung? She amplifies all these little whispers of uncertainty that linger in the back of your mind and echo them like loudspeakers into the forefronts of your consciousness.

Wonyoung is someone who has all the answers, and she makes you want to come up with answers for yourself.

And there lies the problem. For you have no answers.

Because you don’t want them. 

Not anymore.

“You’re an amazing writer, baby. Are you kidding me? I even love your little drabbles!”

“Stop it, you’re just saying that because … you want me to pay for dinner again tonight.”

“While I do want an extra serving of fries, I really mean it though. Do you not believe me?” Gaeul cooes, giving you the pouty look and the pleading eyes. “You just need more confidence in yourself. Confidence in what you have to say. That they mean something. That they can impact and inspire other people.”

“But I just … I’m just writing out of nowhere. Pulling everything out of my ass. What if … what if that stops working? And besides, you’re my only reader. This is all just a silly bit between us both anyway. It’s not like it’s anything serious.”

“Is that all this will ever be to you?”

“What …?”

“Your writing? Your dream to be a writer one day? A novelist? Our dream to pursue that together—is that all they will ever be to you? Just a joke?”

You can’t respond. Years later, and you still can’t respond.

Can you really call writing a dream? Can you even call writing a passion?

When was the last time you even wrote something?

You glance down at both of your hands, at the blunt tips, at their hardened palms, at the stretch of their pores. These hands of yours have seen much work over the years, but when you try to really think about it, it’s been far longer since you’ve last put them to pen and paper. You tell yourself you’d get back to—get back into writing. One of these days, surely. But then the next day turned into the next week, and the next week turned into the next month, and suddenly your previous certainty for a timeframe of return stretched into ambiguity. ‘Soon’, you claim. But ‘soon’ has already been mourned.

What did you have to show for yourself? Nothing.

What kind of a fucking writer doesn’t even write anything. Not even an idea. Not even a plot beat. Not even an ounce of inspiration milked from the drying smoothened folds of your brain that still attempts to be blessed by a muse.

Can you really claim that writing is a part of you? That you enjoy—or even enjoyed—writing without definitive proof of it?

Can you even call writing yours anymore? Or is its only purpose now to serve as a talking point when meeting new people?

You have no response to that. But maybe your actions have already answered for you.

You never ended up finishing your creative writing degree. You took a departmental exam without Gaeul knowing, and you shifted your course. Shifted your degree. Humanities. Social science. Psychology. You heard the degree isn’t so bad. Has some practicality to it. Isn’t hard science either, and mostly skips any math in the curriculum. You still don’t know what you’re going to do with it, but it’s something that’s easy. Something that can potentially help pay the bills better in the future. Something that can get you somewhere, anywhere, away from here.

But where are you now?

Stuck as an undergraduate lecturer, contracted every semester as needed, fearing for your life when you might, in fact, be no longer needed. You’re not even in a field remotely related to your degree, and you feel the certificate vaporizing on your wall within its displayed casing like a memento of your terrible life decisions. It wasn’t your choice to continue with further education. It was Wonyoung’s suggestion. It was Wonyoung’s demand. It’s expensive. It’s difficult. It’s so fucking tiring. But she said it would pave the way towards a better future for you. Something about more opportunities. Something about climbing more ladders and reaching farther up in the hierarchy.

But god forbid you’re so fucking tired of climbing.

You glance at the rearview mirror again, and you see tears welling up in your eyes. It’s only then that you remember Wonyoung’s still on the phone with you.

“Babe?”

You sniffle, blinking your eyes rapidly to try and dry them off. “Yeah … yeah, still here.”

“Are you talking to someone on the side? You were saying some things while I was speaking. Or were you answering me?”

Out of the corner of your eye, you see an empty and untouched passenger’s seat right next to you. “No one. Nothing … Just probably the wind.”

Just probably the wind.

“Ok then, well. Like I said, I know things are rough for you right now, but this dinner means a lot to me. So if you could please just show up? On time? For me?”

Empty. Her words weigh nothing—mean nothing—to you.

You already know the response to this as well. It slips out from your lips and drags out from your throat before you can even think it. “Yes Wonyoung, I’ll be there. I promise.”

“Thanks babe. You know I love you right?”

Her words slice and sever the arteries and veins from deep within your chest. “I … Me too.”

She says a few final things about the food later tonight, about the ratings of this place she reserved herself, on how much it all costed her. You know it’s part of her usual routine to guilt trip you further, but they all just fly over your head. 

It’s only when she ends the call that you finally get a moment to breathe again. 

You feel your grip on the wheel starting to weaken. You feel the sag in your elbow as it swings and drops closer to your hip. You wish you could stop driving now. It’s about half an hour left until the exit you need to take. You just have to tough it out.

“You’re so cozy.”

You close your eyes. You don’t want to, but you let it happen. You picture your life from not-so-long ago. When things were easier. Things were simpler. When things were quieter. “I could say the same for you. Don’t you get bored of this though? Just … laying here. In your room? Doing nothing?”

“We’re doing something!”

“Doing what exactly?”

“Being together.”

“I like the sound of that.”

“Hey … you’ll … you’ll keep your promise, right? The promise we made?”

There’s a stabbing in your throat now, and it’s difficult to swallow. You feel the same piercing sensation behind your retinas—within your eyeballs. You’re halfway between a cry and just feeling numb.

You miss her. You fucking miss Kim Gaeul.

Wonyoung may have provided you with a house. But Kim Gaeul? She was the one who made you feel like you had a home.

You easily remember the first time she ever invited you into her dingy little place that could barely pass as an apartment. You recall the first things she said to you as she opened the door.

“Ya! Baby, I love you, but please—at least stomp off the dirt at the doormat. I don’t want you ruining my carpets.”

She was awfully obsessed with her expensive carpets. They had this little Chinese design embroidered in patterns across it. It’s very well made, and she loved them dearly. You both enjoyed just laying down on them. They were thick enough to make you feel their presence beneath your back, but they were thin enough to to feel comfortable on. They were gifts from her late grandmother before she passed. She treasures them more than anything else you’ve ever seen.

Kim Gaeul was very much your carpet. You’ve loved her more than anyone else in this lifetime. More than yourself, even. And now that she’s gone … you find yourself returning to her anyway.

How pathetic can you really be?

Forget even discussing the possibility of toxic masculinity in your veins. You are downright hopeless for a human. At your fucking age you still think you can come running back to your ex when you have problems? When you can’t deal with shit by yourself? What kind of person shuts down when they’re overwhelmed? What kind of person runs away from their responsibilities instead of facing them head-on? What kind of man bitches about the inconveniences in his life instead of working out ways to address them?

You. Clearly that’s you. You’re the king of making fucking excuses, and that’s why you haven’t made it anywhere in the world. If you had just listened to the unsolicited words of advice from your uncles and aunts, if you had just listened to the persistent sermons of your advisors and seniors at the university, if only you had listen to every tip and suggestion Wonyoung gave you to help you further yourself in your career, then maybe—just maybe—you wouldn’t be bitching about a subpar life and instead be relishing in a bit more success.

But that’s the thing, right? You didn’t listen. To any of it. You thought you were above it. You thought you were above them. You thought you knew better than all these boomers and adults who have lived on this world longer than you have. You thought you could be different. You thought you could find your own way—your own path—in life with your own hands. Even if it was unconventional. Even if it took time. But where did that get you? You strayed from the fixed and known path, and where did that bring you? Back to routine. Back to being a cog in a machine. Back to mediocrity.

Did you really think that you were any better than the last guy? Did you really think that you were special in this life?

You tried screaming into the void for years, demanding it return your efforts, your attempts to repress it, to reward your mild defiance of the structures of life itself. But did you really expect everything to go your way? What kind of fucking main character ass attitude do you have, idiot? It got really tiring repeatedly doing that too, didn’t it? Serves you right, asshole.

As it turns out, you can be more pathetic apparently, as you nearly ram into the barriers of the highway.

Righting yourself and preventing your left side mirror from being blown off by the barricades that are ready to nick it from your ride, your phone begins to blow up again. The jingle—it’s different. It’s less personal. More professional. Not a check-in. Not a request. But a demand.

It’s from Microsoft Fucking Teams.

Your fingers fly to your phone before you can even curse out loud. But the damn notification for a meeting won’t fucking close. You swear you already told them you couldn’t attend to discuss the event they tried to drag you into. You have … other things to attend to. Better places to be. And for some fuckass reason they still included you in the meeting invite. And now, it’s ringing you up too.

Of course your luck is utter horseshit. Because the tempered glass digging into your phone’s screen made it so you didn’t press cancel. You pressed accept instead once again.

And on video call.

You try to rip your phone out if its stand, but god forbid your mobile data is stronger and faster. Everyone at the meeting wearing button-downs and formal attires in front of edited university-approved backgrounds stared at you quizzically for about a minute as you broadcasted your struggle to terminate the call from your end while in the driver’s seat of your car.

When you finally manage to extricate yourself from that precarious situation, your blood is thick beneath the thin stretch of skin across your face. It was almost as if the heat from the late afternoon all coalesced upon your visage to heat it up to a million degrees.

You grab your phone and with a balled fist, smashed it into the fucking horn.

Once. Twice. Five times. Until your knuckles bruise. Until your phone’s activating different shortcut commands. Until you remember that, once again, you are driving on the highway.

You calm down. For just a moment. You return your phone to the stand and try to focus on the road again.

But you can’t. Everything’s getting so loud again.

You’re going to have to come up with some shitty excuse to the head teacher as to why you were caught seemingly available—and to make matters worse, mid-transit going somewhere else—during the time of your scheduled meeting. On top of that, you’ll have to figure out what sort of load you’re going to have to take up once again to make up for your absence.

The news is going to spread like wildfire, and you just know Wonyoung’s going to find out about it. She hears a lot of things from your peers at the faculty workroom. You’re not sure who exactly she’s friends with there, who she might be close with among the other professors, but you already have this sinking feeling in your gut when you think about the conversation you’re going to have with your girlfriend when you get home.

Speaking of the conversation, you do not even want to think about your girlfriend right now. Why? She’s fucking blowing up your phone again. You just know she already found out. So much for compartmentalizing your life. She’s ringing you. Again and again. And it’s just too fucking much.

The notifications. The alerts. The pop-ups. The alarms. The warnings. The schedules. The deadlines. The issues. The reports. The processes. The cycles. The routines. The bills. The mails. The meetings. The parents. The marriages. The futures.

It’s all too much. It’s all too overwhelming.

It’s all too fucking loud.

You’re not sure. You’re not quite sure. You don’t know what’s worse: a heavy type of dread, or an empty type of sorrow. One weighs down on you as if you were at the bottom of the sea, surrounded on all fronts by nothing but the crushing sensation of trepidation; meanwhile, the other drains you of your essence until you’re nothing but a hollow husk of yourself, simply existing.

Is either any real way to live?

You let go of the wheel.

What if you just …?

You place your hands on your lap and breathe in.

What if it all just …?

You close your eyes, and your right foot presses harder into the gas pedal.

What if you were to just …?

“You’ll keep your promise, right? The promise we made?”

“Gaeul …”

“I need you to make sure you will. For us. For me. So even if I …”

“Gaeul, I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry …”

“Even if I fail, someone can still bear the flame and carry the torch of my dreams. Of our dreams.”

“Gaeul, I’m such a fucking coward. In the end, I … I never even tried …”

“You’ll try, won’t you? Even if it’s hard? Especially when it’s hard?”

“Gaeul I didn’t—.”

“I’ll be rooting for you still. Always. Even into the future.”

“Gaeul, I should have known, should have seen the signs. I-I-I—.”

“Even when I’m gone.”

For a moment, you can almost see it. See her. 

The tilt of her head. The warmth of her smile. The gentleness of her gaze. That expanse of skin by the crook of her neck that you love burying your tired and weary face in. That subtle lift and fall of her shoulder whenever you’re yapping to her about a new crazy idea you have for a novel. The way her hands would come over yours as she pulls you forward and into her, dragging you to different food stalls and bookstores she’s discovered around town. The way her lips would meet yours in all the right places and at all the right times. The way her figure just molded perfectly to create the entirety of her form that’s just her—that’s just Kim Gaeul.

And for a moment, you can almost see it too. The final face she must have made before making the worst decision of her life.

But before your thoughts can spiral downwards any further, her voice in your head pulls you out of your subconscious delusions and rights you in your seat, just before you could miss the exit you’ve been trying to remember to take.

You make a hard right, and suddenly, the whole car is skidding. You hear something snap in front of you. You’re not sure what it is. You don’t know jackshit about cars to know what could have broken—what might have gone wrong.

And you start to get an idea of what it might be when you find yourself unable to break.

The lady at the tollbooth is staring at you with absolute terror in her eyes as you just barely manage to swerve away from crashing into her and instead barrel your way through the pole barrier. Forget paying the fine for hitting it—you fucking smashed right through it, sending it flying, shattering your windshield.

You’re pelted by a hailstorm of shards, but you keep driving. Like a final outburst, like a final fit, like a final bellyache in this godforbiddne rotass fucking word. 

You keep going. You have to. You need to make it.

To her.

Your mind does this hauntingly beautiful thing on its own whenever it already knows the protocol. You take a left from the highway exit, make two rights, speed down a long stretch of road that has you dodging cars like a video game, before you force the whole vehicle to take a final sharp left into her community.

The right side of your Civic bodies the gates and bursts it open, leaving even the guard on duty utterly baffled and speechless upon your arrival.

And you are too.

Because now, the car’s tilting, then leaning, then tumbling, then bouncing, then rolling, then folding. Across the road. Into itself. Far away from you.

Your motionless body is ejected like a ragdoll, leaving you sprawled against the sidewalk—the curb sinking deep into your neck, your joints bruised and swelling in all the most painful of places, tendons and ligaments fighting for survival as they try their very best to continue attaching themselves to your muscles and bones—to try and hold up the very physical essence of you together.

But you push up. Into a sit. Then a kneel. And then a stand.

You see your phone blinking different shades of colors, the hairline crack now turning into a web that shatters further into the glass. It’s safe to say that it’s beyond salvaging at this point. It’s safe to say that it can no longer bug you out with reminders or notifications anymore.

You press a hand to your stomach. Against your palm, you watch as an adult spider lily blossoms across it. Damp. Thick. Flowing.

“Fuck …” is all you get out. But you keep moving.

You’re a zombie. Groaning. Chortling. Dragging your carcass across the the sidewalk and into the street where she lives.

And if it weren’t for the viscosity in your throat and lungs, you would have mustered a smile.

It’s beautiful. Oh so beautiful.

You remember visiting her home like this every month for a few years after you had broken up. How you would bring her something to eat while you told her about your days in your new course, or at your new job, and occasionally, about your new girlfriend. She didn’t mind. Gaeul didn’t mind at all. She knew it was about you, and just like she’s always been, she was very receptive towards it.

You know it’s because she just wanted to be with you again—in any way, shape, or form.

And when you see it, when you finally see it once again, you take it all in stride.

The familiar glint of her home built on granite, bronze, and marble. The birds resting atop her roof as they find a moment of solace after their long flights. The smooth and soft green grass that’s littered across her lawn. Her name etched across her front door as if to undeniably claim that this was, in fact, hers.

You stop just outside her property. The boundaries are drawn awfully close to her neighbors’, so you don’t get much wiggle room. But then again, neither does she. You take one step forward, and then another, until you find yourself just a few paces away from her front door.

Then you fall to your knees, hold up a bloody hand towards the surface of the marble, and caress it. You let your fingers trace the way her name is engraved on her door, and you allow them to likewise caress the numbers imprinted just beneath it.

2002. 2023.

You allow yourself to let it go now. You allow yourself to be choked up by the fluids pooling inside you. Whether that’s sweat, blood, or tears, they all come flowing out now. Your feel a pain in your innards with each wince and whimper, and you gather those are from the glass shards that have cut too deeply into your flesh. But you pay it no mind.

“Gaeul ah … I’m so sorry …” you whisper as you caress her face, leaving a bloody handprint against the polished stone. “I thought I … knew what I wanted in this lifetime … but I didn’t … I don’t know …. I don’t fucking know … and after all of that … even after all of that … It’s you. It’s just you. I’m so … so sorry … I failed you. I failed us. A-And I just … I just …”

You can’t even find it in you to confess it to her. You don’t dare do so.

How do you tell your ex-girlfriend, the love of your life whom you lost because of your inability to determine what was going on inside of her head, that you are done? That you are through? You aren’t just adding insult to injury at this point. You’re very much spitting directly into her face and asking her to still smile for you.

Instead, you glance down at your palpitating body, at the blood that’s pouring out of you and soaking the grass beneath your knees in pools of dark crimson, at the bruises across your body that you are certain will no longer heal, and manage a faint smile.

“Ha … haha … I guess I … ruined your carpet, didn’t I …?”

You take a deep breath, lift your chin up, and soak in the warmth of the last few rays of sunshine all around you. 

You stare at her tombstone. You stare at the plans and greenery surrounding it.

Such a pretty house. Such a pretty garden.

Here, there are no hopes, there are no dreams, there is no dread, no more expectation, no micromanaging boss, no manipulative girlfriend, no self-persecution or self-deprecation.

Here, there are no alarms, and no more surprises.

Just the calm and simple life that you and Gaeul have dreamed of. Even if it lasts for only a second, even if you can only cherish it for a few more moments, up until your eyes start to flutter and your consciousness fades to black, you finally, for the first time in decades, feel it.

You feel happy. You feel oh so fucking happy. With her.

And as your skull cracks against her tombstone, your last thought is a clear one.

It’s so silent here, Gaeul. I understand you now.

It’s so fucking silent.