Something in Return

The boat ride back was quieter than the one going.

Not silent. Haziq had the motor running, the forest alive in the background. But the kind of quiet between you and Ryujin was different from the journey upriver. You'd gone toward the village carrying questions. You were coming back carrying answers, which was its own kind of weight.

You sat on opposite sides of the boat. The forest moved past in the other direction. Neither of you said much. Some things needed the silence to settle before they could be handled.

Haziq drove you to Kuching without questions. The forest thinned. The road improved. The charter flight back to KL was forty minutes of neither of you sleeping.

The Bangsar apartment received you the same way it had three days ago. Same smell. Same desk. Same street outside. Different people in it than the ones that had left.

You ordered food. Ryujin sat at the desk with the artifact and the notebook. She didn't write anything. You ate in the kind of silence that wasn't empty. The way two people with too much to say let it settle first.

Eventually she looked up.

"I keep thinking about what she said," Ryujin said. "The thing that makes you most yourself."

"I know."

"I landed on two things," she said.

You looked at her.

"My voice," she said. "And my dancing." A pause. "I think it wants both."

"How long have you known?"

"Since she said it." She looked at the desk.
"I thought for a moment it would just be the voice. That's the obvious thing. A singer, a vocal incident." A pause. "But that's not it."

She was quiet for a moment.

"The voice is part of it. But the dancing is what I am. Before I could sing the way I sing now, I could already move the way I move." Another pause. "It's older. It's more essential."

"That's all I've thought about.” She looked at you. “Since the village."

"Why didn't you say something?"

"Because I needed to know I was still willing before I said it out loud," she said. "Saying it out loud makes it real."

"Are you?" you asked. "Still willing?"

She looked at you steadily. "Yes. I'm scared. And yes."

You didn't say anything. There wasn't anything to say that would have been sufficient. So you sat with it instead. The way you'd learned to sit with things too large for language.

"What about you? What did you land on?"

You looked at the notebook on the desk. Then at her.
"I haven't decided yet," you said.

It wasn't entirely true. But it was true enough that you could say it without it being a lie. You had your suspicions. You weren't ready to make them real by saying them out loud.

She looked at you for a moment. The expression she used when she was deciding whether to push.

She didn't push.

"Ryujin," you said.

"I know," she said. Before you could say whatever you were about to say. "I know."

After a while she closed the notebook.

“Tomorrow,” she said.

“Tomorrow,” you said.

In the morning you were up before her.

You made coffee. The good kind, from a place two streets over that you'd found on your way back from the airport. You also made eggs and toast from a corner shop you’d passed by the night before.

You had it all ready when she came out of the bedroom with her hair still undone. Still half asleep.

She looked at the table. Then at you.
"You made breakfast."

"You made tea every morning in Seoul. It seemed fair."

She sat down. Took the coffee. Looked at the eggs.

"I could get used to this," she said. The way you said things that were true and slightly larger than the moment.

Neither of you addressed it directly.

You sat across from her and had breakfast. You talked about things that weren't the attempt. She asked about Jamie. What she was like, how long you'd worked together.

You told her. The rice cooker piece in Busan. The folder dropped on your desk on a Tuesday that started all of this. Jamie's particular talent for making things sound like casual requests when they were actually assignments she'd already decided you were taking.

Ryujin almost smiled. "She sounds like someone who got into journalism because she actually cares about things."

"She does," you said. "She's been fielding friendly calls from agency PR for months without giving them anything. She's earned her name on the piece."

"She doesn't know what's in the document?"

"Not yet. But she will. I'm sending it today."

Ryujin looked at her coffee. "When you send it—"

"I'll send it before the attempt," you said. "Just in case."

She nodded. The nod of someone confirming a decision rather than approving one.

Her flight was at eleven. She packed efficiently. No wasted movement.