Messy breakup of you and your girlfriend Liz (now your ex) led to attempts to figure out why this seemingly perfect relationship vanishes into nothing.
“I… I don’t know if I can handle this anymore… (sob) It… It’ll be better if we both just… move on!” Dead silence afterwards, followed by the ruthless beeping sound from your phone.
That’s the last sentence you heard before your girlfriend Kim Jiwon hung up the call. To be more exact, she is your ex-girlfriend right now. You let your phone slide down on the mattress in awe, by the moment you realize to call her back, her number is already in voice mail mode. Within expectation, Message is sent and left on read. A few days later, your number was added to her Blocked list, no more “Can I talk to you?” or “Liz, please let me explain!” ever got through.
---
Her cracked and sad murmuring lingered in your head like a curse over the past week. Why? You swear everything in your relationship was going so smoothly. Hell, it was better than the few romances you had before you met Liz.
The first anniversary was just last week. You took a huge chunk of your PhD stipend to book a fancy restaurant that serves little food on very big plates and surprised Liz with a bouquet full of pink roses. You hid the bouquet behind you as you walked towards her. She’s wearing a brown tank top beneath a black cardigan. Her hair dyed brown, her plump lips are glassy under the orange late-afternoon sun. “She’s literally an angel.” You thought.
“Jiwon, I made a guess that you’ll probably like this.” You hand her the bouquet, trying to act calm despite your face is just as pink as the flowers.
“Aw~ they’re so lovely! How do you know I like pink roses?” Liz is blushed as well; your gaze meets each other’s. Her endearing dimple makes you fall deeper each time you look at her.
“I thought gorgeous and elegant girls all like roses. Like yourself.” You squeeze a faint smile, pulling her close on your side while she holds the bouquet with both hands, eyes flickered full of joy from your compliment.
“You’re trying to make me blush again, stop~” Liz hides her face into your neck, her warm breath brushing your skin. That fresh vanilla scent of her shampoo makes you smile.
You hug her closer to you and she hums softly, your palm never leaving her waist.
The rest of the date was phenomenal, you thought.
The way how she couldn’t hide her smile when you held her hand into the restaurant and told her to order whatever she wanted to eat.
The way her cheeks turned so pink after the second glass of wine was down to her stomach.
The way she covers her face shyly while mumbling something like, “Babe… I love you so much. Hehehe…”
The way how she eagerly kissed you when you shut her apartment door and she pinched you to the wall.
The way how she let out soft moans like melodies from heaven when you really felt her with your body.
The way your bodies and the sheets tangling together the morning after, her room filled with nothing but love.
---
“I loved you too, Liz. I still fucking love you right now. I still do…” Maybe it was the sixth can of beer tonight? Maybe seventh. You lost track.
---
But that was all in past tense. It wouldn’t change the fact that you’re now single again for reasons that are still unknown to you. You wish you have something to do, just to distract your attention somewhere else. But unfortunately, this year is the time you took to fully prepare the upcoming GRE exam so your life is nothing but doing practice exams and studying.
How the fuck you’re supposed to study when your girlfriend just cut you off after your first anniversary? You stare at the window with a pair of eyes that are red from too much crying. Even the weather is not on your side right now, 5 days of consecutive raining already. There is no sunlight, just non-stopping tears dropping down from heaven.
You rub your eyes with the back of your bandaged palm: injured from slamming the table while you re-watched every video clip you filmed from the past dates. Blossom bite marks turned into purple bruise still clearly visible as you bit your forearm as a desperate measure to stop your never-ending grief. You caress your neck, where Liz left you a hickey at that night – the final proof of her existence on your body.
For maybe the tenth time today, you persuade yourself to pick yourself up. You throw your phone onto your bed without mercy; it bounces a few times before it lands on the pillow. The lockscreen is still the first picture you ever took with Liz. In that amusement park. She forced you to wear cat ears like she did and it had been your wallpaper ever since. You have yet to replace it.
You stare into the empty practice exam booklet, each problem is easier to solve than to figure out why she left you like this, broken and messy. The knots in topology are like how your heart is tangling and twitching. Those non-converging sequences in those metric spaces are cruel reminders of how the distance between you and Liz is approaching infinitely, no matter how you define it.
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