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The sound of the front door shutting forces your body to immediately react and bury yourself deeper in the grave of blankets and pillows you’ve rested yourself in. Your eyes shut even tighter and you hold your breath, thinking that maybe you could make yourself invisible to the world, to everyone, even Joohyun.
She calls your name on a clear pitch with a bright tone. The lilt at the end tells you that she is looking for you. Swear words stitch themselves across your webbed mind and you are now completely submerged in the thick fabric.
Joohyun opens the bedroom door and stands in the doorway, letting the yellow flourescent light of the hallway fill your dark room. You can’t see her, but she has a grim frown on her face. Softly, she sets her bags down and gracefully makes her way over to your nest. Her footsteps are not audible. She sits on the edge of your bed and you feel her hand resting on your waist through the blankets. Again, she calls your name.
“Honey,” she says. Her voice is sorrowful. You stay quiet and so does she. She waits a moment before beginning to peel back the prison of fabrics burdening you. You don’t move a muscle - you don’t even have the energy to open your eyes. Your lungs fill and depress and your heart beats on a steady rhythm, but the weight of this life was keeping you bound to your bed. It was yet another day where night had leaked into the sunlight and your spirits were low enough to leave your body forever. Your cheeks were stained with dried tears and you had been in bed for hours upon hours now. Again, you had found yourself closer to death than life. Joohyun maintained somewhat of a concerned pokerface, failing to mask her grief, but managing to hide the panic and dismay she felt when she came home to find you, yet again, on the brink of this world.
She pulls back the last blanket and you muster the energy open your eyes. Ahead of you is the window showing the Seoul skyline and you force yourself to breathe. Joohyun runs a small hand over your hair and you don’t dare look up at her. Joohyun, the radiant, divine Joohyun, was too magnificent for this world. She was far too amazing for you, yet she came home to you every night and told you that she loved nothing more than you. You, an empty vessel, a fool that couldn’t complete the most simple of tasks, the undeserving less-than-human being that was you, was what Joohyun loved most in the world. The thought brought tears to your eyes which were now squeezed shut. She leaned over you and wiped your tears, whispering soft words to you as your sobs broke through.
Through your crying, all you could manage to choke out were vague apologies. Joohyun hushed you and sat you up. She sat you in her lap and rubbed your back. Her affections managed to both bring solace to your raging mind and make your cries come more rapidly.
“Shh. It’s okay. It’s okay. You’re fine, I’m here.” Again, you couldn’t see her face but you knew that she bore a pain-filled mug. You continued to wail as she frantically tried to comfort you, just as she always did.
Nowadays, it was more often than not that you found yourself walking as a corpse, a slave to the universe. The world you saw was not the same as before, the music you heard did not sound as it once did. But again, time after time, Joohyun had found herself offering her hand and picking you up from the depths of human dejection.
And she loved you.
Despite the inconsistencies, the depression, the unwashed dishes and the drawn curtains, she loved you. Joohyun was always, and would always continue to be, the steady, constant factor in your life. Your life that was ever-changing, lived on a day-to-day schedule on the woven threads of a prayer, had one permanence and it was her. When you had met, it was not like this. When you met her, it was as if the sun itself had been sealed to your soul, and she had sealed herself to your heart. Neither of you were sure when things went wrong or when you got lost, but Joohyun knew that it would be her to find you again.
In this moment, she had retrieved the part of you that had wandered off the edge of the stagnant soils of your depression. You had calmed down, and your body now rested, exhausted, in her arms. You listened to the sound of her heart beating.
“Why?” You uttered. In your heart of hearts, the rational and logical side of you could conclude that Joohyun dedicated her time to you because she loved you. She was your girlfriend and she loved you. However, you couldn’t help yourself from wondering why this was so. “Why are you helping me? Why have you stayed?” Your voice came out as a choked whisper and your grip on her unintentionally tightened.
She hummed a low pitch, all-knowing and sad. “I love you. You know this already.” She lifted your head that was resting against her stomach and warmly held your face. She said your name and you lifted your tired eyes to meet hers. “You are my best friend.” Your heart cracked a little at this and tears began to stream down your face again. “You’re my best friend and I love you. We’re gonna get married some day. This is no obligation to me. I want you to get better because I love you.” She smiled warmly and you felt the literal, actual heat radiate from her body. She sighed and again, ran her hand over the crown of your head. “Yeah. I love you.”
You stared at her, this girl. Joohyun, the girl that loved you more than anything, the girl who you swore was a queen in her past life, the girl that had stardust sifted over her soul. She was only a girl, but to you, she was so much more. If there was one thing left in the world that you cared for, it was Joohyun. When this universe had left you behind, she ran back to come and get you. And you, the shell, the vessel, stared back at her and watched as she grabbed your hand and told you that she would fix it all, take you somewhere, elsewhere, and she would fill the cracks in your soul with love.
She leaned in and kissed you. It was simple. You kept your eyes open. She continued to run her fingers through your hair. “Can you eat?” You stared at her, her question taking a moment to reach the clouds of despondence.
“Okay.”
You sat waiting at your dinner table, clad in pajamas and smudged makeup. You watched her flutter around the kitchen as she stirred a large pot of soup for the two of you. Recently, you discovered that you found comfort in cleaning the apartment. Joohyun had taken up your past chore of grocery shopping in exchange for her chore of tidying the living room. Your hazy mind reflected on this as she continued to add ingredients to the pot. She turned around suddenly, a small smile adorning her face. She caught you staring and you only had to slightly force a smile back to her. This was a vast improvement from the beginning of the day when you were convinced that smiling no longer existed.
It was incredible how quickly and easily Joohyun could improve your mood even despite the imbalance and disorder in your brain. As wonderful as she was, you knew deep down that she could not solve all of these new tendencies and thought processes that reared their way into your life. Your love for her and her love for you could only go so far. You both knew that your recovery required strength from yourself as well.
She set down a bowl of food in front of you and rested herself in the seat across from you. You both began to eat wordlessly and you realized how hungry you were. You had been resting in bed for hours and the thought of eating didn’t even remotely cross your mind.
In a burst of confidence, you vocalized this to your girlfriend and she gazed at you with thoughtful eyes. She reached across the table and held your hand before continuing to eat.
“I know. I’m sorry. Eat up, please.” She looked up at you with a sad smile and she ran her thumb over your hand. “This was your favorite when we were in school.”
You smiled at each other and you let yourself get lost in your mundane conversation about soup. The topic of your more youthful days successfully provided itself as a temporary distraction from the current situation. Before you had known it, you had finished all of your food and Joohyun was hovering over you, asking if you wanted more. You looked up at her and the rational part of you nodded. Again, she kissed you sweetly and walked off to refill your bowl. As you watched her in the kitchen, that dreadful feeling planted itself back into your body. Though you loved her, you felt at times that your indifferences with life hindered this. To put it simply, you were a depressed soul that was trying their best to hold love in the dark. You looked down at your lap.
Joohyun returning and placing another bowl before you snapped you out of yet another daze. Then, she kneeled down before you in your chair and kissed you again. And again. And again.
There were feelings in your heart, but you did not cry. She rested her forehead against yours before returning to her side of the table and once again grabbing your hand.
You eat in silence this time. It engulfs the apartment and laces itself into your hair. You stop eating.
“Let’s go take a bath.”
Leading you by the hand, Joohyun takes you to the bathroom and strips herself of her clothes. Sluggishly, you strip as well. As quickly as your spirits could raise when Joohyun made herself present, they could also fall spontaneously without warning.
Standing across from each other atop the cold tiles, she grabbed your naked shoulders and ran her warm hands over your arms. You looked at her and she stared at your collarbones with a content look on her face. “Come on.” Her voice echoed in the tiled room.
Together, you entered the tub filled with warm water and you wondered how long you spaced out for her to both rid herself of all of her clothing and fill the tub. You found yourself sitting between her legs and a sigh escaped the both of you. Joohyun grabbed your loofah and began to run it gently across your body. Bringing your eyes up, they were met with hers and her dilated pupils. This time, you went in to kiss her. She quickly returned the kiss and you began to deepen it. You, desperate to feel something, then broke the kiss and reattached your lips to her neck, kissing up and down and leaving marks behind. Her breathing became shallow, and abruptly, she pulled you away.
Your eyes dropped again to the bathwater and you closed them in embarrassment. “Sorry.” You muttered. She grabbed both sides of your face.
“It’s okay, don’t worry.” She ran her thumbs under your eyes. “I don’t want you to…find comfort like that. It’s not good for us. We can do that any other time.” You opened your eyes, expecting to meet pity in hers, but you were surprised to see that they were filled with compassion and understanding.
A guilty thought popped into your head.
Why would you ever doubt Joohyun? You knew that she loved you. She told you so many times before that she would never look down at you.
So why didn’t it feel that way?
In this moment in the tub with your girlfriend, it had hit you after all this time that there was something bigger about your disposition. These feelings were not just you being a child, nor being irrational. Your feelings were valid, and there was something irregular going on in your head that was beyond your control.
The world wasn’t supposed to look like this. Music was not supposed to sound like this.
You were not, ever, supposed to stop believing in Joohyun.
A spark of emotion, something unfathomable like pain or love, pricked your chest.
“Joohyun. I love you. I’m sorry, I…I need to get better. There’s something…wrong with me or something…” You fumbled over your words and she inched closer to you. She called your name. There was no lilt at the end - she was not asking anything of you. She wanted you to know something. Her straight brows showed her seriousness and your heart, always belonging to her, skipped a beat.
“There’s nothing wrong with you. There never has been. You did nothing wrong at all. There’s just…something happening to you.” She kissed you. “I’m gonna help you just like I always have.” Another kiss. “I’m gonna help you fix yourself.”
Your heart sped up a bit. “You think I can?” A large part of you was genuinely surprised that anyone, let alone your girlfriend that you believed was far too good for this world, believed in you. She continued to kiss you innocently and you returned each one.
“Of course. I love you.” Warm tears trickled down both of your faces, but you were sure that you were not crying anymore. These tears belonged to Joohyun as she cried for you. You carefully wiped her face and kissed her back.
“I love you too.”
In the morning when you awoke, Joohyun remained asleep. She had fallen asleep after you had crashed in your shared bed after your bath. You walked into the untidied living room and sat down on the couch. Joohyun’s journals and laptop were sprawled across the coffee table, open almost as if she wanted you to see them.
There, in her neat handwriting, showed her diligent, thorough research she had conducted while you slept. Joohyun had spent her time searching the internet, writing down phone numbers and reading until it hurt to be awake. Through the night, she had wrote down a profusion of information on mental illness and local psychologists. The header at the top of all of the pages showed an illustration of your name, embellished with small flowers. As you studied her writing, an unexpected teardrop hit the page and spread the ink of her handwriting. You snapped up, wiping your face and sniffling.
Multiple sparks of emotion lit up inside your chest. The emotions you were feeling were clear this time. You loved her. You loved her, you loved her, you loved her. A small sob left your lips and you covered your mouth with your hand.
Joohyun, the beautiful one, the one that was chased after by everyone, your own Bae Joohyun, had recently displayed so much affection for you that it had finally hit you like a tidal wave. She cared for you so much, and you knew it. The thought had always been with you in the back of your mind. Having this epiphany wasn’t something that was unexpected, but foreign in these dark days when you had been struggling to even get out of bed. You had known all this time that she loved you, but you hadn’t felt it in far too long.
“Honey?” There was a lilt at the end of her voice. Standing up and turning around, you were faced with Joohyun, barefaced and in one of your shirts. “Oh, you found that! Honey, let me show you some stuff that I found last night,” she made her way over to you, light footsteps making a soft padding sound against the floor. “I thought some stuff from this one website I found was really important. It’s stuff about the chemicals in your brain and whatever, the website could explain much better than I could. Oh! And I found a list of all these doctors in practically walking distance from our apartment, and I have a list of -”
She went quiet when you wrapped your arms around her waist and buried your head into her chest. She laughed and embraced you back. Rapidly, you muttered “Thank you,” over and over again, still crying a bit.
“It must be a better day, right? You’re so much more…” She trailed off, not knowing what exactly to say.
“Alive?” You sat up and looked at her. She was glowing, beaming, even though she had just woken up.
She hummed. “I don’t know if alive is a good word to use. You were never dead!” Just as she had always done, she cupped your face in her hands. The look in her eyes had dulled from her initial excitement into something of a casual seriousness.
You grabbed her hands and lowered them from your face. You hummed back at her in the same pitch. Your voice just above a whisper, you said to her, “Yeah. You’re right.”