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“Tell me how it feels,” Chaewon whispers as her hands are roaming through Hyejoo’s soft dark hair. “One more time.” Hyejoo twists to meet the eyes that never fail to burn right through her. “Tell me how it feels to love me.”
She is six and her mother is pushing her down on her knees. The cross burns a shadow across her face as she kneels and repeats after her.
“
God, my Father,
may I love You in all things and above all things.
May I reach the joy which You have prepared for me in Heaven.
Nothing is good that is against Your Will,
and all that is good comes from Your Hand.
Place in my heart a desire to please You
and fill my mind with thoughts of Your Love,
so that I may grow in Your Wisdom and enjoy Your Peace
.
”
Her tongue wraps around the words easily, but her mind, not as much. As she lets autopilot command her speech, her eyes begin to wander around the room, across the mantle where the wooden cross is hung precariously over the fire that is now sputtering out. The carpet beneath her knees is beginning to scratch at her skin, so she adjusts her position, earning a swift but soft smack on the back of her head from her mom.
“Hyejoo,” she murmurs softly. “Focus.”
She mutters a quick apology and clasps her hands tighter. Her mother is whispering something under her breath. Hyejoo once asked what she was saying, when she had been smaller.
“I’m thanking God,” she replied.
“Why?”
“Because He is the reason for our existence. He is the reason we wake up in the morning. He gives us everything we have and more and He gives us innumerable blessings. One day you will be able to see that.”
Hyejoo had nodded uncertainly. She wanted to feel that —still she wants it. She wants to feel in her bones whatever her mother does as she squeezes her eyes shut and bares her soul to something she cannot even see but has devoted her soul to. Even as small and stupid as she is at six years old, she wishes with an ache she could love something like that.
She is eleven years old, and she stares just a little too long at the TV screen as Carol walks down the aisle towards Susan. Her parents are on either side of her, watching in barely veiled disgust, so Hyejoo looks down at her lap and stays quiet.
Later that night, she is awake in her bed, so she thinks about her own wedding. To a rich, handsome guy, of course. He would be smart and kind and he would love God as much as her mother said he should. He would love God as much as she was supposed to.
She closes her eyes and tries to imagine it, standing across the altar from a man. He takes her hands in his. She tries to conjure up the feeling of his palms against hers.
No matter how hard she tries, she can’t see his face.
She is thirteen years old and her Sunday dress is noisy beneath her as she tries to get comfortable on the hard wooden pews. Her mother stares at her disapprovingly until she stops shifting, then gestures for her to pay attention to the sermon.
“As some of you all know,” he is saying, “Two weeks ago homosexual marriage was legalized on a federal level. This is yet another example of how perverted and corrupt values are being normalized in this Godless society! This breakdown of Godly marriage will be the…”
Hyejoo sort of tunes him out for the rest of the hour. She tries not to think about that pretty girl in her class, or about the small, hot stone of guilt lodged in her ribs.
She is fourteen years old and there is a girl with a face made of sunlight standing in front of her desk. Her long dark hair tumbles over her shoulders, and she speaks with a voice like songs whispered on an evening breeze.
“I’m Chaewon,” she says, “what’s your name?”
The words nearly lodge in her throat as she replies, “I’m Hyejoo.”
“Hyejoo,” Chaewon repeats, and Hyejoo would give anything to take that sentence and wrap it around her like a blanket, to forever live hearing the way her name forms in Chaewon’s mouth. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Chaewon used to be homeschooled, and she sticks to Hyejoo like a life raft on the ocean of high school. Chaewon tells her everything, about her home life (her parents aren’t really getting along anymore and she’s kind of scared) and her interests (she loves photography and knitting, which she knows is old fashioned but it’s so fun) and everything in between.
“You’re such a great listener!” she tells Hyejoo one day after a particularly long rant.
She is not a good listener. Every day as Chaewon walks towards her in the hallways Hyejoo is so overcome by her presence words refuse to appear. She can barely pay attention to what she says most of the time, and she tells her this.
Chaewon laughs lightly. She thinks she’s teasing. “Then how come you remember everything I tell you, hmm? How do you know me so well?”
That’s easy, Hyejoo thinks. Knowing her is easy; recognizing her soft, overwhelming presence is like recognizing the sun’s light as it dances through the stained glass windows in church across her eyes.
“I have known you from the moment I met you,” she ends up saying.
I know you, she says.
Hyejoo is fourteen. She is sitting on the stone steps in front of the frozen yogurt shop just past her school. She doesn’t know it yet, but she is so, so in love with her best friend.
She is fifteen years old and sitting across from Chaewon. She’s complaining about the splotches of acne that sprawl her adolescent face.
Hyejoo doesn’t understand. She is pretty, and she tries telling Chaewon this, but she just waves her away with a sigh. “My stupid pimples don’t make me look good, don’t you get it?”
She doesn’t. Hyejoo doesn’t see the point of debating whether Chaewon looks good or not. As far as she’s concerned, it doesn’t matter. She is beautiful, so by extension so is her acne.
Hyejoo wants to kiss the frown off Chaewon’s mouth.
There’s a sharp intake of breath. Chaewon looks at her funny, then continues chattering away.
Without realizing it, she has fallen.
She is still fifteen, and she is kneeling at the foot of her bed trying not to think of Chaewon. She is trying to think of God, and why she loves God, and why she loves God more than Chaewon, and why she loves God enough to not love Chaewon.
She can’t think of many reasons. But she knows, she knows she doesn’t love Chaewon. She cannot love Chaewon, because then God would hate her, and then her mom would hate her, and her dad would hate her, and Chaewon would hate hers, but mostly Hyejoo would hate herself. If she did actually love Chaewon. If the fluttering feeling in her chest actually meant something. Which it doesn’t. If it did, that would mean she’s a bad Christian. And being a bad Christian means going to hell. And she really, really doesn’t want to go to hell.
Which is why she doesn’t. Love her, that is.
I choose the love of God, she thinks. She thinks it over and over again. I choose the love of God. I choose the love of God.
She goes to sleep still in love with Chaewon and still hating herself.
She is sixteen years old and Chaewon is drunk. Like, piss drunk. Like, absolutely wasted on her porch steps at ten o’clock at night.
“What are you doing?” she hisses, and drags her inside of her house.
“Hyejoo?” her mom calls. “Who is that?”
“It’s Chaewon, mom! We’re, uh, doing our chemistry project together!”
“I don’t remember you telling me about this.”
“Really? I must have forgot, sorry. Anyways we’ll be in my room, bye!”
She pulls Chaewon up the stairs and pushes her on her bed. “Chae, what are you doing?” she asks again.
A light, bubbly laugh rises out of her throat. “Hyeeeeeeejoooooooo,” she slurs. “Hyeeejoooo, I’m sad.”
“Why are you sad?” she asks softly.
She makes a noise, something like a laugh or a sob. “Hyejoo,” she says. Her voice is like sunlight reflected on freshly fallen snow. “Hyejoo, I love you.” She sobs again, in earnest this time, and she doesn’t stop.
The next morning when she wakes up, Chaewon apologizes to her for hours.
“I didn’t say anything embarrassing, did I?”
Hyejoo pauses. “No,” she says.
Chaewon grins sheepishly. “Right. You must have questions, though, right?”
Did you mean it? she thinks.
“Why were you drunk?” she asks.
Chaewon’s smile falters. “I was just...sad. A little. It’s fine.”
“What’s wrong?” Hyejoo asks.
“I...have you ever been in love with someone you know you shouldn’t?”
Hyejoo is silent, because if she speaks she will break. If she answers, she will most definitely tell Chaewon she is in love with her.
Because she is in love with her, she is silent, and in the silence she can hear her heart breaking.
She is seventeen and Chaewon is kissing her.
She is seventeen years old. She is standing in the forest that borders the carnival she was at not ten minutes ago. There is a bird chirping in the tree above her. Chaewon is kissing her.
She doesn’t remember how it happened. She remembers her lips are soft. She remembers her heart is racing. Mostly, she remembers how everything is now clear. She doesn’t have to choose between the love of God and the love of Chaewon; not when She is standing in front of her. With Chaewon’s touch she is born anew at the feet of a new and ancient god. Is this how it feels to be baptized?
“I’m sorry,” Chaewon murmurs as she pulls away. “I know you—I’m sorry. I don’t know why I—”
“I love you too.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t say it back then. Last year. I’m sorry I was too scared. But I love you.”
Chaewon’s tears burn her. She’s saying something, stumbling over her words, and Hyejoo feels bad, but she can’t hear her over the roar of her long repressed emotions coming to life. So she doesn’t listen; instead she presses her lips against Chaewon’s again, over and over until there is no oxygen in either of their lungs.
No, she is not a good listener. But perhaps she will be a better lover.
She is seventeen still, and her mother is screaming at her to get the hell out of her house. Her skin still stings, remembering the feeling of a hand against her cheek, and the messages she stupidly didn’t delete are blinking up at her from her phone screen.
“Didn’t you hear me?” her mother shrieks. “If you don’t want to follow the rules of this house and not live in sin, then you need to get out! Get out!”
She collapses on the couch and begins crying. Somehow it hurts more than the slap.
Hyejoo blinks back her tears, quietly gathers her things and leaves. It’s not until she reaches Chaewon’s house she breaks.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbles, over and over.
“Hyejoo,” Chaewon whispers after a while, after the tears have finally abated, “Hyejoo, I can just say it was a misunderstanding. You could go back, if you want. I’ll help.”
Hyejoo shakes her head vehemently, gulping down the last of her bitter tears. “No.”
A look of pain flashes across her face. “Hyejoo. I know how much your mom means to you. How much...how much your religion means to you. I don’t want you to sacrifice any of that for me.”
Hyejoo pauses for a second. She isn’t sure how to express how deep her emotions run. Saying she loves her isn’t quite enough. It is something deeper than love, older than affection. It is veneration, it is exaltation, it is the feeling her mother felt every night as she kneeled at the foot of her god. She had never understood worship until she felt her body beneath hers.
But she cannot say all of that, because she is not Chaewon, to whom words flow like silk and a laugh is always light on her tongue. She is not good with words. Instead, she lifts her fingers to her lips and hopes she feels the reverence she pours into each kiss against her knuckles.
It seems she does, because after a couple seconds she says, “You’re okay with this? You’d give it all up just like that? I mean—you’d give up paradise?”
“What are you talking about?” Hyejoo looks into those eyes, those eyes that haunt her when she closes hers. Her relationship with her mother, with God—they’re probably splintered by now. Broken beyond repair, but Hyejoo can’t find it in herself to care about anything other than the tears filling her soft brown eyes.
“You’re right here.”
Hyejoo is an adult now, and she is trying to find an answer to Chaewon’s question. She has told her before, waxed poetics about her for hours on end, but words seem to fail her this time around.
In the end, she turns to what she knows.
“May I love You in all things and above all things.” She placed a kiss on Chaewon’s cheek. “All that is good comes from Your hand,” another just above her eyelid, “Place in my heart a desire to please You,” near the corner of her mouth, “and fill my mind with thoughts of Your love, so that I may grow in Your wisdom and enjoy Your peace .” One on her forehead. “May I never falter in my worship of You.” A final one, ultimately, on her smiling lips.
“You poet, Hyejoo,” Chaewon giggles.
Hyejoo disagrees. She is not a poet. She is just a believer. And when Chaewon tells her, “Kiss me again,” she has no choice but to pray with every glittering kiss she presses onto her skin.