Work Text:
Do you see a long lost father?
Does he hold you with the hands you remember as a child?
—Me and Magdalena, Ben Gibbard for the Monkees
In This Light She’s Under
FULL FIC HERE
Prologue: Joohyun
The year is 2027. The place is a dark airplane cabin on Singapore, which was chosen because I despise the middle console between business class seats in both Korean and Asiana. A blinking panel watch that does not look like a panel watch lets me know that it is 09:23. In less than two hours the plane will land in Toronto. Seungwan, whom I love, is thirty-three years old, soon to be thirty-four. I am a minor character in Seungwan’s story, which I love.
I stretch my neck and feel the cricks that start creeping to my shoulders. My blanket slips to my elbow. I lift the window shade beside me with a finger, and immediately a blinding ray of sunlight filters in. Part of it falls on Seungwan’s eyelids, and she grunts in her sleep and scrunches her nose. Adorably, if I may add. I pull the shade back down for her.
Seungwan is curled into me, head lolled to my sternum. My hand has long nestled underneath her sweater, grazing the underside of her bra, ever in search of her warmth. Or just of her, plain and simple. Half of her face is covered by hair. Seungwan first appeared sporting that shoulder-length haircut only a few days ago. Pretty, I had thought at that time. Really exquisite. Divine. But my uncouth mouth and compromised brain at that time could only manage to make me say, “Hot.” Seungwan merely raised her eyebrows at my comment, but that’s enough. That was more than enough. We made love until she was too sore to go to her morning pilates session the next day. Or any pilate sessions for the whole day, that is. Seungwan did not blame me. “What can I say. I’m weak against Bae Joohyun,” she had reasoned.
See that, the strongest person in my universe is weak against me. Now that’s what I call a great confidence booster.
A flight attendant stops by our seats to ask if I need anything. Seungwan stirs only to pull her blanket higher, only her forehead visible now. I pull her closer, hold her a tad tighter, smile a little softer. You’ve made an honest woman out of me, love of mine. “No,” I tell the flight attendant. “Everything’s perfect.”
Epilogue: Joohyun
This is a week later. This is the flight back to Seoul. She’s asleep next to me, airpods still in her ears, an unfinished book lying across her lap. A small smile lies on her lips, lips I want to kiss badly and often. Where her dream is, I don’t know. Maybe it’s at that merry house on Canyon Hill Ave., Vaughan whose residents love to wear ugly socks in winter and jam to random music in an impromptu show. Maybe it’s at that rowdy dorm in Gwangjin whose inhabitants can’t cook even if their lives depend on it. I can only hope it’s with me, be it in my house in Pyeongchang, the one where I have built a home studio for her home work and emptied a wardrobe for her belongings, or in fond remembrance of me while naked and freshly-taken and sated with happiness.
I have also looked up the lyrics of the other song she sang the other day. Everyone that day heard her, watched her listen to what the song demanded and be its most humble servant, was in awe of her. And I don't know if I've ever loved any other half as much as I do in this light she's under, she sang. She sang it for me, and she sang it that way because of me. And only I saw her the way she wanted to be seen: the brightest version of her was when she was on the stage, full of light, full of love, and mine.
During the last week, I have been left wanting a lot of things I don’t know I want. I want my mother to be more like her mother, she who pulled me aside just to tell me, “The ttarogukbap you brought from Daegu is delicious, Joohyun-ah. Let’s eat it again together someday.” I want my father to joke more like her father. I want the effortless coolness of her sister to rub off on me. I want to visit her cousin and buys her cousin’s first full album to send it to her grumpy, judgey uncle. I even want to get along with her giant dog, but that seems like a stretch, I know. I think I’ll start small with a goldfish or a turtle.
Most of all, I want her more. On our last day in her parents’ house, she was preparing breakfast for me. It was simple, really, just her and her mother standing side by side, she in an old white shirt, talking to her mother, slicing cherry tomatoes for salad, large windows in front of her, Canadian winter sun outside. I was setting up plates and cups on the table, and I was only turning to her to ask something I have now forgotten, and there she was. There is nothing beautiful in the way I was stunned, but that is all me in the way I want those wings her shoulder blades make that move under her shirt. I want that quiet chatter and laughter. I want that sun, that light, in such kitchen, in this kind of home, in winter and all other seasons. I want this one person and everyone and everything she holds dear. I want her, her, her.
There are and will be days where my back aches, brittle bones from past imbalance diet having their revenge, and she doesn’t know what to do except handing me my osteopenia meds. There are nights where the phantom pain from her car accident flares up, and all I can do is rub her back while she’s making an appointment with her therapist on the phone. Some days I forget where I leave my reading glasses, and she plucks them out of my hair. Another time she stress-bakes after having to go overtime to finish a recording. I still don’t know a lot of things. Still am terrified of a lot of things. Still am unsure of how things will work out. But I hope and I don’t lose it. Ever. This is it. There is no any other. There is no any other.