Archive of Our Own

A new family moves into one of the townhouses down the street. Over dinner that night, your dad mentions that the new family has two kids around your age, a boy two years your junior and a girl older than you by a few months. Wouldn’t it be nice if you had a friend your own age in this neighborhood? 

The first thing you notice about him is that he’s missing his two front teeth. Next, that he’s so small . His features all seem too big for his face. There’s no way this kid is any older than five years old, and he’s supposed to be seven?  

He shakes out his bangs and spreads his mouth in a practiced smile, pulled far at the edges in the way children smile before they learn that there’s more to it than just baring their teeth. You’ve never had trouble making friends, but you’re not entirely sure what to do with this kid.

Things you end up doing with him: 

• Wading in the stream that cuts through the woods behind his house with your pants rolled up to your knees and your shoes in your hands. Sunlight cuts through the summer-green leaves, dappling the forest floor in alternating shades of gold and gray. He squeals in delight when a minnow bumps into his shin before darting off with a single flash of its tail. Later that hour, you slip and fall, sitting on the creek bed as cool water seeps through the seat of your pants. His laughter scatters the nearby birds into flight. You threateningly reach for him, and he scampers just out of reach, but it wouldn’t have mattered either way. You never would have had the heart to pull him in.
• Sitting next to him on the school bus every day. And as an extension of that, walking with him to and from the bus stop. When the weather gets colder, you bring an extra knit hat with you because he’s used to warmer weather and owns no proper winter clothes other than a navy blue parka. Occasionally on the way back home, he’ll fall asleep on your shoulder, cheek smushed and mouth slack, each exhale a puff of cloudy white.
• Collecting Pokemon cards and swapping them (outside when the weather is nice but usually in your bedroom). He reverently touches your right-out-of-the-package cards with 200 HP Pokemon, careful even with just-washed hands. You trade him those for his beat-up ones that his parents bought at a yard sale, insisting that you prefer the vintage look as you slot a 50 HP Oddish in the binder sleeve next to your legendaries. 
• Catching fireflies on your lawn: waiting and watching in the dark with outstretched hands and bated breaths. He catches two in one go, peeking at them with his cupped hands pressed right up against his eye, then passes one to you. You hold it in one hand, and it doesn’t immediately fly away. It tickles, the firefly crawling across your palm and up your index finger. Flickering twice, it wiggles then launches off, circling around you once before flying over to him. Illuminating the wonder in his eyes.
• Sleeping over at each other’s houses. He brings a heavy green sleeping bag the first time and never brings it again. What use is a queen sized bed if you can’t share it with your friends? You stay up until 1 AM watching YouTube videos on your phone, and in the middle of a cinnamon challenge video, his head tips forwards and falls onto your forearm. The light of the phone screen tints his forehead blue. You guys had been planning on eating ice cream later, but you toss your phone onto your nightstand and tug the covers up to his chin.

Your family is moving to Korea for your dad’s job, and you tell him the day you find out, sitting on a swing set at the park near your homes.

“That’s really far,” he murmurs and rolls his lips into his mouth, and you nod solemnly. “For how long?”

“Two years, maybe three,” you say as gently as you can. He blinks rapidly. You’ve never seen him cry before, not when he fractured his foot during taekwondo, not when he scraped his knee against the concrete and had to limp half a mile home, fingers snarled into your t-shirt. But he cries now because he’s ten ( “almost eleven” ) and his best friend is leaving for what feels like forever. 

He stumbles off his swing, chains rattling and mulch kicked up into the air, and careens into you with all of the force of a distraught, tearful almost-eleven-year-old. You grip onto him as tight as you can, the cold zipper of his parka digging into your cheek. This is new, the physical contact. 

“I’ll miss you,” he says tightly into your hair. 

“Two years will pass quickly,” you promise, “and we can still keep in touch.”

The two years don’t pass quickly, but they do pass. You guys make do with international phone calls and messy handwritten letters and chain emails that claim to curse you if you don’t forward them to 10 other friends. It’s not the same, but you learn to get used to falling asleep to his tinny voice over the phone and penning out stories about school in a mix of English and hangul.

And at school, math is difficult but not unmanageable; you’ve made friends, who are nice and don’t hesitate to take the piss out of you; and you pick up your first camera—your first actual camera—, a heavy DSLR that your friend’s mom shows you how to use: where to hold, how to adjust the shutter speed and aperture. When you leave their house, she gives it to you, along with the case, because she doesn’t use it much anymore, and it shouldn’t sit around and collect dust.  

You try to give it back, you really do. It’s expensive and what if you drop it on the way home and really, you couldn’t possibly take it. But she presses it into your hand with a perceptive smile: you both know that you want it. With a sheepish smile, you cradle it to your chest. You’ve never been a skilled liar.

So you take it home and use it and clean the lenses religiously. You take photos of your friends messing around on skateboards and everyday objects around your house and sunsets, which you’ve always had a soft spot for. Now, even more so than before. 

On a particularly musty day in May, you squint one eye closed and look at the brilliant blaze of pollution orange through the viewfinder. The shutter clicks, and you pull back to look at the photo then back up at the sun making its descent, crawling to a new beginning elsewhere. To a boy on the other side of the world, soon to wake.

And there are boys. The tall, shaggy-haired boy who sits behind you in math compliments your English, and you stammer out an apology. He laughs, his eyes narrowing into crescents and soft cheeks dimpling, and your tongue thickens, fat and clumsy in your mouth.

You write I think I’m gay on a dozen letters throughout the next year and a half, tearing them all up instead of sending them on the off chance that his parents read the letters that you exchange. Or maybe you’re just afraid. 

This is the first secret that you’ve ever kept from him, and it fills you up like an unbanked creek during a thunderstorm. It overflows into your daydreams, and when those fill to the brim as well, into your dreams at night. Jungwon , you say on a beach, by your old elementary school, in his bedroom, I think I’m— what if I’m— would you still want to be my friend if I’m— 

“I like guys,” he whispers over the phone one night while you’re brushing your teeth. The phone clatters against the ceramic tiled floor, and your mom asks if you’re okay from two rooms over.

“All good,” you holler back louder than necessary and pick up the phone, pressing it to your ear. 

Silence.

“Jungwon?” 

“Yeah,” he says in a subdued voice, “I’m still here.”

More silence. Blood thunders in your ears. Lightning splits you in two. The creek surges.

“Me too,” you breathe into the receiver. “Jungwon, I’m—,” your voice cracks, “—gay.”

Even after that conversation, you guys rarely discuss it, whether over letters or calls. Because your parents might overhear, and that would be a nightmare and a half to explain. Because there are more interesting things to talk about, like how the Lakers are doing and this film camera you’re saving up for and a TV show that he swears on his life is funny. Because you’re still trying to grasp at the nebulous strands of your own sexuality. 

You land back in America on a blurry July morning, the sky an expanse of off-white and everything smudged over with a layer of gray. The air fills your lungs like molasses, wet and heavy, and the airplane pasta barnacles itself against the lining of your stomach.

Home , you think when you open the door to your house, but everything feels off-kilter. The bowls strangely shallow. The lighting too bright. Your bed just a smidge too close to the wall.

Even when Jungwon knocks on your front door that afternoon after taekwondo practice, you double take because this isn’t at all the boy you left in America. In your two missing years, you’ve rocketed up seven inches with stretch marks to show for it. He, on the other hand, has aged into his limbs a little more gracefully, nothing gangly about him, but he still seems to fill too much of the doorway. You stare at one another, each trying to reconcile this new boy with the one you last saw over two years ago, with the one you mailed letters to twice a month, with the one who courageously whispered I like guys over the phone. A dozen superimposed images of the same person.

Then he breaks into a smile, two dimples cratering his cheeks, and suddenly, all of those images shift into place: this is the same boy you’ve always known.

The memory card in your DSLR fills with photos of him. A silhouette on a skateboard against a ripening sunset, soft pink. A blurry hand along the bottom edge of a photo featuring two birds on a telephone line. A red-tinged violin propped under a chin.

You fall back into the comfortable pattern of friendship, of give and take. Mostly giving because you’re not sure how else to negotiate a friendship. And the years pass quickly, faster than they had in Korea, though you sometimes wish they hadn’t. There are SATs and ACTs to prepare for and colleges to visit and grades to improve. But he’s a constant, a touchstone. Even at fifteen, he’s steady and certain and unshakeable in the way only geologically ancient mountain ranges can be. 

There’s something else there too. Not from a gradual build up but a flipped switch, setting an entire circuit of bulbs alight. Looking back, you can pinpoint the exact moment it happened: you had been adjusting the shutter speed of your camera when he ran out into the middle of the cul-de-sac, throwing his arms up to form a Y then an M, a C, and an A. You catch him mid-Y, his oversized jean jacket winging up, his mouth half-open in a smile with only his top teeth showing. Glowing in the early autumn dusk: this golden, impossible boy. 

In the moment and the following weeks, you don’t notice. You’ve always adored him, so what difference does a single string of lights make next to the sun?

It’s only when things have quieted down that you figure it out. On a sleepy bus ride to school, with the top of his head jammed into your neck, you glance out the window to gauge how much longer it’ll take the bus to get to school. But you catch onto your reflection instead. You find yourself studying the angle of his jaw, the slope of his nose. He readjusts and rubs at an eye then catches you looking at him through the window reflection. Smiles blearily and stares back at you, head still tilted against your shoulder. Looking at his reflection on the fingerprint-smudged school bus window, tinted morning-blue, there’s that feeling again: tongue stuck in your throat, blood heating up your cheeks, heart rattling at the bars of your ribcage.

You have a crush on your best friend, and maybe you’re in love with him, but you’re not sure. You expect it to hurt, like all the movies and books have promised: staring out the window, crying into a slice of cold pizza, languishing in your bed with coming-of-age indie pop playing in the background. But it doesn’t, not really, not for you. 

Occasionally, you’ll have to restrain yourself from leaning in and kissing him when he laughs or looks at you too softly, and it’ll feel like pressing on a three-day-old bruise. For the most part though, it’s a buzzing warmth whenever you spend time with him and a more intense instinct to dote on him at all possible times. It’s okay if your feelings aren’t reciprocated. Maybe it’s better if they’re not. You could be happy with this for the rest of your life.

He kisses you after everyone else has left your graduation party, just the two of you sitting on your childhood bedroom floor. Leans in while you confess your concerns about the future. Just a brush: quick, dry bushfire. Your eyes are open. His are not. He smells like laundry detergent and the cologne that he only wears for important occasions. You will relive this moment in the quiet dark of your bed for years to come, but you don’t know that yet.

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” you blurt. Because it’s not. You’re leaving in three months, and for all of his maturity, he’s still sixteen. While you’ve always been the more foolhardy one, the risk-taker, the idealist, this isn’t a risk you’re willing to take. Not when the stakes are your decade-long friendship and his heart. Yours as well, but that’s less of a factor.

His face shutters. “Okay,” he says, a slight bobble in his voice, “I understand.” It sounds like the quiet metal click of a door shutting, the closing of a fist around the heartbeat of a bird.

After that, there’s a chasm that you don’t know how to cross, a door that you can’t open, not even with a decade’s collection of lockpicks and keys. He’s as kind as he always has been, but even when you had been separated by several time zones and an ocean, he’d never felt this distant.

When you leave for college, he sees you off on your driveway, hands tucked into the pockets of his shorts but shoulders thrown back. Wearing a polite smile, he tells you to have fun and not to get caught drinking, and your laughter comes out metal-bright, sharp as shattered mirror. In response, you wish him luck with his college applications, and he dimples neatly and nods.

As the car pulls out of the highway and down the street that you used to play badminton on together, you look at him disappear in the side-view mirror, still standing in your driveway and watching. Hands in his pockets. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear , the text on the mirror claims. Doesn’t feel like it.

And once you get to college, you no longer have time to worry about it, swamped by midterms and parties and academic clubs. Your text exchanges peter out from everyday to every other day to sending an obligatory “ how are you doing” on Sunday nights. But you still think about him. You go out to a party with your new college friends and wonder if he would like them. You try a hole-in-the-wall ramen place run by an old Chinese couple who hang up their granddaughter’s finger paintings and think that he would find it charming. You take pictures of the finger paintings and never send them. You skip your lectures in favor of sleeping through your hangover and imagine him scolding you. You kiss other guys and wonder if he would be jealous.

The next time that you see him in person (not winter break because he has college applications to polish and can’t find space in his schedule for you) is during his graduation party, a good deal smaller than your own had been. You hadn’t expected to get an invitation but his parents invited your parents, and one thing led to another, and you’re standing in the doorway to his bedroom, holding his gift: a scrapbook of all of the photos of him you could find. 

He takes it gingerly, flipping open to the first page and skims through the rest of them. Then he closes it and fixes his eyes on yours: the first time he has looked at you directly all day. “Thank you,” he says. 

You smile and nod and pretend like you have not spent the past several weeks toiling away at it. 

On your way down the stairs, he calls your name, and you turn to him, expectant, lost.

“I’m glad that you stopped us,” he tells you. 

“Oh,” you say because what else do you say to that?

“Thank you for coming,” he says with a concluding note in his voice.

“No problem. See you around this summer, I guess.” You turn back towards the door and toss a small wave without looking back.

“And next school year. Probably the next three,” he corrects from the top of the stairs.

“But—” you start, whipping around so fast that you almost lose balance and have to clutch onto the handrail. What about Oxford? Berkeley?  

A knowing, amused smile unfurls, small but genuine. “Yeah, I know. But they’re expensive, and I realized I wanted something a little closer to home.”

True to your word, you see him several times throughout the summer. There’s only one good Korean grocery store in your area, and you bump into each other several times while running errands. Not literally, of course. He’s much too careful for that, and you’re constantly hyperaware of him as well. You’ll walk through the snack aisle, catch a glimpse of black hair and perfect posture, and spend the rest of your trip glancing over your shoulder.

You wish you had a memorable story, but all the instances bleed together: exchanging pleasantries and scripted small-talk that he has always been better at than you. Whenever you try to ask about how he’s really doing, he waltzes around the topic, instead offering an evasive comment about a new knitting project his grandma is working on then hinting at how his parents are expecting him back soon so it was nice to see you, but he’s really got to go. 

And just like that, he’s gone before he fully takes shape in your mind.

Once you get to college, you see him even less. During the first week of classes, you had texted him, offering to show him around campus, but he brushed you off with a succinct thanks but i’ve got it handled!  

Sometimes, you’ll spot him on the other side of your street during your trek across campus for your psychology class, and you’ve waved a few times, but he never waves back. 

The only place you see him regularly is at parties held by the Korean Students Association, which vary from flashing lights and more people than you can count to playing card games with a dozen club members on the floor of someone’s apartment. He doesn’t avoid you but he doesn’t seek you out either, instead sticking closely to a few of the other freshmen.

On one of those nights with music throbbing so loud you can feel it in your bones, you stumble into a bedroom with your one-night-stand, only to find him already occupying the room with his one-night-stand. They’re still clothed—a small mercy. And you slam the door shut after staring ten seconds too long. The image of his hands fisted into the back of someone else’s hoodie brands itself into your memory. It is maybe the worst experience of your life.

The closest you come to an actual conversation with him happens during one of the quieter parties, when everyone has split up into pairs to play Clue. You end up being paired with him, and while you don’t win, you come damn close. Afterwards, as you fold the board back into the case, he loiters around, picking up the scraps of paper people took notes on. You don’t know what spurs you to say it—maybe it’s the four shots of rum you’ve had or the way his profile looks against the backdrop of cream-colored walls and a worn leather couch—but you ask him if he wants to get coffee sometime. As friends. No pressure.

He looks up at you for just a moment, gaze heavy. Weighing the advantages and disadvantages. In the end, his verdict is a quiet “sure.”

“Can’t we be friends again?” you plead. He studies you with quiet, probing eyes and stirs his drink. 

You had decided to meet at a coffee shop on the edge of campus, where the prices aren’t exorbitant and the business is slow. He had shown up far too put together for a freshman in his second semester of college: a white and black striped turtleneck tucked into black-wash jeans, an olive green bomber thrown over, thick multi-metal rings glinting under the harsh white lighting.

“Why do you want to be?”

You don’t have an immediate answer to that. You could say any number of things and they would be true, but they ultimately boil down to one thing: you miss him. But that doesn’t feel enough or like the right thing to say. You say it anyway.

He twists the rings on his index finger. “Okay,” he says, “let’s be friends.”

With that set in place, the conversation flows naturally despite the two-year lapse in your friendship. It winds from his classes to how his family is doing to how your family is doing to your two years away from Korea to the kiss and the aftermath. 

“Well, it wasn’t great,” he says with a wry smile after you ask him how he was afterwards. Which means something along the lines of it messed me up so bad that it single-handedly sent me to therapy. Or maybe you’re just projecting. He adds, “I liked you for a long time.”

“I liked you too,” you admit because he deserves the truth. 

He laughs then says, “Not anymore though.” Voice light as a bird. A weight off his shoulders. 

“Not anymore,” you agree. The lie burns like bile on the way up, but you force it out because your feelings are your own burden to carry.

You love him. You don’t deserve him. You balance these facts in your mind like two full glasses of water in the same hand. The water licks at the rim of its cage with every careful step you take.

Being in love with him this time around (which might be an inaccurate phrase given that you’re not entirely sure you stopped loving him in the first place) is harder. No longer blurred and softened by childhood adoration. Instead, it sits at the forefront of your mind, gnawing at your conscience. 

Your photography professor pulls you aside after one class to ask if you’re okay, and you end up crying into a fistful of tissues. It’ll be embarrassing to think about when you look back, but it helps relieve some of the tension in your chest.

After dusk, everything doused in blue and winding down, you meet him by the swing set that’s a short walk from your neighborhood. You’re back home again, this summer completely unlike last summer. Slow and drenched in sweet wait: early August stretched over three months.

He gets there before you, seated on a swing and scrolling on his phone. The phone lights up his face: a ghostly apparition. Before you make yourself known, you hold up your camera to capture this moment, and he looks up just as your finger presses down. In the photo, his lips are parted in surprise, his eyes wide open, his face and neck thrown in white with shadow swallowing up all of his nose save for the tip. He’s cute, even though the photo wouldn’t fit into any category except horror. In real time, he sighs out a laugh and brushes back his bangs. 

“I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen you without that camera.”

“You knew me before I got it,” you point out.

His eyes drift away from you and towards the line of townhouse roofs a few hundred meters away. “Yeah.”

“Why didn’t we just meet at my house?” you ask as you take a seat on the swing next to him, hooking your arms around the chains.

“Was feeling nostalgic, I guess.” He shrugs and turns his face towards you, chin dipping towards his sternum. Your heart patters against your ribs. “Remember that day you told me you were going to Korea?”

“Hard to forget.” With a kick, you send yourself swinging. He doesn’t say anything, but you’re both thinking of the same thing: the tears, the hug, the frozen-over ground, the pain of parting from your best friend, now eased by the distance of time and faded by the filter of nostalgia.

You stay for a few minutes longer then trek back to your house, where he stays for dinner. And that turns into your parents insisting that he stay the night.

The breeze through the open window feels like an exhale against the nape of your neck, as you lie in the darkness of your bedroom and watch him sleep next to you. A trace of moonlight cuts from behind you, highlighting the arch of his forehead, the flat of his temple. Your chest aches, deep and full. His lashes flutter, and for a moment you’re worried he might wake up, but his face smooths out again after a slight twitch of his nose. You roll onto your stomach and bury your face into your pillow. You shouldn’t be doing this. 

You wake up half an hour before noon and stumble downstairs to find him seated at your kitchen table and conversing with your mom. He readjusts the powdered donut on his plate then rubs his index and middle fingers with his thumb to dust them off, but they still come away finely coated in powdered sugar. They don’t notice you at first, deep in conversation about something. You stop on the last step and strain to hear, but you still can’t make out the words, so you clomp into the kitchen.

“Good morning,” your mom says, and you mumble something unintelligible in response, fish a cherry out of the bowl on the table, and sit heavily in the only remaining chair. “While you were asleep, Jungwon-ie and I went for a walk and picked up breakfast.” His name sounds lighter in Korean, less encumbered.

“I’ve never realized before, but your eyes stay open when you sleep,” he says after chewing and swallowing. You touch one corner of your eye unconsciously, and your mom smiles. “He’s been doing that since forever.” 

You blink. She’d never said anything about it before. At the look on your face, they both laugh.

You grunt in fake annoyance as you bite into the cherry, sweet and tart and tasting of summer. Your teeth scrape against the pit, and your fingertips come away stained red-pink. Breakfast proceeds quietly, your mom taking delicate bites out of her donut, Jungwon sipping his glass of orange juice, you finishing the last few cherries. You’d stay here forever if you could.

Time always passes faster when he’s around, and half of your junior year slips away like water through the finger-seams of a cupped hand.

He’s over in your apartment, perched on the armrest of your loveseat. Both of you are studying for your upcoming finals. The words on the page are beginning to blur together, so you set the textbook down on the floor at your feet and look at him. 

The only light source in the room is the lamp you’ve got in the corner, even with your blinds raised. Outside, the sky is a deep blue, dotted by the first few stars of the night, and the outline of the campus buildings can just barely be made out. The lamplight casts a warm glow over him, and you drink in this moment without reaching for your camera.

He reminds you of summer sunshowers: a neat, polite partition between mottled clouds and bashful blue sky. The kind where the sun hovers white-gold a few hours above the horizon and the afternoon feels like it will last a childhood-eternity. The kind that you catch once every few years, if you’re lucky enough to look out the window. It is a kind of loveliness that you can’t quite clasp onto in your memory or capture on your camera, the hazy silhouette of a silently-mouthed syllable. A kind that you can’t fully recall until you see it next and remember all over again.

“Jungwon,” you say, and he looks up expectantly. Your heart throbs in your throat, war-like in its cadence.

“The conversation we had at the café,” you begin, wetting your lower lip. He opens his mouth then sets his notebook on the coffee table and sits next to you without saying anything. You wait for him to get settled before continuing, “I never stopped liking you. And the kiss— I should have fully explained myself. I didn’t— it wasn’t the right time, and I was afraid of breaking your heart.”

“You did that anyways,” he says quietly, looking at you with dark eyes.

“I know,” you croak desperately, needing him to understand. “I know that now. But now, I think. Now—” You wet your lip again.

“We could be something,” you say, lowering your voice, and list towards him. The tides to the moon. The afternoon sun to the horizon.

“We could be,” he acknowledges and draws away. The clouds roll over the sun.