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She wishes she could describe what it feels like.
She’s heard many variations of the word “love.” She’s read about what it means to other people and what it feels like for other people. She has never felt it until that day, so she has nothing to hold it to for comparison.
But this doesn’t really matter, because she knows better than anyone how real it is.
His was a love that consumed you whole, taking refuge in your bones and melding and mixing with every fiber of your being until it wasn’t possible to pick yourself apart from it anymore. It’s all-encompassing and overwhelming and devastating, but she would choose it a thousand times over. In any lifetime.
He wasn’t like fire, burning you from the inside out, like she had read once before. He wasn’t an ocean that she could drown willingly and gladly in, like she had seen once in a television drama. He couldn’t be compared to any element, really, and she wonders if it’s because he’s all of them or none. He’s a non-human entity and he’s spent eternity being but he’s still not human.
He’s the reason she’ll never be whole again but he’s the reason she’ll never come home and wonder what it’s liked to be loved so fiercely that nothing else could matter more. It’s heartbreak multiplied so far she isn’t sure if any normal person could bear it, and she’s well aware she’s not normal. It’s also a hug so grounding and soul filling it feels not of this world.
She’s still not even close to doing it justice, not by words at least, if her thoughts until now were anything to go by.
But it wasn’t always this way.
There was a time she’d been foolish enough to think falling in love with an immortal manifestation of doom wouldn’t result in the catastrophic destruction of her heart.
She’d been foolish because she’d been broken and numb. Kind of similar to the night she spent in a drunken haze, screaming curses at the world like she’d really meant it.
And then, when her world was dim and she hadn’t much hope, she spent her first night lying next to him, an odd flicker of comfort in her stomach at the warmth of his back.
Dongkyeong asks him to sit up in a moment of reckless abandon.
He does so wordlessly. He sits up and stares back at her with this look, like a blank slate, a constant reminder of what he really is.
He looks beautiful, but this seems merely factual. It’s not a feeling that fills her with warm butterflies.
She leans in to him. “I’m going to kiss you.”
“Okay.”
As she predicts, he doesn’t object. Of course he doesn’t. In the moments before she closes in, she wonders incredulously, he really wasn’t normal, was he? He isn’t human at all. He’s… just some thing that walks and talks like one. He’s warm up close, though.
His lips feel like they look. Their kiss feels like a fact, too. Not like a feeling.
It’s depressing.
“How am I supposed to fall in love with you?” she scolds as she pulls away. She glares back at him.
Myulmang’s lips stretch into his cordial smile again. “Don’t know.”
She huffs in frustration and flops back onto the bed, arms and legs splayed out.
He glances to her, the corner of his lips tilting upwards slightly. “Aren’t you afraid?” he asks.
She’s not sure what he’s referring to: she should be afraid of a lot of things, but she isn’t. “About what?”
“That I will violate you in some way.”
It’s certainly a thought, but Myulmang has never seem the type to do so. He’s not even human, is he? When that thought strikes her, she becomes curious.
“Do you even… you know. Have sex? If you don’t need to sleep or eat, then…” Dongkyeong trails off, giving him an inquisitive glance. She’d never probe anyone else about such a sensitive topic, but she figures he isn’t like anyone else.
“No,” he answers succinctly. “I’ve never participated or felt the need to.”
She nods, taking that information in. Well, sex would be off the counter then, if she were to be in a relationship with him. She thinks about it, realizing it doesn’t affect in her in the slightest.
“Do you identify strictly as a man?” she asks next.
Myulmang smiles again. “Mostly. It’s the appearance I was given, and I like it. I would prefer to be referred to as one, but it wouldn’t bother me greatly if I was not.”
Dongkyeong thinks this should be complicated, but somehow it’s not. The answers she receives are ones she has always expected. Myulmang has many sides which suggest he is very much capable of feeling, but not once does he betray the need for something… biological. But isn’t love biological?
She lies back down and faces him. He is lying on his back, eyes traversing the dark ceiling above them like he’s on autopilot.
Autopilot. She always comes up with the strangest words to describe him.
“Good night,” she says, before her eyes close.
.
.
.
As the tumor in her skull continues to shrink, Dongkyeong likes to think the tears she had locked away so tightly finally return in the form of saltwater running down her cheeks. Even as she begins to heal, she cries. She cries every day and every night, and sometimes even in the small quiet moments at work. Saram had left many weeks ago, taking with him the centerpiece of her chest, leaving something hollow and painful behind.
When she is finished crying, she is tired. Her chest still rings with a dull ache that never seems to leave her, no matter who she is with and how much fun she is having. She retrieves her phone when no one is looking and types out a few texts to him when she feels this way. Sometimes, it makes her feel better. Sometimes it doesn’t.
On her good days, she buys herself red roses and yellow begonias and feels like she’s patching up a raw wound. On bad days she watches the dead petals litter her table and cries her heart out.
If someone asks her, “What’s the worst part of it all?” her answer is that she cannot reach him. She doesn’t know if he’s dead. She doesn’t know if he has simply ceased to exist. Either way he’s not a cellphone call away like he used to be. She can’t yell at a crosswalk and watch him materialize at her side. She can’t even sleep peacefully at night knowing he is at least at rest.
As she moves on through her days like this, Dongkyeong finds herself escaping into fantasies of the past as a temporary reprieve. She thinks about all the questions she used to have, and how effortlessly he had provided her with all of the answers. He may be an entity but his experiences and time have defined his blurred edges and made him undoubtedly human. She doesn’t know if loving is limited to humans, but she knows he would end his life for her in an instant.
She knows now, that he may not have needed to eat, or sleep, or even have sex. You didn’t need any of those things to let someone make you feel home.
And as this truth circles in her mind like a mantra, he appears to her one day on her bus ride home. In utter shock and disbelief she clings to him as they walk home, trying to convince herself it’s not a dream again.
They eat cereal that’s too stale and sit in front of her TV that’s too small and in their apartment that’s too cluttered. They exchange lazy quiet kisses until the sun rises, and it's more than enough.
Their story began with a curse, but it will never end.
Because love never does.