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“I wrote a song about you,” Jungeun says, and Sooyoung can’t tell whether she wants to laugh or cry.
She clutches her phone in her hand instead, forces herself to keep it pressed to her ear. Sooyoung finds her voice after a long stretch of silence.
“Is this a warning,” Sooyoung asks, low and incredulous; exasperation scratches at her voice and begs to call it something else, “or—?”
Jungeun is quiet. Sooyoung can imagine her, head tipped back toward the sky, eyes squinting against the sun on the other side of the country. It’s late where she is, and early where Jungeun is. Sooyoung is still talking to the moon while Jungeun welcomes the sun.
“It’s a song,” Jungeun tells her. There is not much else to say beyond that.
“Right. Right, okay,” Sooyoung nods even though Jungeun can’t see her do so. She uses her free hand to card through her hair, fingers sliding against the long strands as her grip tightens, tugging a fistful. The pain grounds her.
What else is there to say?
“Well,” Sooyoung says after a beat, “thanks for telling me.”
Jungeun sounds like she wants to say more, but doesn’t. Sooyoung wonders if she imagines the way she swears the pause is heavy with all that she could say but chooses not to. “Anytime.”
Sooyoung winces. She can feel Jungeun does, too. It’s a promise—she has not stopped writing about her. This might just be the start.
*
Sooyoung breaks up with Jungeun because Jungeun would never do it first. Because she would never pack her bags and follow her band on a cross-country tour that finishes with their crowning homecoming show in their new home on a different coast, thousands of miles away from her relationship.
She breaks up with Jungeun because she believes in Jungeun more than Jungeun does, more than she might have anything else in her life—even herself.
Jungeun knows this, too.
It’s not a fight that ends them. It is the aching reality of life: love will not always overcome circumstance, distance, even when two people are determined to see it through.
Sooyoung will not let them put themselves through war for love.
It is an act of mercy, if nothing else. Jungeun packs her things and Sooyoung can see exactly where Jungeun packs her heart with her in the back of her run-down car, between a guitar case and a box of winter clothes that will be too light by the time Jungeun is too far east.
Jungeun leaves at dawn, the beginning of the day at the curtain call of their relationship. Sooyoung watches soft orange and shimmering gold reflect off her eyes as sunrise takes the girl.
*
The world will make them strangers before enemies, Sooyoung decides with a final surrender as Jungeun, finally, drives away.
*
So she lets go of the strings that have held them together—diner conversations held between fake leather seats, dark bar shows where Jungeun finds her in the crowd flawlessly, morning afters in Sooyoung’s apartment where Jungeun makes a space on the side of her bed and finds home—and in the process, unfolds Jungeun’s wings.
She scrolls through her phone and nearly scrolls past Jungeun’s band’s latest update. Odd Eye Circle formally signed on the soundtrack of a new Netflix romcom, starring duo heartthrob co-stars.
A knot in her chest loosens, and Sooyoung breathes a little easier. Regret does not stick to her ribs, only longing. This is as much relief as she can hope for.
*
Jungeun writes a song, and Sooyoung can’t say she doesn’t have some idea of what to expect. She thinks of secrets shared between the delicate space between Jungeun’s driver’s side seat and where she would once sit in the passenger seat, all the breaks between work shifts she’d spend there curating endless playlists. She knows the kind of songs that Jungeun likes, and she knows the kind of music Jungeun creates as a result, plucked between guitar strings and lines of prose.
*
Jungeun writes a break up song that happens to be a love song. It is both sad and warm, a sunset so beautiful there is not enough time in the world to say it doesn’t pass too soon. It is bittersweet, the last vestiges of the strawberry milkshake kisses Sooyoung does not forget. It lingers after all two minutes and fifty two seconds of it, and the record of Sooyoung’s heart skips and plays it again, again, again.
*
So the song soars up the charts and Sooyoung’s life is one cosmic joke. In grocery stores, shopping mall dressing rooms, even one odd remix in a nightclub Sooyoung only goes to because her friends will not let her stay in one more night, Sooyoung, honestly—the mobius strip of her own heartbreak reels back at her, and she cannot even be upset. Jungeun told her, after all.
She’s an actor. A struggling one, but an actor. Sooyoung knows what it’s like to put on a charade, to put on airs to be anyone but herself.
Jungeun isn’t an actor, but she is a performer, and that’s almost the same thing. Sooyoung listens to her ache and lament and sing lines like I didn’t know that loving you was the happiest I’ve ever been and searches for that tell, that giveaway that when Jungeun sings, it’s coming from a place of past and not present tense.
There is none, which means Jungeun is an even better artist than Sooyoung has given her credit for, or something else.
*
“I can find you in any crowd,” Jungeun had breathed into the shell of her ear once, one lazy morning that had Sooyoung burrowing into the warmth pooled into the sheets of her bed, “You’d think I couldn’t see from up there, but I can find you.”
Sooyoung had snorted softly, turning her head, lips brushing against strands of wild honey and sun. She does not remember what she had said in return, only the way Jungeun had tilted her head up and brought every thought she’d had crashing down by force of gravity, of the growing need to keep the girl with the songs and the words as close as possible.
She wishes she’d remember more than just the kiss, the morning. She wishes she’d told Jungeun to stop looking one day.
She wonders if Jungeun still searches for her. She wonders if there will be a day she stops looking for little pieces of Jungeun everywhere, too: reminders of what the younger girl would like and places Sooyoung would want to share in a universe that kept them together.
*
It’s laughable. Something like hysteria bubbles up in her chest when security motions her forward. It’s not even Jungeun’s show—it’s a music festival, with Odd Eye Circle as a surprise guest.
He gestures her backstage. Sooyoung wonders what he thinks, if he’s sized her up to be what she’d think of anyone picked from an audience and led behind the scenes like this.
But she follows. He doesn’t seem to think she’d say no. Sooyoung is fine with that. It is better than being asked—the lead singer of Odd Eye Circle wants to see you, do you want to see her?
*
Her heart answers for her. Sooyoung finds herself in a small dressing room and waits.
*
“You wrote a song about me,” Sooyoung says, and Jungeun’s eyes soften, still sparkling, like light reflecting off the ocean she’d traded for skyscrapers and record deals and a girl she’d watched disappear in her rearview mirror forever ago.
Jungeun nods, a thousand emotions flickering across her face. Sooyoung tries to place each one, dares herself not to recognize Jungeun in every picture if Jungeun still looks for her in every show.
“I did,” she admits.
Sooyoung keeps one arm crossed over herself, and catches Jungeun watching the movement. She looks like she’s worried to take a step closer, like Sooyoung is worried about Jungeun doing something and not her own stupid, selfish heart.
She’s distracted. Jungeun notices that, too.
“It did pretty well,” she adds. Humility makes awe soak into each word, and even now Sooyoung wants to tell her she’d known it all along, that this was for the best, this might’ve never happened if they didn’t end when they did.
“They keep asking me who it’s about,” Jungeun says, and Sooyoung stills.
She has kept herself, at least, from watching any radio interviews or press conferences. She has, if only between the margin of space between her forefinger and thumb, some amount of self-preservation. Sooyoung presses on. “What do you tell them?”
Jungeun takes a step, and Sooyoung’s arms fall to her sides. This is not war or mercy, but a truce.
“I wrote a song about you,” says Jungeun, bold as summer and as free as the wings Sooyoung had let her unfurl and fly and come back. Jungeun has come back, maybe not for good, maybe not for forever, but she looks for Sooyoung to see if Sooyoung is looking for her, too. “I wrote a song about you and I’m famous now but famous doesn’t bring you back to me.”
Sooyoung’s voice is raw. “So what does?”
It’s a question and an answer in one. Jungeun is satisfied enough with it to close the distance between them, and Sooyoung does not let go first, this time.