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The news comes out on a Tuesday.
It’s been a little over a week since the Seoul concerts—since the final show of their tour—but only now does it feel like the end: the final nail in the coffin, driven in deep by the handle of a hammer, an act so absurd and drawn out and wrong.
Equally cruel, as well, is the fact that it had been Jiwoo’s birthday just a few days ago. The twelve of them went to a noraebang, par for the course for people in their 20s. There was pointedly not much to celebrate, however, and the soju shots that filled their glasses were more to drown their sorrows than anything else.
They’ve come to expect it, of course—Sooyoung most of all—but it still manages to catch her off guard, to hurt—a little, just a bit. Or at least hurt enough for her to cry, the kind of tears that pool in a perpetual, precarious threat to fall; as if to say that it’s not time yet, that there’s worse to come.
But what could possibly be worse than this? What could ever be worse than a member leaving, than Jiwoo leaving?
Sooyoung feels the sheets next to her shuffle, the warmth of a chest pressed to her spine, cold fingers making their way to her cheek. “I’m scared, unnie,” the voice behind her whispers. A voice almost gone in its brokenness. “I can’t even look.”
Quietly, Sooyoung concludes that Jiwoo doesn’t need to look. She already knows—all of them do—remembers too well how it played out: how they sat around a conference table, in a space with no room for any sort of comfort, not even familiarity. Just the stern gaze of an announcement that had been looming over them for so long that it felt unreal in its shadow, a bad dream or false memory. But there it stood, in all its solid horror: paper and signatures and screen. Now, an official statement.
Most of them teared up, some stayed still and silent. A few were seething in what was, although less apparent then, subdued rage. Sooyoung doesn’t remember which group she belonged to. Maybe it was none, maybe it was all, maybe it didn’t matter because Jiwoo was holding her hand so tight during the entirety of the meeting that she couldn’t think of anything else.
And no public, company-approved article would ever be able to capture the heft of that day. No perfectly composed social media notice would ever be able to recall the way Jiwoo’s nails dug into Sooyoung’s skin hard enough to draw blood, enough to leave marks.
Sooyoung takes a deep breath and turns around. “You don’t have to look at any of it,” she says, her thumbs wiping the corners of Jiwoo’s eyes. “You can just look at me instead.”
So Jiwoo does just that, because what else can she do? She resolutely nods, wraps her arms around Sooyoung, and sighs into the crook of her now ex-teammate’s neck. The bed they're on is narrow—a single meant for Jiwoo and Jiwoo alone, the sole place of rest in her apartment cramped to the brim with gifts yet empty all the same—that their bodies can’t help but weave into each other, limbs upon limbs. It’s uncomfortable; painful, if you will, but in a way that only the bodies of two people in love could endure.
And Sooyoung decides: she will endure. Jiwoo will endure. They’ll endure this Tuesday together, and the next, little by little until this broken piece of theirs becomes just another part of the week again.