Chapter Text
What is easy, Nayeon knows — for she has been told countless times and knows it well herself, is dreaming of her. Blue and pink and vivid aquamarine, she dreams of her in. Nightly, without fail, as the fables promised.
They begin at seven, also promised, and they begin in flashes. Colorful, bright, and loud.
Coincidentally, this is also when Nayeon begins singing.
Singing as she soars through the streets on her bicycle after she’d been taught exactly how to use it after many a trial and error, singing to herself as she studies elementary math and language and the likes — diligently, as she must, despite how much she hates it, and singing to her baby sister Yeojin — much more quiet, like she’s told to, but singing nonetheless.
She dreams of rainbows and storms of color and serenading her beneath a setting sun.
These dreams take place all across the world, in Berlin, Egypt, Tokyo and Buenos Aires and in Rome, but Nayeon thinks it would be most convenient if she were to meet her in South Korea.
Convenient, yes, but Nayeon knows herself, and therefore she knows like she knows the sky is blue that she would travel to the ends of the earth to find her.
A glimmer of a silver tooth, dark brown eyes that glimmer under a blanket of stars. All Nayeon’s, wherever she is, and in turn, Nayeon will be all hers.
The dreams continue and do not decrease in frequency or in brilliance. A myriad of colors and shades are splattered across her unconscious mind as the years go by, tiny little details one just might pass by if one was not an incredibly overzealous Im Nayeon. Overzealous being the key adjective Nayeon’s friends, or more specifically Jeongyeon, might use to describe her.
You see, Jeongyeon was a special case. When they’d first bumped heads in middle school, Nayeon had been mistaken in assuming Jeongyeon was her soulmate, because under the sun, she really had appeared somewhat magnificent, blonde locks glimmering in the light — Nayeon would later find out Jeongyeon had insisted on her parents allowing her to have done and that in fact she was not a foreigner, as her name might lend the assumption — and eyes squinting at the girl who had literally just knocked her off her feet.
Nayeon had been told meeting one’s soulmate was cinematic, movie-like, as if you’d know.
And perhaps Nayeon was not wrong in assuming Jeongyeon was her soulmate, but rather in assuming Jeongyeon was her romantic soulmate.
In later years, they would laugh over drinks and wonder how they might have navigated a romantic relationship at the young age of freshly twelve and thirteen — meeting one’s soulmate at any age before adulthood was a few and far between phenomenon, not unheard of, of course, as all things are not, but Nayeon is lended the relief that when Jeongyeon greets her with a toothy grin and introduces herself as Yoo Jeongyeon, shaking her hand, the spark is not there, and she is able to continue as is, dreaming and continuing in avid preparation for when love truly does come find her, as any eager 13 year old might.
The dreams continue, and with someone who she might hope flows on the same wavelength as herself, Nayeon, for the first time, has someone to confide in about her hopes for a movie-like meeting with the girl of her dreams (both literally and metaphorically).
“How are you so sure it’s a girl?” Jeongyeon inquires when Nayeon finishes ranting to her for the first time, a sort of incredulous tone in her voice that has her worrying that Jeongyeon might not be as accepting as Nayeon had originally assumed.
In truth, Nayeon doesn’t know. She’d just assumed. And her dreams might, in extension, just be an augmentation of that assumption, but when she dreams and she sees the bright gummy smile, curious dark eyes that peek out from beneath a bed of flowers — two features that are never paired together, the most she can make out of her face — she just has a feeling. And she tells Jeongyeon just that, sitting on the edge of the younger girl’s mattress in her tiny room, little hands clinging tightly at the sheets so much so that her knuckles turn white, and when Jeongyeon just shrugs and says ‘alright’, Nayeon lets out a shaky breath she didn’t know she’d been holding.
This also makes Nayeon a little less nervous when she invites Jeongyeon to her house for the first time and she is greeted not by a mother and a father but in fact two moms, but Jeongyeon is nothing if not unaffected by the seemingly atypical family dynamic.
It seemingly wasn’t just Nayeon who held her anxieties either after all, both her moms had been nervous considering Jeongyeon was the first friend Nayeon had asked over to her house, but when Nicole makes her famous dumplings for dinner with Jiyoung feeding an embarrassing (at Nayeon’s insistence) Yeojin the dough and filling picked apart, Jeongyeon again is unphased and just asks Nayeon if she can come over again for, reportedly, the killer dumplings.
Nayeon is a wildfire, a cannonball rocketing from interest to interest and from friend to friend (or so many would say, including both of her moms, who have been witness to Nayeon’s frequent switching of friendship groups) but Jeongyeon sticks by her side longer than any of her acquaintances she’d then deemed uncool in elementary, and she is there to spectate upon the steady progression of increasing specificities in Nayeon’s dreams, begrudgingly (she insists, but really, she’s not convincing anyone) hearing Nayeon out whenever she makes a new realization.
It is nice, but it is not enough, and a mid pubescent Nayeon is growing increasingly frustrated with the detail yet lack of detail in which she is provided of her soulmate, who exists, and yet is nothing if not just a figment of her imagination, because Nayeon is turning fourteen in a few months and she has yet to come across the girl who haunts her in the loveliest of ways.
It’s the most frustrating of dilemmas, because even one self described girl blessed with the virtue of patience (many would argue against this point, it seems) has her limits. Nayeon is frustrated frustrated frustrated and yet there is nothing she can do.
Her birthday rolls around and there is an advancement exactly three days after the golden day, but not one anyone might have expected. In all of her previous dreams, where Nayeon had sung and the girl had sung back — though for some reason the exact tune and lilt of her voice and her accent and the cadence in which she would speak would evade her mere moments after her awakening from the bliss of worlds connecting which was over all too soon — the dreams, one night, begin to take an unexpected turn, in which Nayeon sings and the girl just smiles, that familiar gummy smile she knows like the back of her hand.
It’s odd, because in a way, one might think she does not understand what Nayeon is transmitting to her through the practice of Nayeon’s favorite instrument — her vocal chords — but Nayeon sings still.
If anything, she sings more.
She sings when she wakes and when she brushes her teeth and when she eats rice for breakfast (though sometimes this results in the little grains flying out of her mouth and over the table which results in a scolding and which now Yeojin is old enough to call her disgusting for) because if there is one thing Nayeon can do, it is sing.
She sings loud enough that one might wonder if she were trying to reach someone in the country which is geographically furthest from Nayeon’s little pocket of the world in Seoul, South Korea — Uruguay, she’ll have you know, she looked it up — until she is politely (debatable) given the suggestion to join the school choir.
Nayeon had no idea the school even had a choir, but she signs up with ardor, Jeongyeon at her heel, of course.
This lasts two weeks before she is kicked out on an account of her insistence on overshadowing the rest of the students, most of which are over glorified band kids who were there against their own wills, because no matter how spectacular Nayeon’s voice is, the head of choir tells her, the choir is supposed to be everyone taking turns, not quote-unquote: Nayeon and friends.
Nayeon had then gone home and written up a poll and spent her lunch break the next day interviewing every member of the choir regardless of whether she remembered their names or not about whether they minded her being the face of the choir and taking lead in the performances, in which a startling 81% had answered that in fact they did not, but much to her chagrin, the head of choir did not budge, and Nayeon was once again left without an outlet for the way she makes her feel.
Her soulmate. In every beat of her heart and strain of her mind and spread of her fingers, the colors ring brighter, the songs sing louder, and the threads that bind them wind a little tighter. This is no laughing matter.
It is the most unjust of situations Nayeon has ever been witness to. She tells Jeongyeon this, who tells her to ask her moms about unjust situations, being a pair of women outwardly gay in a conservative country.
Nayeon supposes she has a point, but she also believes that the injustice her mothers experience does not erase the vapid attempt at burning out a passion which burns relentlessly — Nayeon knows it cannot be engulfed, but she does not appreciate the attempt at trying.
It’s then that Nayeon suggests to Jeongyeon that they begin a band along with the Japanese transfer Hirai Momo — who’s really good at rapping, as is whispered among her classmates — and as her right hand woman, Jeongyeon agrees reluctantly (after a promise of a week’s worth of her mom Nicole’s dumplings) and as such, MEGACOLOR is christened with Nayeon’s entrance into high school, much to the head of choir’s chagrin (this is what someone dismayingly responsible such as Jeongyeon would regard as speculation, but Nayeon has reason to trust her dedicated connections in the somehow still functioning school choir — they did not flop spectacularly after Nayeon’s departure, much to her disappointment and disbelief) and it is a smashing success.
They are permitted to perform at the school’s summer festival once Jeongyeon and Momo make their entrance into high school one year after Nayeon, with all three as unique lyrical composers (and an unspoken lack of experience in the love department, one which Nayeon insists on focusing every song she writes on for some godforsaken reason (Jeongyeon and Momo know the reason — the reason is written in the dreams that Nayeon has yet to let lie in any sort of background focus)).
Nayeon is 17 and she is frustrated.
There is a limit, one Im Nayeon would learn, to the patience one was expected to extend to the indefinite search of their soulmate. Nayeon is 17, and the dreams continue, in screaming color and frightening intensity, but the progression has ground to a halt, as if this was par for the course, a designated dry patch in which Nayeon is just expected to be satisfied with what has come.
Nayeon, for the record, is not a greedy person. She’s ambitious, hands reaching just a little too far for the stars on occasions, so much so that she ends up straining herself. The idea that her soulmate is so close and yet so far frustrates her to no end, the idea that all she can do is wait. For the first time, Nayeon doesn’t want this just to be in the hands of fate, she wants to grab it by the collar and wring it dry for all it’s worth, demand answers and demand them now.
Unfortunately, there is no one to consult about the happenings of fate. And as such, Nayeon begins searching for her in other things. She takes up knitting and drawing and guitar (Momo’s responsibility in MEGACOLOR, but Nayeon figures it’ll come in handy sometime) but it’s as if fate just knows she’s trying to pass the time for more to unwind itself, because there is no progression. Nayeon is tied up in something bigger than her, and it is as frightening as it is thrilling. She just wishes she had something to connect the dots.
Nayeon is walking home from school, wallowing in yet another grueling test that had all cognitive function following handing the paper in clocking out early, when she stops, dead in the middle of the road when something catches her eye.
A letter.
A letter written in English, Nayeon’s mind supplies. No, four letters. No, eight or so, but Nayeon’s focus lies on the four smack-bang in the middle of the word, four letters anyone other than Nayeon might not have spared a second glance. Eureka! An epiphany!
Only when a car beeps does she hurry across to the footpath, and something in her mind clicks. Nayeon is one of the three students in her grade who can read and speak English fluently, and it comes useful in times like this, when she needs to voice a word she would otherwise have no idea how to pronounce.
Mee-nah. Em. Eye. En. Aye. M-i-n-a. Mina.
Nayeon almost faints, because this is it. This is it.
A name is attached — Mina — and her heart sings, because it’s beautiful. It’s just so, glaringly, dead-on obvious. Mina. Nayeon wants to scream her name from the rooftops. To be in love with someone you know only the name of is something one might consider outlandish but Nayeon loves loudly and unapologetically, and in regards to her soulmate is no different.
Jeongyeon thinks she’s insane when she brings a fully written song titled just Mina to band practice. Nayeon, for all her understanding and patience — nonexistent, one (Jeongyeon) might argue — does not understand why for the life of her.
“You know nothing about her!” Jeongyeon exclaims, though she might not have said anything, because Nayeon has her chin cupped in her hands, staring out of the window and thinking the lovely cerulean of the sky reminds her of the girl who’s woven so tightly within her though they haven’t even met.
It doesn’t matter, because they will. Nayeon knows this for fact. Whether it takes thirty years or three minutes, meeting Mina is when it will make sense. When the ink that bleeds from her fingers will find its canvas, when the flowers that bloom in full will reach their peak, and when the tunes that ring about in her mind will find their voice. Her Mina. The answer to questions not yet asked.
“Nayeon?!”
Nayeon is drawn from her thoughts, “What?”
Jeongyeon sighs, “How do you think the school will react when we perform a song titled after a girl’s name, and much less one the school knows nothing of?”
“They have no problem with my lesbian moms!” Nayeon argues, though she’s just saying it for speaking and knows it isn’t true, fiddling with the fountain pen that’s begun to bleed into the paper on her desk much to her nescience.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Jeongyeon deadpans. “And furthermore, the parents of a student don’t make headlines on the school’s bimonthly gossip magazine,” She frowns, “I know you love that we’re all the rage of the school, but this will be a big deal, especially since this is indistinguishable from a love letter.”
(To - a - girl! Jeongyeon adds silently, though the way she pointedly mouths each syllable is dead-on obvious. Nayeon, needless to say, elects to ignore her.)
“...Then, we can say it’s from the perspective of a man?” Nayeon tries.
Jeongyeon just sighs and begins packing up her textbooks into her backpack.
“Jeongyeon, please!” Nayeon pleads, “This means so so much to me, please?”
“No.” Jeongyeon says finally, casting a wary eye over to Momo, who’s busy with her headphones in, oblivious to the two other girl’s dispute, most likely watching the latest M/V release from f(x) and chowing down on a container of chicken larger than her head, before she steps out of the classroom, shutting the door a little too loudly.
Momo is evidently drawn from her k-girl induced trance, because she looks up at Nayeon as she pulls the plugs from her ears, “What happened?”
“Jeongyeon is saying the school is too... homophobic..." Nayeon winces with the word she likes to make scarce use of, mainly because of how taboo it is to regard the disdain towards
“normal”
as something that might be protested against, “For us to perform this song I wrote.”
“Hm,” Momo hums, “Lemme read it.”
Nayeon passes the sheet over, and Momo taps the point of Nayeon’s bleeding pen against her cheek as she reads through the lyrics once, twice, three times with a thoughtful glint shining in her eyes.
“...So?” Nayeon frowns, and Momo looks up, left cheek now splotchy with blue ink.
“Why not just change the name to a guy’s?” She suggests, passing the paper and pen back, page unmarked unlike how it might have been had Jeongyeon been given the opportunity to change the lyrics.
“Because it’ll be less special,” Nayeon remarks, “Also, you got pen ink on your face.”
Momo is unphased, just shrugs and begins packing up her stuff, “Jeongyeon is right. The school will have issues with us if you decide to sing this.”
Nayeon decides then and there not to throw a tantrum like the Nayeon of three years ago might have had she both had such a heart-stuttering epiphany and written something so personal and special. It stings, mainly ‘cause Momo’s right, but there’s something immature and selfish in her that wants to say screw it and throw a big fuck you to the school that’s given her and her moms such trouble over the years just because the love they share is one that’s looked down upon.
But Momo and Jeongyeon are right. Nayeon, now alone in the classroom, looks back down at the lyrics and cringes. For the first time since the name came to her in her dream, she decides to look it up, and learns Mina is primarily a Japanese name. Of all the places one might have been born, Japan isn’t quite as far as... say... Uruguay, and this lends her the slightest of relief in that finding a faceless Mina in a sea of people with dark eyes and smiles that just might be hers will perhaps be a little easier than she’d thought.
After a while of searching, the closest male name she gets to Mina is Minato, and she decides that will do. Your pretty eyes and the gummiest of smiles are perhaps lines that are gender neutral, but your eyelashes and rosy red lips are ones she decides grimly she will have to change.
Nayeon spends the night rewriting and altering a song that had been written with ink sourced straight from the lakes of lavender and violet she finds Mina in, and for the first time at 17 years of age, bears the harsh impact of a society molded perfectly for those square shaped, when Nayeon is and has known all she’ll ever be is decidedly circular, not a corner in sight.
College, when Nayeon enters at 21 after a few years of saving, is a blur of alcohol and energy drinks and 8am classes (the devil’s work). Nayeon blames this on the fact that she still has not met Mina. She gets shitfaced with Jeongyeon and Momo and sometimes her coursemate Dahyun and wakes up 5 hours later to attend a grueling seminar and somehow passes all of her classes through her first year with flying colors.
She dates casually, girls whose names print themselves onto her back in hickeys and bite marks and whose faces are naturally forgotten moments after they exit her dorm, and it’s nice, but what it isn’t is permanent.
What it also is not is honorable — at least in the so-called dignified honors student Im Nayeon’s opinion — because Nayeon feels as if she is doing a disservice to a faceless Mina after each and every hookup (29, over the first year of her course, but who’s counting?) and not for the first time, she asks the sky:
When will I find you?
Nayeon sighs into her now lukewarm rum and cola, her seventh drink of the night, and she’s well and truly hammered but she takes another languid sip through the plastic curly straw anyway, “When am I gonna meet her?”
Momo grunts from her spot at the table, head resting in her arms, her left one looped into Jeongyeon’s. Jeongyeon is asleep, snoring with her head against the booth’s vinyl leather, and only when she kicks her hard in the shin does she wake and Nayeon receives some type of answer.
“What,” Jeongyeon grumbles.
“When am I going to meet Mina?”
“This again..." Momo mumbles into a yawn, and this earns an equally ferocious glare from a pink cheeked Nayeon.
Anyone could deduce Nayeon is being entirely serious about this topic, but knowing her lends you the reluctant idea that she might be mere moments from going off on a spiel about her faceless soulmate. Nayeon doesn’t understand why she’s the only one who’s as up in arms about it as she is, because in truth, nothing in her life has felt quite so consequential.
“You’ll meet her when you meet her,” Jeongyeon says profoundly. Plainly and falsely intelligently, Nayeon would add. Momo might fondly drop the plainly and falsely, but that’s of no one’s business but her own.
“I know, idiot. That’s what it means to meet someone. But when?”
“Honestly,” Jeongyeon rolls her eyes, “Do you truly expect two drunk college students with only slightly more of a solid direction in life than yourself to answer a question like that with something that would satisfy your nit-picky ass?”
“Does the ‘slightly more of a solid direction in life’ count for nothing?” Nayeon groans, then, “Wait, who says you guys have more of a direction in life than me?”
“There she goes,” Momo sniggers.
“No, I really mean it. Just ‘cause Mina’s my priority doesn’t mean I don’t have other things planned out.”
“You say that like you know her, though. And for the second point,” Jeongyeon enunciates with a flair of her own swirly straw, flicking diluted gin and tonic across the table, “You don’t.”
“Yes I do and yes I do.”
“No, you don’t.”
“Yes I do!” Nayeon protests, fuming.
“Okay,” Jeongyeon says, ignoring the first point, “Then what are you planning to do?”
Nayeon hadn’t expected that question. She falls quiet, swirls her straw around in her drink a few times.
In truth, Nayeon has been studying for a job in a real estate agency — her grades are the least of her issues — but anyone could tell her heart isn't in it. She’d wanted to take a course in musical arts, but decided against it at the last minute due to the high stakes.
Nayeon doesn't think in numbers and analytical data and in marketing, her mind is a galaxy constantly begging for her left brain to take the wheel, let stars spill across the pages and create something 17 year old Nayeon could only have dreamed of. Current, 22 year old Nayeon, is not so lucky as to have explored such an option.
She puffs up her cheeks and exhales pointedly, ending with her lips in a pout. The reflection of the stars in the water feature just outside the window their table is right beside catches her eye, and she wonders for just the fragment of a moment...
“See,” Jeongyeon sighs. “You don’t.”
“Astrology!” Nayeon shouts out, the glimmer in her eyes a reflection of the sky that blankets the world just outside of the stuffy venue they sit in. It feels fitting, the epiphany she’s just had, because Mina is such a starry name. Searching for her in a field that produces only the sparkliest of people: it’s genius.
“...Like zodiacs?”
Nayeon frowns, “No. Like stars.”
“So astronomy?”
“Yes!” Nayeon clicks her fingers, “Astronomy!”
Momo and Jeongyeon exchange a look. It’s one Nayeon has become familiar with over the years. Spells something like ‘Nayeon isn’t serious about this shit’, but oh, this time are they in for a surprise, because when Nayeon is hit dead on with a comet painted in genius, you should know you’d have to pry the rocky residue out of her cold dead hands. Momo and Jeongyeon should know this by now.
“But Nayeon..." Momo begins, “You’re two and a half years through a degree in finance.”
“I’ll drop it,” Nayeon says immediately, banging her fist down on the table.
Jeongyeon blinks a few times. Momo takes her drink and downs it in one gulp. Jeongyeon eyes her warily and hails over the waiter for another round of shots. For the supposedly most responsible of the three, she certainly is not acting as such.
“You don’t wanna think about it for a second?”
“I did,” Nayeon insists, “When you asked me what I was planning to do!”
“I meant about quitting your course,” Jeongyeon winces.
“That too. I’m certain. I’m beyond certain. I’m the most sure I’ve ever been about anything.”
“This is how you know she’s wasted,” Jeongyeon tells a giggling Momo, and Nayeon kicks her shin again much more roughly as the waiter serves them six more shots.
“Jeongyeon!” Nayeon scolds, “I’m not joking!”
Jeongyeon stares at Nayeon. Nayeon stares back. Momo watches in earnest as the two face off in a stare-off. As predicted, Jeongyeon’s eyes begin to water too soon, and she blinks with a snarl and a few fingers drummed against the table. She looks up to meet Nayeon, who appears no less serious or sincere than she had.
“Are you sure about this?” Jeongyeon’s hand is just inches from wrapping around the shot glass and downing it. Nayeon nods, fire brewing in her eyes and gaze unwavering, and Jeongyeon, for once, does not attempt to dissuade her friend from one of her incredibly reckless, impulsive (and drunk) decisions, just takes another shot of vodka and prays she won’t be seeing the inside of the toilet bowl neither tonight or tomorrow morning.
And drop it Nayeon does — the next morning, with a raging hangover and the smell of vomit in her sweatshirt, but no less passionate, because she wakes up at 7 on the dot to get ready in suitable time and to brew her morning coffee for when the course coordinator’s office hours open. She leaves the office with a few flyers and a notice about packing up her dorm within two weeks, because only in between quitting her current field of study and inquiring about astronomy and astrophysics did she discover her university did not accommodate for the kind of course she was looking for.
No matter, because the flyers read many many other universities which do. Including ones that are located in Taiwan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Japan, and America. Exciting!
“Unnie, are you insane?” Yeojin cries incredulously into the receiver, and for once, Nayeon does not blame her fifteen year old sister for being outwardly shocked at one of her haphazard decisions.
“It’s important to me,” She just says, which is true.
Yeojin ignores her, “What’s mom gonna say? You know she was so excited for you to follow in her footsteps of becoming a ... uh.”
Nayeon winces. This is also true, and the realization stings like a thorn in the side to sink in.
“A real estate agent,” She finishes for Yeojin, then, “I bet,” Nayeon is tucking the fliers carefully into her bag as she takes a sip of her second coffee of the morning — the only thing so far that’s managed to keep her stomach jerking violently and rendering her a spewing mess on the floor — “That she’ll be, yes, a little bit skeptic, but when I explain how I came to this conclusion and when she sees that I’m really passionate about it she’ll be overall supportive.”
I think, Nayeon doesn’t say. Mainly because any fuel given to Yeojin is a loss.
Yeojin doesn’t even hesitate, “And will you tell her you came to this conclusion drunk out of your mind with Jeongyeon unnie and Momo unnie?”
Nayeon elects to hang up the phone. Useless teenagers, they know nothing, except somehow the regretful doings of a Nayeon of not 12 hours ago.
“America!” Nayeon grins, cheerfully, as Jeongyeon stares at her in disbelief.
“...America,” She confirms, still not having moved from her spot at Nayeon’s armchair which she’d sold and is to be picked up in three hours. She graciously allows Jeongyeon to resume her spot at the well-loved seating place.
In not two weeks, Nayeon has quit her course, told this to ten people, journaled, attended the gym 5 times, packed up her apartment, lost her keycard twice, gotten drunk with Momo and Jeongyeon thrice in celebration of both younger girls acing their midterms, and spent countless hours scrolling through her options in regards of astrological courses.
She had decided after her mother had made a few calls — Jiyoung takes no shit from anyone — and had come to the conclusion it was only possible to study abroad in America or to continue study in Korea.
Nayeon will never admit she made the decision while intoxicated after a few drinking games rendered Jeongyeon passed out and Momo scribbling in whiteboard marker on her face as she scrolled through her laptop and compared the population size of Korea and of the United States and deciding the chances of meeting Mina there were far more likely.
She only remembers because she recorded the entire thing on her phone and couldn’t quite bring herself to delete it after hearing the affectionate way in which Momo called Jeongyeon’s name, a fashion she’s only ever heard addressed to the short haired woman. Hmm. Something to investigate for the future, perhaps.
Of the ten people she’d told, all of them had taken it relatively well (her and Yeojin had gone out for ice cream the night after Nayeon had hung up on her and made up over a few matches of Mario Kart). And yes, her real estate agent mother Nicole had held her misgivings, but as predicted, had come to terms with Nayeon’s decision and drawn up a plan at 2am in the middle of a spontaneous pilates session in which she’d been struck with inspiration. (Nayeon had to get her efficiency and diligence from someone.)
“Yes, Jeongyeon,” Nayeon says, “I’m going to America.”
Jeongyeon runs a weary hand through her hair.
“Hadn’t we already established that Mina was a Japanese name?”
“Actually, there are origins of the name in..."
“...In?”
Nayeon holds up a finger, scrolling through the google search results, “Here. Arabia, China, India, Cambodia, and Korea.”
“...But not America.”
“So what?” Nayeon shrugs her shoulders, “America is a place of diversity. I could very well meet her there.”
“America is also, like, giant,” Momo points out, “They have fifty states. You’re gonna go to all fifty states to find this girl?”
“Plus,” Jeongyeon adds in, “You said Mina is a Korean name too. Who says you won’t find her here?”
“Guys! I’m not going to America forever, just for this course.”
“What if she’s there but you don’t find her before you come back?”
“I’m going to find her,” Nayeon says, and she means it, “I’ll just know. I will find her. That’s how fate works, right?”
Nayeon turns when neither Jeongyeon nor Momo respond, and catches the two of them appearing suspiciously busy and decidedly further apart than when she’d last tossed them a glance.
“Right,” Jeongyeon nods, flushed, as she fiddles with a pen.
Nayeon shrugs and turns back to what she was doing.
Both girls watch as Nayeon takes a few papers and slips them into a plastic folder, dusting her hands free as she steps back to admire the near-empty dorm.
“You’re really just gonna pack it all up and fly to America?” Jeongyeon asks, more carefully, in one last ditch attempt to dissuade Nayeon from a plan of seemingly reckless abandon.
Nayeon turns, fire burning in her eyes like they had that night, like they had when she’d written a song based solely off one name that had come to her in a dream, like they had when she’d told Jeongyeon she was sure her soulmate was a girl. If Nayeon is one thing, it’s determined, and though she doesn’t know it yet, her determination is what will drive her those final few laps, par for the course.
Nayeon is one to grab a chance by the reins and let it pull her forward with no set destination, it is this that drives her forward with every ounce of fire in her blood: the idea that something that could pass you by in mere moments is something that could have been evading you your entire life. Nayeon can feel it, in the paper of her plane ticket, that there is something waiting for her in America. She knows it.
Nayeon is all but what meets the eye: because if there is one thing it is, Nayeon is fire. And she will let herself burn as a means to reach the embers, the gold, the promising glimmer underneath coal that stains your hands.
“Yes.” She says, finally, “That’s what I’m gonna do.”
Nayeon, for all of her impressive feats, has never flown alone. Or flown at all, period. She does not forget her passport or her boarding pass or any of her luggage, and for that, she is satisfied. All she’d brought with her were the basic necessities — clothes and toiletries — because with her luck, there was a vacant dorm, and her grades had easily scored her a spot halfway through the course provided she paid a backstreet deposit for her loans upon arrival.
(Those few years she’d taken off to work before college had paid off, it seems.)
So Nayeon’s issues with planes do not lie in a fault of her own, but rather a fault of the plane’s. There is an excessive amount of turbulence (excessive in the eyes of one amateur flyer Nayeon) and, well, the amount of times she visits the bathroom or hails over the flight attendant for another barf bag are between her and the higher ups.
But she makes it there in one piece, and it’s worth it, because Nayeon steps out of the plane into California and she can feel it. Mina is here.
The day Chaeyoung and Mina break up, Mina is less heartbroken than she thought she’d be. She’d always been strongly against the idea of soulmates, has held her reservations with the concept — loving someone immediately after knowing them and just believing they’ll love you too? What if they were a doggy-pager? What if they poured cereal before milk?
Unforgivable, Mina thinks. She is in strong belief that love is not so simple. It’s a two way street, a constant repeat of give and receive. What you put in, you get back out. Like a garden. Like feeding a chicken the best quality of chicken food so they stay faithful to you, lay quality eggs, and do not stray from the coop and get eaten by a coyote.
(Mina has had her share of pet chickens eaten by coyotes, having to wake up the day after to the scraps of chicken bones in her back garden rather than the daily call of the rooster. Dark times, they were, but then her dad had installed extra precautions to ensure the chickens didn’t get out, and all was well.)
Mina does not believe in soulmates. In falling for someone effortlessly, solely because the wiring between you and them are bound by some involuntary, cruel force of nature. It’s entirely random, chance, and the fables say it’s insurmountable. Mina could laugh.
But she wouldn’t, because she knows she doesn’t quite have the right to. Mina, regrettably, is terrified. She knows why. It’s because it’s written in the books, in the stories and in ancient scriptures.
It’s boundless. Universal. Worldwide. The fables surpass the boundaries of language and culture, and she’s seen it. She’s seen it in her parents, in her friends, in mentors and teachers and in movies. Soulmates.
That’s why it terrifies her: trapped to one person. It’s quite a pessimistic way of thinking, she’s been told, but really, it’s a way of thinking she’s observed people stray from considering. Mina has fought to be what she is, so much so the idea of such a large part of her being predetermined is one that is entirely unfavorable.
Perhaps it’s why she hasn’t traveled to South Korea yet. She shoots a solemn glance up at the name written in black pen that had been nearly out of ink when she’d printed the name in Hangul. Nayeon.
Mina is a worldwide girl, a traveling connoisseur. By the age of nine, she’d been to twenty different countries. Benefits of your Dad working in the military, she guesses.
Perhaps if he hadn’t been, though, she’d have been able to listen to the new f(x) comeback, because at age 12, she and her brother were playing hide and seek at a rural airport while waiting for the plane back to South Korea, and Mina had unearthed a landmine just fifty meters from the building, though she’d been fine (She hadn’t been seriously injured, if one didn’t consider permanent hearing loss a serious injury).
Mina doesn’t. It doesn’t change much of her life, no, not much. Not in the ways that really count. She learns sign language — in Japanese and in English — and her family does too, and she attends a school where they teach in subtitles and words written on the board and silence, and it’s different, but it’s not as if she had much choice other than to get used to it.
So yes, until age 12, Mina is a worldwide girl. A traveling connoisseur, cultured in any aspect one might be cultured. She speaks English, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin and a little bit of Cantonese too. That is, until she loses the ability to hear, and her family settles down in the states. She forgets most of her Korean and Mandarin, but she learns two different languages of sign, and she resigns herself to focusing on the smaller joys of life.
Mina has never believed in big gestures, in fate, and in things bestowed upon you by higher ups, because if she did, the idea that she’d been born into a family with such an annoying older brother was just too depressing of an idea to deal with.
She does believe in love, though. She believes in love when you work for it.
And don’t get her wrong, she and Chaeyoung worked for it. Chaeyoung is an arts major, she already knew sign language, preferred it herself, anyway, because a lot of the time she was non-verbal. They communicated their needs to one another, Chaeyoung could read her like an open book. It was nice. It was everything she needed. Chaeyoung was perfect, and they worked.
But there’s a difference between something working and something working out. Because while things were fine, things were working, it was just temporary. Something to keep the sheets a little warmer and the heart a little less firm.
There was no future for the two of them. No spark, that sense of urgency that shimmers in your eyes and is reflected in the urgent tremble of your fingers when you reach for their skin, so they’d settled as friends.
Friends, Mina had thought, was pretty much what they were anyway, in all senses except for officially.
She is drawn to a quote from a play she doesn’t quite remember, a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. She thinks it’s pretty and fitting.
Mina drops Chaeyoung’s sunflower sweatshirt into the box with an affectionate glance thrown towards it, and steps towards her desk to continue tidying it up as the semester draws to a close.
Studying in America is grueling. Grueling, Nayeon thinks actually, might be the understatement of the century.
It is only made marginally easier by the fact she speaks English, because when she messages Jeongyeon and Momo about stupid stuff her classmates say, they either don’t understand at all what she’s saying or don’t understand the meanings behind the finicky metaphors and phrases they seem to use. Nayeon doesn’t blame them, especially when the majority of Americans speak in tongues she has yet to master.
One upside of America though, Nayeon learns — particularly in a course which quickly weeds out those not sufficiently dedicated to such an obscure and modern craft — is that it is far more accepting than South Korea. At least in regards to her sexual preference regarding men (or rather, a lack thereof).
Where she’d had certain people avoid her and rumors flying her way back home — not entirely common, she’ll admit, but not unheard of — in America, she steps into her dorm and her roommate (some multilingual Taiwanese girl called Shuhua who apparently was born and raised in California) already has a sapphic flag hanging from the window’s archway above her bed.
“Sorry,” She winces, when she meets her first, “Is it a bit much?”
Nayeon blinks, “A bit much?”
“I’m having a girl-friend-acquaintance-of-sorts over,” Shuhua frowns, “I don’t know how else to make it more clear I swing that way.”
“You ... hadn’t mentioned you like girls?”
“Well..."
Nayeon also learns her roommate is a bit of an idiot at times, though this term is thrown forth with a sort of affectionate lilt to the voice. Nayeon guesses it’s just the way she is though, and she could’ve been doomed with far worse roommates, so there’s seldom to complain about.
She calls Jeongyeon and Momo and texts them daily, despite both of them having taken up full time jobs with a combined yearly salary of over 150 million won (Nayeon might be jealous if she were in this for the money, and since when did Jeongyeon and Momo have a combined salary?) and even a few words from them has her smiling into the blue light of her phone beneath her dollar store quilt.
“Found her yet?”
“No. Goodnight Jeongyeon.”
“kkkkkk
It’s 6pm here, Nayeon unnie.”
Nayeon washes her face in her tiny dingy bathroom that reeks of the pot that her dormmate’s girlfriend (Shuhua had finally beaten around the bush and asked Soojin to date her!) never seems to stop smoking.
It’d taken a few days to find a pharmacy that sold her favorite moisturizer, but with a little bit of imagination and a peg on her nose, it’s almost close enough to home for her to bask in those few moments of silence in the morning hours most Americans seem to be out at frat parties and the like.
Nayeon has no problem making friends. Perhaps she’d be more intent on participating in social activities if it weren’t her second time going through college and she wasn’t dead set focused on finding her soulmate.
Nayeon, mostly, has no clue what she’s doing, particularly when her brain is fried from long classes and the stink of foreign food she has no taste for, and this is made no easier when all she wants to do is study in Korean and the goddamned google translate has her notes going off in a tangent about mandarin oranges — something she’s made the mistake of paying close attention to only to realize a little too late it’d ended up being a very inaccurate mistranslation for the fourth time this month, jesus christ — but what drives her through the days of shitty gas station food and classes that all blend together is that each morning she wakes might be the one she finds her.
“So, why are you here?” Shuhua asks one night as the two of them sit in the sort of reverence one might only hope to achieve in the company of your roommate five years your junior who you still don’t actually know the surname of on the balcony, Shuhua sitting in the lap of her older girlfriend who’d dozed off some fifteen minutes ago as she sips at a beer.
“This is our dorm?” Nayeon throws back after a long swig of soju — her guilty pleasure when she misses home a little too much.
“Duh. I mean why are you studying astronomy?”
“Astronomy..." Nayeon echoes, exhaling slowly as her eyes fix on a cloud that passes over the moon, temporarily blanketing them from its light.
“...So?”
“Well, it all began —”
“I don’t care about any of that!” Shuhua protests, in the middle of Nayeon’s introduction to a long winded explanation of her values, morals, and a brief (not brief in the slightest) rundown of her life from the moment she’d opened her eyes to when she’d first graduated high school to sobbing, shiftfaced in Jeongyeon’s dimly lit bathroom as she puked for the fifth time that night to this very moment, “What’s your purpose..." Shuhua drags her bottom lip through her teeth, as if searching for the word, “Your... Your muse! Your driving force!”
And when Nayeon opens her mouth again, Shuhua interrupts once more, “And in the nicest way possible, I mean a short version.”
Nayeon takes pause, takes another sip of her drink and focuses on the faintest of glimmers somewhere in the distance beneath the balcony. Something so small anyone could tell you it was pointless to take note of, probably just the blink of a car’s headlights or a street lamp.
She looks back up at Shuhua, then at Soojin, whose chin is tucked into her shoulder, then back at Shuhua and tilts her head, telling her in a fond voice, “My soulmate.”
Shuhua’s eyes widen, “Oh my god, who is she?”
Nayeon laughs, “I don’t quite know yet. I haven’t met her. I just know her name: Mina.”
Mina. She sees it spinning through Shuhua’s mind, the two syllables that click continuously like clockwork in a steady rhythm through her body, the root of everything Nayeon does.
Shuhua nods, and Nayeon continues.
“It’s normal to want to meet your soulmate, of course. But there’s something about her — though I don’t even know her yet — that drives me forward in every part of my life. The dreams,”
Nayeon pauses momentarily, to watch Shuhua nodding eagerly in recognition.
“The dreams have been with me for as long as I remember, which isn’t all that unusual either, but I guess there was something that clicked in my mind when I first started connecting the dots and forming a person from the small glimpses of her that came to me. Like, this is what I’m here for. Here, like, on this Earth. And I’ve always thought, isn’t it just so beautiful that there’s someone who’s destined for you? Perfect in every single way, so much so that they’re tied to you by fate?”
Nayeon only stops when there’s a bright shimmer in the sky above them all of the sudden, and almost falls from her chair when a shooting star soars past, glimmering in all of its glory and disappearing as quick as it had come.
She looks back to Shuhua who’s shutting her eyes tightly, then looks up in earnest at Nayeon.
“You made a wish, right?”
Nayeon’s lips part, then they fall shut as she shakes her head with a smile, “Nope. Maybe next time.”
“Ugh, you’re such a bore,” Shuhua gripes, but the next morning Nayeon wakes up with an iced cookie at the foot of her bed from the premium bakery she passes by often on the way to campus with pink fondant and icing that reads: “good luck on your soulmate search!” and smiles, cutting up some melon and placing both the cookie and fruit on the plate as she retreats to her desk to cram for the test later.
Sparkly eyes, dark hair, a glint of a silver tooth. Nayeon knows these features like the back of her hand, and she knows — because she’d stepped off the plane in California and she’d felt it — that Mina is here. And Nayeon is never one to give up, so when she is faced with hardships, she overcomes them, cause what else is there to do?
And there are hardships. Oh, there are hardships. Nayeon is halfway through scanning the third draft of her final essay after zero sleep for 42 hours at 9pm — three hours before the due date — when she gets a call from Jeongyeon and falls asleep midway through, wakes up at 11:49pm, and bullshits her way through the final edit and submits it seconds before the entry window closes.
Nayeon wakes up half an hour before she’s got a scheduled interview for an internship with Shuhua blasting trap through their dorm. As disgruntled and displeased she is with this particular method of waking her up, she does owe it to Shuhua when she makes it to the interview with two minutes to spare and in relatively one piece despite forgetting her keys underneath her bed.
Most of these hardships, Nayeon will admit, come as a result of her poor sleeping habits, and she’ll digress: perhaps “winging it” the second time through when it came to maintaining healthy habits (ie, not eating proper meals, surviving off monster energy drinks and discount oreos from the gas station, and going multiple days without sleeping) was not the best idea. But Nayeon is no quitter, and she’ll sleep once she gets her degree.
And as such, she finishes her final year with the title of Valedictorian, making it through: she always does. She also scores a spot with the internship, taking up a side job for cash as a TA at a state university (not her own, which would have been cool, but largely unfavorable).
Nayeon wakes up to prepare for her first day, and there’s a tingling in her fingers, the slightest of gravitational pulls towards somewhere she can’t quite decide of the direction on, which lends her the suspicion this day might not be just like any other, and not just in the fact she’s a newly graduated honors student of San Diego State University.
She supposes it would just so happen that they meet on Nayeon’s first day in her internship at a small rural site for the United States national observatory, because she steps in the door, and is quite literally knocked off her feet, all the papers she’d carefully tucked into a plastic sheet strewn across the marble floor.
And she knows this is it, because there’s that pull again. The stars folded behind her eyes come crashing out, glimmering all across the floor and right in her face. This is it. Nayeon, for all her preparation to meet her soulmate, is speechless, because she sees Mina and her brain malfunctions like a computer might if all the footage clogged up in Nayeon’s mind, tucked neatly away, were suddenly wired into its system. Every dream, word, glimpse of her, couldn’t have prepared her for this. Face to face with Mina, who’s staring right at her.
“Mina,” She whispers, and the glimmer in her eyes is tell enough that it’s her. She’s who Nayeon has been waiting for.
The fables, stories, the dreams and the music and the singing and the way her heart sings her name — None of it could have warned her for how absolutely colossal this moment is. She tastes the name on her tongue, sweet, peppermint — she’ll have to ask Mina later if she likes mint chocolate — and it tastes like beginnings.
“Mina,” She says, “Mina,” and Nayeon doesn’t care that she’s just dropped all of her files because this is her.
This is Mina.