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Danielle doesn’t remember falling in love.
She only remembers waking up and finding herself lying on a couch. It was a warm day in late summer, and she felt the morning sun on her skin, gentle as a kiss on the forehead, but the lingering taste of alcohol on her tongue was bitter and dry.
The night before remained as an unpleasant blur of loud music and meaningless conversations, topped with the discomfort of feeling ever so slightly out of place, that now stuck to her skin, like the smell of smoke.
Then, when her senses finally returned to her, Danielle noticed a girl sitting by the kitchen table, surrounded by piles of textbooks, bathed in sunlight streaming in through the half-open blinds.
From then on, again and again, that image would return to Danielle like a recurring dream. She would sit in front of a blank canvas with her paintbrush hovering above the clean surface, uncertain where to even begin. She would sketch that face on napkins and the backs of receipts, hoping that at least one of them would look right. But like a poet unable to find the right words for their sonnet, she would lie awake at night, wondering if it was beyond her capabilities to capture even just a sliver of that beauty.
But at that moment in time, they didn't know each other's names, Danielle wasn't even sure if she wasn't just dreaming. Then, the girl spoke, her voice so soft that you could have mistaken it for a warm breeze that snuck in through the open window.
“Is everything alright?”
Danielle opened her mouth. She wanted to say no because her head was pounding, and she was overwhelmed with a strange sickness. But she also wanted to say yes because she hadn't been so vividly aware of her existence in such a long time without fearing a gnawing existential crisis that would come in the same heartbeat.
So, instead, she just nodded, like she had vomited out all the words she knew and replaced them with a stomach full of butterflies.
Everything that came after that melted away in the scorching midday sun. The bus ride back home, the meal she had that afternoon, the dream she had that night, they were all but afterthoughts. The only thing that remains of that day was the sight of Haerin’s face in the sun, her eyes amber in the light, her hair dark like the curtains of midnight and her cheeks rosy in the summer heat.
***
There are people that Danielle considers friends, people who she texts during boring lectures and shares a table with at lunch. Then, of course, there is Hanni. They have been attached at, the hip since middle school and seemingly never separated. Even when Hanni moved out of town for college, she would visit Danielle at least once a week to catch her up on anything that had been happening in her life.
Kang Haerin, however, isn't someone Danielle can call a friend. At most they are just acquaintances, but even that might be a reach if you consider the fact that they have barely even spoken a sum of twenty words to each other.
(“Sorry for always crashing on the couch,” Danielle said, scratching the back of her neck, after waking up from Hanni's birthday party. She still smelled the cologne of the guy who tried to hook up with her on the hem of her shirt, but the scent soon got overpowered by the calming earthiness of fresh coffee.
“It’s nothing.” Haerin's tone was impassive as she scooped a few coffee beans into her manual coffee grinder. “The couch isn't mine anyway.”)
So far, apart from the fact that she is Hanni’s roommate, Danielle has only gathered that Haerin is a physics major and someone you would never find at any party.
“She is a bit of an enigma,” Hanni says after taking a sip from her drink. “I just never seem to quite see through her.”
Danielle looks up from her sketchbook, the page still empty despite having spent twenty minutes staring holes into it. “But she seems nice.”
“I bet you just like the structure of her face,” Hanni scoffs playfully. “Or whatever you art people call that.”
“I’m not that shallow,” Danielle protests.
Later that night, at the party celebrating the end of midterms, Danielle thinks back to that conversation and wonders if she has been wrong all along.
“I just thought your face looked really pretty under the disco lights,” she hears the guy who has been trying to make a move on her say, and Danielle realizes she has just forgotten his name again.
It’s beautiful, but it's empty. Her professor's comment echoes in her mind.
Is it empty because I am, Danielle doesn't finish that thought. Instead, she drowns it out with another shot and a side of words that are too pretty to be real.
“What a romantic thing to say,” she smiles at him, but it doesn't reach her eyes.
***
There she was again, waking up on the couch with a blanket draped over her stomach that she doesn't remember being there last night.
“Sorry,” Haerin says mildly, eyes only half open and hair still tousled from sleep. “I didn't mean to wake you.”
For some reason, it is a strangely comforting sight. It's almost as if Danielle's whole world could crash and burn but Haerin would still be there, standing in the morning sun, blissfully unaware of anything. And Danielle decides to linger for a moment, unwilling to move on from this peaceful silence she only ever seems to find in Haerin.
“Is there something on my face?” Haerin asks, her cat-like eyes peering over the rims of her glasses as she observes Danielle like the carvings on an ancient vase, confusion mixed with curiosity.
“I just think you’re really pretty…” Danielle didn’t mean to say that out loud.
The air in the room stills for a moment, and Danielle doesn't dare to look at Haerin's face because she feels like her heart is going to burst if she even sees a crack in that perfectly calm facade she has grown so used to. She can hear the ticking of the wall clock and beneath that a gentle rain against the window, faint like a fading cry. But soon everything gets drowned out by her own drumming heart.
“Thank you…” after what feels like an eternity, she hears Haerin say. However, Danielle doesn’t have much time to linger on that answer, because Hanni has finally awoken from her deep slumber and walks into the room, still yawning.
“You good?” She gives Danielle a concerned look. “You look kind of… sick. Like, 40-degree-Celsius fever sick.”
“Oh, uh..” Danielle swallows, scrambling for answers. “I probably got sunburned from sleeping by the window.”
She hears Haerin let out a faint breath that almost sounds like a laugh.
Hanni convinces Danielle to stay for breakfast, which is how she ends up sitting right across Haerin by the table, chewing on a slightly over-baked slice of toast as she waits for Hanni to finish getting ready.
And in the silence that befalls them, Danielle begins to think. About the things that went wrong and about the things that went right. About all the sleepless nights spent staring at empty canvases and about the early mornings spent mesmerized by sun-kissed faces. But mostly, about the fact that Haerin has seemingly only ever seen her at her worst.
“That’s from you, right?” To Danielle's surprise, it's Haerin who breaks the silence, her voice calm like always. Danielle looks up and sees that her gaze is fixed on the frame hanging on the wall right next to her. It is a watercolor painting that depicts the view from a window. A tall green tree with little birds chirping on its branches, the sky blue and cloudless, the sun brilliant and bright, but the colors blurry and washed out, like an image captured a long time ago.
Danielle nods. She gave it to Hanni on her fourteenth birthday. That was almost six years ago, and now that Danielle looks at it, all she notices are imperfections. The line work lacks precision, the colours bleeding into each other creating messy edges.
“Admittedly not my proudest work,” she mutters sheepishly. “It's quite a mess.”
“I think it’s really charming.” Haerin’s words follow without a beat of hesitation, like they have been resting on her tongue, waiting to be released. Then, she continues, her voice becoming a little softer: “Reminds me a bit of my grandmother's backyard. She had trees that looked just like this.”
“Do you visit her often?” Danielle asks as she is overcome by a sense of curiosity. This feels like something new, an emotion that she has never seen on Haerin’s face before.
“Not anymore,” Haerin lowers her gaze to the butter knife lying on the table, the metal glaring under the light. There is almost a sense of longing in Haerin’s eyes and Danielle begins to wonder if it has always been there. “I used to see her more often before leaving Korea.”
On her bus ride back home, Danielle sits by the window and looks at the passing scenery that she is slowly growing used to. The dull concrete of the streets, the reflections on tall glass buildings, the expressionless faces under the gray sky of this crying city.
She thinks about Haerin. About the lights that catch in her eyes and glimmer with something Danielle can't read. About the words she uttered so carefully over the dinner table, almost like a confession. Danielle doesn't know why, but she finds pieces of herself in it. In the words, in the eyes, in the longing.
***
At some point, Danielle finally learns to accept that things aren't as easy as they used to be.
She looks at all the paintings surrounding hers. Everyone has a story to tell. Every stroke, every choice of colour, full of intentions and motions. Suddenly, she feels like she isn't supposed to be here, sitting in this chair, being in this room, dreaming of something grand she would never achieve.
“It's lacking something,” she hears her professor say, but his voice is merely a blur of frequencies.
Her phone in her pocket vibrates. The newest message from Hanni reads: “We can always talk if you want to.”
Danielle stares at the message until her eyes start to feel dry from the tension, and she wonders how you even begin to express a feeling that you have never put in words before.
Thank you for always being there for me.
Is the answer she settles on. Because she realizes that she has always taken her for granted, and that one should never take a friend like Hanni for granted.
***
Back at home, her mother wraps her hand around her arms, tears glimmering in her eyes, and says: “Have you not been eating well lately?”
There is a drawing that hangs in the hallway of their family home, right by the entrance to the kitchen. It shows a field of flowers. Some red, some blue, and some in an unnatural shade of green. Some resembling daisies, some resembling sunflowers, some oddly shaped like squares. Danielle remembers running past it on the day of her high school graduation and asking her mother: “Don’t you think we should change it for something that looks a bit better?”
Now, she is standing in front of it again, and all that she can see are those tiny hands that used to hold the crayons with a death grip, so tiny that almost nothing but those crayons could fit in them.
“Ah, I still remember how passionate about it you were.” Her father smiles at her and suddenly Danielle feels the urge to cry, like she is back to being that helpless child that didn't even know how to properly hold a pencil. “You spent hours upon hours on that one. We could barely even get you to have a bite of lunch.”
“You took me to see grandma's garden that day,” Danielle laughs, half-sincerely as she tries to blink away the tears that for some reason started to well up in her eyes. “And I wanted to have my own little garden. I guess I just really felt that spark of inspiration hit me.”
“And? Is that spark still there?” Her father asks, as if he had sensed the bitterness in her smile, the hesitation in her words. He always does.
“I don't know,” Danielle tells him honestly. “I just feel… exhausted.”
She is convinced that there has to be something worth continuing for, or that’s what she tries to tell herself as she picks up the paint brushes and tubes strewn across the floor of her room, exhausted and resigned, that spark that she has relied on for so long reduced to nothing but a smoldering fire.
But maybe, despite everything, there is also something she has gained.
Haerin has dyed her hair. It's now a muted sort of blonde. Danielle discovers that when she runs into her while browsing the self-help section inside a bookstore after deciding, for the third time this week, that she needs to turn her life around and make something better of it.
“Good afternoon,” Haerin greets her like she always does, soft voice and calm eyes. Only now, they are standing inside this half-empty bookstore on a Wednesday afternoon, and everything feels closer to reality than a dream. The light falls in from the tall windows and Danielle can see the little specks of dust dancing in the air, like little snowflakes falling down on them. But it's only spring now, and soon it will be summer again.
Haerin is still looking at her, almost smiling, and it suddenly occurs to Danielle how strange it is that she has never once felt humiliated by Haerin's gaze, not once felt the urge to cower, to run. Instead, she looks back into those eyes and, even if just for a moment, lets herself be seen.
It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment they become something akin to friends. Maybe it's when they sit by the window in a quiet corner of the cafe inside the bookshop and Danielle runs a thumb over the knuckles of her left hand and tells Haerin that she is sorry for always showing up drunk at their apartment, that she is thankful that Haerin has been tolerating her, that she is working on being less of a mess. Or maybe it's when Haerin looks up from her book and lets out a laugh, easy and light.
“You know, I have actually always wanted to get to know you,” Haerin says as she looks out the window, the sky now slowly turning pink and purple. “Ever since I saw that painting on the kitchen wall, I wondered what kind of person would be behind it.”
“Did I disappoint you?”
“You definitely weren't what I was expecting.” Haerin’s smile softens, almost as if she notices the tenseness in Danielle’s body. “But now, I don't think I could picture anyone else.”
And it's the first time Danielle really sees Haerin, not in the blinding early morning sun that makes her seem almost otherworldly, but in a light that shows the texture of her skin, the dark circles under her eyes, the crinkle of her nose when she smiles.
Danielle thinks it fits her even better, this gentle dash of orange from the sunset, warm and, at the same time, melancholic.
***
For some people, change is something radical, like a storm that uproots everything in your life. For others, it is more gradual, like a river that smoothens the surface of rocks. And in Danielle's case, it starts like this:
Hanni moves out just before graduation and after getting a job offer from outside the country, she decides that it’s about time to leave this place behind to discover the world she has yet to meet.
The night before Hanni moved away for college, they sat on Danielle's bed, their heads leaned against the wall behind them
“Where do you think we will be in ten years?” Hanni asked her back then and Danielle remembers staring at the hand-painted stars on her ceiling, not knowing how to respond.
There was always a clear image of Hanni in her mind. Hanni waving goodbye as she stepped on the train, Hanni strumming her guitar and singing, Hanni laughing in the scorching summer sun. And in ten years, even in twenty years, no matter how much she has changed, Danielle will still see pieces of that Hanni within her.
But no matter how clear that image of Hanni is, she just can't seem to see herself anywhere. In her vision of the future, she remains a shapeless figure.
And even now, as she watches Hanni disappear behind the gates of the airport, her face grown out of all her childhood features, Danielle can still not see herself anywhere else, almost as if she is stuck, lost in the busy crowd moving past her.
“Let’s go back.” Haerin pulls her sleeve gently, and when their gazes meet, Danielle catches a glimpse of her own reflection in Haerin's eye. It's blurry, but Danielle sees herself a bit clearer now. Tired, exhausted, lost. And in ten, maybe even twenty years, nothing will have changed, and she will still be where she is now.
But as the engine roars awake and the bus starts to move forward, Danielle stares at Haerin's face in the sun and wonders if this is how change starts. Quiet, calm, something you can miss in the blink of an eye.
***
Danielle officially moves in with Haerin a few days afterwards, although her moving boxes have been blocking off the living room for weeks already. It all started a few months before Hanni moved out, when they were sitting on the couch watching a movie together in the half darkness. Despite being the one who initiated the movie night, Hanni was already well asleep at that point, inhaling and exhaling softly as she lay on Danielle's shoulder.
The bright light of the TV screen flickered across Haerin's face, and Danielle tried to sketch an image of Haerin in her mind. The sharpness of her gaze against the gentle curves of her eyebrows. The coolness of her expression against the faint rosy blush running across her cheeks. An image full of contradictory tensions, shrouded by a mist that no one can really see through.
“Hanni asked me if I wanted to move in after she left,” Danielle absentmindedly says. “I told her that I wanted to ask about your opinion first.”
Haerin looked at her, seeming slightly worried. “What makes you think I don't want you here?”
“Half of the time we have known each other, you either saw me incredibly drunk or incredibly hungover,” Danielle reminds her. “I would argue that your first impression of me isn’t exactly great.”
“I hold no grudge,” Haerin laughs. “Or at least people tell me I don’t.”
“So… that means I’m welcome?”
“Of course.”
Haerin’s voice is steady, her gaze traveling to the painting that hangs on the wall.
“In a way, you have always been here.”
She settles in like she has always been a part of this constellation. The wilting houseplants on the windowsill, the random little figurines distributed across the room, the tall bookshelf next to the mini telescope, and Danielle right in the middle of everything, sitting on the couch where everything started.
Haerin helps Danielle unbox everything. Houseplants and books. Paintbrushes and sketchbooks. Paint tubes with colours that she can’t name.
Yet, it doesn't immediately get easier. It is still difficult to pick up the paintbrush and not feel exhausted before even trying. Sometimes she would sit in the dark, staring at the blank canvas in front of her, and suddenly start missing home. The vibrant blues and the crying of the cicadas, the glistening lakes and the endless summers.
“Still awake?” Haerin asks her when they run into each other in the kitchen. The clock on the wall shows two in the morning.
“Yeah, I am a bit stuck,” Danielle sighs, sitting down at the table where Haerin has sprawled out all her worksheets and textbooks. Numbers and letters that don't mean anything to Danielle, yet Haerin seems to see the world in them.
“Is it fun?”
Haerin lifts her gaze from her work. “Physics?”
Danielle nods, her head and eyelids suddenly feeling heavy. She puts her chin on her folded arms on the table, her eyes still fixed on Haerin's face.
“Well, fun is not exactly how I would describe it.” Haerin's voice is soft, almost like a lullaby, and Danielle feels herself drifting in and out of consciousness. “But I have always wanted to understand the world a little better. It’s not much, but it offers the answers to some questions.”
“Like?”
“Hmm,” Haerin spins the ballpoint pen in her hand a few times, seemingly deep in thought. “Like the way a microwave works?”
Danielle lets out a laugh. “So, that’s your main motivation for battling all these formulas and numbers?”
“It starts small,” Haerin tells her matter-of-factly. “And well, microwaves are arguably quite an integral part of our everyday life. From microwave ovens to radars, nothing would function without them.”
“I see you are quite passionate about microwaves.” Danielle props her chin up with an arm, amused by the way Haerin gets so strangely passionate about the most mundane things.
“And you?” Haerin asks, her eyes meeting Danielle's. “Why did you decide to study art?”
Danielle sits in silence for a minute, thinking about all the times she has been asked that same question and how she has responded. In college applications and motivation letters, in clubs over the music drowning her voice out, but the actual answers she gives are now but a blur to her.
“Honestly, I don't remember anymore.”
That night, Danielle dreams about her childhood bedroom. She finds a younger version of herself sitting on the bed, brows furrowed in concentration.
“Can I ask you something?” Danielle kneels down by the bed.
“Sure!” Young Danielle grins, dried paint still sticking to her cheeks.
“Why do you like doing this?”
“Why…I have never really thought about it…” Young Danielle pouts, seemingly deep in thought. Then, her eyes light up. “I think it’s because I want to show people how pretty the world is!”
“But not everything in this world is pretty.”
Young Danielle crosses her arms defensively. “Well, my dad always says beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And because I am the beholder, I get to decide what the world looks like!”
How silly, Danielle thinks before waking up. In the end, it was really that simple.
***
After a while, things become a little easier, even if they aren't what they used to be before.
“My hair looks horrible in the morning,” Haerin lets out a soft sigh when she finds Danielle hunched over her sketchbook again. “I don't get why you keep drawing me when I look the worst I could possibly look.”
“That's the charm of it,” Danielle grins. “And also, you have arguably seen me looking worse, and yet, you never hear me complaining.”
“Fair point,” Haerin says after taking a sip from her morning coffee. “I still remember when you-”
“Hey,” Danielle stops her with a playful glare. “You don't want to upset me on a beautiful Monday morning.”
Danielle starts painting again, not for a deadline or the evaluation of anyone. She paints because she sees birds on her windowsill, their blue feathers shimmering in the daylight. She paints because the flowers in the parks are blooming again, their colors vibrant like they have never faded. She paints because she finds Haerin asleep on the couch, her expression calm and unguarded.
Sometimes, Haerin would sit beside Danielle and watch her make the sketches, the sounds of pencil against paper filling the gaps of silence.
“Don't you think your face looks a bit…wonky?” Danielle stares down at the half-finished sketch, unsure if the eyes or the lips are the issue.
Haerin leans over to take a look. “I think it looks just fine. Unmistakably me.”
“You think so?” Danielle laughs. “You said that last time too. And that one looked completely different from this one.”
“Well, the lighting was a little different last time,” Haerin explains, almost as if she were the one who drew the sketch.
It feels easy to show Haerin sides of herself that aren't perfect. Half-finished paintings, abandoned sketches, silent breakdowns in her room, all the things that would have made her feel stripped naked, she now wants them to be seen. As an act of trust, in Haerin, but also in herself.
So, she lets Haerin find her lying on the floor, paint tubes and brushes scattered around her, her unfinished painting staring down at her tauntingly.
Haerin never says much, no questions or comments. Instead, she just wordlessly sits down beside Danielle. In the mutual silence that washes over them, Danielle watches the play of light and shadows on Haerin's face.
“Do you miss her?” The question escapes Danielle when she catches that familiar glimmer in Haerin’s eyes, almost like tears. “I mean... your grandmother.”
There is a momentary silence as Haerin continues to stare at the painting, seemingly trying to formulate an answer. “I don't know,” she finally tells her. “At some point, I just stopped thinking about what exactly it is that I miss.”
Then, she looks back at that half-finished painting, ambiguous blobs of colors blur together into something that is just beginning to take shape. “But you… your paintings… they make me feel like I have regained something I never realized I lost.”
Danielle doesn't blink. She can feel the sticky paint between her fingers and see the sweat on Haerin's forehead. A warm afternoon breeze seeps in through the open window. Outside, the birds are chirping, and the air in the room carries an uncomfortable humidity. When she closes her eyes, she can almost smell the sea salt in the air and hear the waves crashing against the shore. Then, she opens her eyes again.
“Do you want to see the ocean?”
Haerin looks at Danielle, her eyes amber in the sunlight. “Right now?”
“Right now,” Danielle says, almost like a promise.
The train ride from the city to the nearest beach lasts about two hours. Back home the ocean was just at their doorstep. Still, it’s better than nothing, Danielle tells herself as she dozes off. When she wakes up, she is lying on Haerin’s shoulder, the train passing the coastline and the ocean shimmering in the sun.
There are surprisingly not many people at the beach despite the good weather. Danielle only catches sight of a few mothers playing with their young children. They end up sitting somewhere underneath the shadows, on the bark of a tree that had been washed ashore. The sky is a bright shade of blue and the sun glistens on the surface of the water.
“My father always used to drive me and my sister out to the beach whenever we felt down,” Danielle tells Haerin as she closes her eyes, feeling the sun on her skin. “He always said that the blue of the ocean is the cure to everything.”
“I see,” Haerin hums. “So, that’s why you brought me here?”
“Partly,” Danielle gazes into the pale blue sky. It looks no different from the one back home. “I think I needed it for myself too.”
A few children run across the warm sand, their laughs distant but vibrant. Haerin's gaze follows them.
“My parents weren’t home often,” Haerin says as she absentmindedly draws shapes into the sand, two big ones and one smaller one. Then, she wipes them away with the sole of her shoe. “But I guess they liked me for never complaining. About that. Or anything at all.”
Haerin's face is calm, waveless, but Danielle knows that somewhere deep down, it still stings. Even if it's small like a paper cut, once you notice it bleeding, you can never seem to ignore the pain.
“I didn't say anything when they told me we were moving away. I just accepted it, like everything else in my life,” Haerin says, looking down at the sand that is still clinging to her fingertips. “Maybe I was just too scared to think about what it really meant. Leaving everything behind, starting a new life.”
The sun is now at its highest point in the sky, the shadow now barely hiding them from its blinding light.
“But lately, I feel a bit more at home.”
When Haerin's gaze meets hers, Danielle finally sees everything clear as daylight.
“And I think I have you to thank for that.”
Danielle doesn't remember falling in love.
But she remembers the waves crashing against the shore, the cries of seagulls echoing through the sky, the voice of a mother telling her children it's time to go home, and Haerin’s face in the sun, calm and content.
***
When Hanni comes back to visit them in spring, the first thing she notices is the new painting on the wall.
“So, I guess life without me wasn't so bad after all?”
“Oh, come on!” Danielle laughs as she gives her a tight hug. “You know how much I have missed you!”
She had painted that right after they returned from the beach that day, still smelling the saltwater and warm sand on her skin. Brushstrokes in vibrant blues and yellows that seem haphazard at first glance outline the scenery of a coastline on a hot summer day. And if you look carefully, you might see the two figures standing in the water, facing each other in the light of the sun.