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Yuri doesn’t watch it right away.
The notification sits there longer than it should. A fan account she doesn’t follow, reposted onto her timeline anyway, like the universe decided subtlety was optional today.
JESSICA PERFORMS GIRLS’ GENERATION SONGS FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE 2014
Her body reacts before her mind can catch up.
The sudden increase in her heartbeat catches her off guard.
She tries to swallow, but there’s a knot in her throat.
She locks her phone. Puts it face down on the table. Stares at the grain of the wood like it might rearrange itself into something easier.
There’s a feeling in the pit of her stomach. A discomfort she refuses to acknowledge. She coughs through a raspy, tight throat and gets up, leaving her phone on the table beside the now lukewarm cup of tea she never got around to touching.
“It’s so cold today,” she mutters to herself as she heads to her bedroom. The advanced heating system and triple-layered windows keep her apartment well insulated from the harsh Seoul winter, where she usually walks around in short-sleeve T-shirts and silk pajama shorts.
This time, though, she shivers.
Yuri pulls a clean hoodie from her closet, a black cap, a mask. Finally, she grabs the coat she left hanging on the rack by the door and gets ready to head out, slipping her phone into her pocket before she does.
The Seven Eleven down the block is fairly large for a residential area. Perfect for Yuri to pick up whatever she needs for her small, temporary apartment in Seoul, like… uh, -she scans the aisles- laundry detergent.
And it’s there, surrounded by cleaning supplies, far from the privacy of her home, from the confrontational silence, from intimacy itself, that Yuri pulls out her phone.
There’s something about the ordinary, mundane nature of a convenience store that makes it feel like a safe place to check the news. As if opening it somewhere public strips it of its weight. Like something she’s just glancing at in passing, in between other important things she definitely needs to get done.
So now, under harsh white lights and with her AirPods in, Yuri scrolls.
A clip loads by accident, autoplay doing what she doesn’t have the courage to do herself. The sound hits first, not even the visuals. Just that familiar opening note, slightly rearranged, pitched to fit her voice now.
Jessica’s voice.
It’s steadier than Yuri remembers. Fuller. Like it learned how to stand on its own.
Yuri’s thumb freezes.
She doesn’t breathe until the first line is over.
There’s something unreal about it. Like watching a ghost walk through a house that once belonged to them, touching furniture that still remembers their hands. Jessica doesn’t look like she’s pretending nothing happened. She looks like she knows everything happened.. and sang anyway.
Yuri’s chest tightens, sharp and sudden, like her body reached a conclusion her mind hasn’t caught up to yet.
She exits the app.
Then opens it again.
Then saves the video.
She tells herself it’s just for later. For context. For understanding the public reaction. As if she hasn’t already memorized the way Jessica’s eyes lift toward the crowd during the chorus, like she’s bracing herself for something. Love, rejection, memory, all of it indistinguishable at that distance.
Yuri tosses the phone back into her pocket like it burned her.
But later that night, in the darkness of her bedroom, after hours of tossing and turning, unable to drift off, she reaches for it again. Fingers already knowing where to go.
It’s like falling back into old habits. Back to those dark days when one glass of wine a night would turn into a bottle, and she’d lose herself in an Instagram rabbit hole, scrolling and scrolling, desperate to find something that would make her feel close to her again.
This time it’s a fancam. Close-up. Unsteady. Someone in the crowd gasps when the song starts, and Yuri hates how much that sound gets to her. As if the audience just collectively realized something they weren’t supposed to be allowed to want.
Jessica smiles halfway through. Not wide. Not performative. Just a small, private curve of her mouth, like she’s remembering something no one else can see.
Yuri knows that smile.
It used to mean I can do this.
It used to mean watch me.
Her throat burns.
She thinks about all the times that smile was meant for her. All the things it used to say without speaking. All the ways they learned, over time, to look past each other instead. All the things that were easier when they were younger and didn’t yet know how permanent the consequences could be.
Suddenly, her phone buzzes. As if it isn’t close to three in the morning.
Yuri doesn’t open the message right away. She already knows what it will be: a link, probably. Or a did you see? wrapped in casual language, like it isn’t loaded with history.
She opens it.
Joohyun: Are you okay?
Of course it’s Seohyun. Always precise. Always aimed directly at the truth.
Yuri exhales through her nose, slow and controlled.
Yuri: Yeah. Just surprised.
A lie, but a gentle one. The kind people accept because it makes things easier.
Seohyun doesn’t respond immediately. When she does, it’s short.
Joohyun: She looks happy.
Yuri stares at the words until they blur.
Happy.
That’s the part that hurts the most, she realizes. Not the songs, not the memories, not even the absence. It’s the fact that Jessica looks whole.
For over eleven years, Yuri has lived with the feeling that something is missing. As if, when Jessica left - when they left her, she took a piece of her heart with her. And she never got it back.
Yuri is certain that something inside her isn’t quite right, like if they were to pull her chest open, they’d find a hole there. Like something had pierced straight through it. And Yuri knows exactly what shape it has.
No matter what she does, she can’t seem to fill the space. She can’t close the gap, the gap between all the versions of herself. The version of herself that had Jessica. The version of herself that pushed her away. And the version of herself that has grown older and wiser, without her.
Yuri still wonders if she will ever feel whole again.
Sleep doesn’t come that night. Not really. Just a light slumber, and a certain melodic voice echoing in her ears.
It’s the next morning when she gets a notification from their group chat.
Not their old chat, that one is buried somewhere deep in Kakao, untouched for years, preserved like a fossil they’re all afraid to excavate, but the newer one. The one that exists because time moved on whether they wanted it to or not.
The new one, though, has been silent for weeks. A normalcy that settled over the years as Girls’ Generation became less active. A silence that makes up for all the busy, loud, restless days they spent together in their early twenties. This group chat only comes alive when there’s a birthday or anniversary coming up, with the occasional meme or TikTok shared in between.
So today, when her phone lights up with one new message from Tiffany, Yuri sighs.
It’s a video of Princess, her dog, happily chasing pigeons at the park as Tiffany walks behind her. It’s casual. Harmless. Just their old friend sharing a cute moment of her pet.
But there’s something mechanical about it. Something forced. Intentional.
And Yuri recognizes mechanical. It’s the way they were trained to live for a long time.
Yuri is usually the first to react whenever one of her members shares something about their pets. This time, though, she just stares.
It’s expected when Sooyoung is the first to reply, sending a picture of her own dog. Soon enough, everyone is sharing their latest photo or video. Even the ones who initially only reacted to Tiffany’s message with an emoji join in.
A little uneasy, a little tired, Yuri opens her iPhone’s photo library, searching for the last picture she took of Dooe before leaving Jeju that same week. It comes in last, after a video of Sogeum, one of Sunny’s cats.
Yuri can’t help but stare at all the messages. Their eight four-legged children.
Eight.
A rare thought crosses her mind. A dangerous one, a domestic one. Yuri wonders if she ever got a pet in the end.
She types it.
She stares at it.
The Yuri is typing bubble lingers on the other members’ screens for far too long, she knows.
Do you think she has one? Delete.
She sighs, tells herself she’s being overly sensitive. That this isn’t worth losing her composure over. She can’t spiral. Can’t go down that road again.
And right then, as if they know exactly what she’s thinking, as if they all know each other in a way only people who went through the most unique, hardest, happiest, and most dehumanizing experiences together as young adults could, one last message is sent to the group chat that day.
Sunkyu: Sogeum and I were listening to some old songs yesterday.
Someone reacts with a heart.
Someone else reacts with a teary-eyed emoji.
No one says her name.
No one brings her up.
They’re all very good at this now. Acknowledging without touching.
Yuri closes KakaoTalk and drops onto her living room couch. She opens another app. She doesn’t type Jessica’s name. She never does. She scrolls until the algorithm gives her what it knows she wants: another clip, another angle, another version of the same moment, repeated like proof.
At some point, she stops pretending she’s just curious. She watches until the end.
When it’s over, her phone rests against her chest, the echo of the final note still vibrating somewhere behind her ribs.
Old habits really do die hard, it seems. Because a familiar impulse, an old, well-worn fantasy, crosses Yuri’s mind.
She thinks about texting.
She picks up the phone again, opens KakaoTalk, presses add. She doesn’t have the number saved, she hasn’t for a long time. But Yuri knows it by heart; has known it since she was twenty years old. Contrary to what most people might think, Jessica never changed it.
Yuri opens Jessica’s KakaoTalk chat. It greets her with an empty, pale blue screen. The old messages aren’t there, of course. Years of history - their playful banter, their soft good nights and good mornings, the casual can you pick up some milk on your way home?, the silence of those last few weeks - all of it gone forever, as if it never existed at all.
It’s safer this way.
Her fingers hover over the keyboard for a moment. Then she types,
You did well.
The twinkling cursor stares back at her.
Yuri remembers the first time she had the impulse to text her. April 2015. About six months after that day. She’d searched for Jessica’s chat with a racing mind and shaky hands… only to realize she’d been blocked. Jessica had blocked her.
It landed like a slap to the face. Yuri is sure that’s exactly how it was meant to feel.
She didn’t know what she’d expected. She should have known. But still far too self-absorbed, far too immature, Yuri felt upset.
She remembers the bitterness, remembers opening Instagram and remembers, in a blur of anger and hurt, pressing like on Jessica’s latest post anyway. Whatever childish point she was trying to prove. (Jessica deleted the post ten minutes later).
She remembers the second time too. Around five years later, during darker days, when the weight of her choices had started to press in on her chest. Just like now, she typed the well-memorized number into her phone and opened Jessica’s KakaoTalk chat.
She wasn’t blocked anymore.
Yuri remembers the strange relief of it, the way the distance suddenly felt shorter. A warmth spread through her body, fragile and dangerous… and it only made her want more. Like a drug. Like a painkiller.
So she didn’t text.
Too afraid to mess up the fragility of this newfound warmth, she left things exactly where they were. Instead, every night, Yuri would get into bed and stare at the empty chat; watch Jessica’s number (no name, no saved contact) at the top of the chat appear online and disappear again, until she fell asleep. Like a psychotic attempt to feel closer.
Yuri recalls that her one smart decision was not reaching out. So again, today, she doesn’t.
Instead, she opens her social media apps.
This time, she types Jessica’s name into the search bar.
She doesn’t scroll compulsively. She looks for the fancams with better sound and presses play.
And as she listens to the voice she loves most sing those old songs - the ones that belong to her just as much - Yuri doesn’t feel like she’s slipping back into an old habit.
There’s no false sense of closeness this time.
If anything, it feels like distance.
So she keeps watching. She keeps listening. And as her eyelids begin to flutter closed, with Jessica’s voice wrapped loosely around her, it feels like Yuri is waving goodbye in return.
For us, in this world,
All the pain that kept coming back,
Now... goodbye.
The echo of the final note vibrates somewhere behind her ribs.