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The moon is full tonight.
Yooyeon takes a step past the concrete edge of the sidewalk. Her sandals sink into the grass. As she walks further, the warm glow of the streetlights disappear. She trudges deeper into the abyss of the park.
It’s been three years since she’s last been here and yet she’s still too early. The damp cold of the grass clings to her bare ankles. She shivers and wraps her arms around herself, hands gripping her elbows.
Yooyeon keeps her gaze fixated straight ahead. Straining her eyes, she can faintly make out the looming silhouettes of pine trees at the edge of where the park dissolves into forest. Aside from the frantic buzzing of crickets, the night is silent. Even her footsteps barely make a sound, damp grass muffling most of it.
She stops walking and tilts her head up to the moon. It’s a cloudless night; the moon hangs solitary in the void of space. Yooyeon tenses. The sound of footsteps, muffled but obvious, hasn’t paused.
Someone else is in the park with her.
She swivels her head around. Maybe this is where she dies. This isn’t the death Yooyeon was predicting.
Her breathing accelerates to a sprint as she finds the intruder. The figure approaches from behind, a lamp in hand. Yooyeon can’t make out any features through the black nothingness of the park.
Yooyeon wonders if she should scream. Who would hear her? Will the trees and the moon report her missing? She clenches her fists and prepares herself anyways. If there’s one thing she knows about herself– she’ll die trying.
She opens her mouth and– the prospective murderer holds the lamp up. Yooyeon lets the scream die in her throat and exhales softly. She’ll live tonight.
“You nearly gave me a heart attack,” Yooyeon says.
Sohyun’s eyebrows furrow with worry. “You look cold.”
“I was ready to fight you.”
Sohyun takes the blue sweater that’s draped over her right shoulder and hands it to her. Yooyeon hadn’t even taken this out of her suitcase. How had she– Oh.
“Did my mother send you?”
“She was worried that you were out alone in the dark.” Sohyun helps her put her hand through a sleeve. “It’s dangerous.”
“I could’ve fought you if you were a killer.” Yooyeon tosses a weak punch in her direction.
Sohyun smiles. “I believe you.” Sohyun’s previously lanky arms are now firm with muscle and she seems to have gotten slightly taller in the years that have passed. Yooyeon doesn’t even believe herself.
“It’s too dark here.” Sohyun reaches out to take Yooyeon by the hand but hesitates before making contact. Yooyeon meets her halfway and takes her retreating hand. Sohyun steers them away from the forest. They walk slowly in the direction of streetlamps and safety.
“Aren’t you going to ask why I’m here?” Yooyeon shivers as a gust of wind cuts through.
Sohyun lightly squeezes her hand. “In the park or back home?”
Yooyeon isn’t sure she knows the answer to either of those questions.
“In the park.”
Sohyun tilts her head up to the sky. “It’s Chuseok. The moon is bright.” Sohyun’s lips curve into a smile. “I figured that you were here to see the rabbit pound rice into songpyeon.”
Yooyeon follows her gaze to the moon. Even from all the way down here Yooyeon can see the dark stains on its surface forming the rabbit and its mortar. But she knows from her introductory Astronomy class, a freshman year regret, that the rabbit on the moon is no divine creation but simply a collection of basaltic plains.
Yooyeon vaguely remembers her notes, the lines blurring into each other during late-night cram sessions.
Originally believed to be basins of water, the plains are called mare or maria: Latin for “sea.”
She can still recall each of their names. The rabbit’s head, diligently staring down at its mortar: Mare Serenitatis. The Sea of Serenity.
She looks at Sohyun and feels herself get tugged by the current to twelve years prior.
“Come swim with me,” Sohyun says.
Yooyeon digs her toes into the sand. “Isn’t it scary?”
“I guess.” Sohyun reaches out to tuck the strands of hair blowing into Yooyeon’s face behind her ear. “But I’ll be with you if you feel like swimming.” Sohyun smiles, easy and unrestrained.
Yooyeon watches her wade into the ocean.
Gazing up at the moon, Sohyun looks just as relaxed as she did at eight years old, swimming out into the unknown. Strands of Sohyun’s hair lightly flutter in the wind. The Sea of Serenity indeed.
“I’m sure you have your reasons for being here.” Sohyun has never been one to pry. Yooyeon is silently grateful for the reprieve after the onslaught of questions that Chuseok with her family always brings. “Either way, I’m glad to see you again.”
“I’m sorry I haven’t visited sooner,” Yooyeon says.
“You don’t need to apologize,” Sohyun gently swings their arms back and forth. “I didn’t visit you either. And you were busy.”
That’s the excuse Yooyeon has given for every Chuseok that she’s missed. It’s partly true. There’s always been another class to study for, another internship to chase. A tendril of guilt curls around her stomach regardless.
“What have you been up to?”
“I’m still working at the library,” Sohyun answers. “Not much has changed for me since I graduated.”
Sohyun’s voice is ocean blue, deep and familiar. Yooyeon lets herself sink into its depths.
“Do you remember Jeong Haerin? The tiny kid a block over?”
Of course Yooyeon remembers. In their little suburban pocket of the world everyone knew everyone.
“She’s in high school now.” Yooyeon lets her jaw drop a little. “I know right? She comes by the library sometimes to pick out a few YA novels.” Sohyun smiles fondly.
Yooyeon sputters. “I mean– she can read?” Sohyun leans into her, shoulders shaking with laughter.
“We’re so old, aren’t we?” Sohyun laughs even harder at that, tracing a familiar melody, strange and lilting like a whale song. Eventually, her laughter trails off, melting into the monochrome silence of the park.
“How have you been?” Sohyun asks. Yooyeon has answered this question at least six times tonight with various degrees of honesty.
“I’ve been–” she thinks of all-nighters and endless exams. “It’s been okay.”
Maybe Sohyun, in all her patience, deserves a better answer than that. Yooyeon stops walking and lets out a slow exhale. She pulls her arms around herself.
“This semester has been– it’s been rough.” Sohyun’s eyes tighten with concern as she waits for her to continue.
Sure, her grades are fine. But what do good grades mean in the face of another eight years of exhaustion before she even has a chance at becoming a doctor, let alone a surgeon like her father?
Yooyeon wonders what he sees when he looks up at the celestial bodies in the sky. Maybe he sees limbs and organs: Andromeda’s legs, Orion’s arms, a trembling heart at the center of the moon. She wishes the stars would reveal her fate too.
The words spill out from deep within her gut, coated in stomach acid and painful truth.
“I don’t know. Part of me is wondering if I should be doing something else.”
Yooyeon feels empty, viscera tossed out of the airlock into the space between them. Maybe this is why she hasn’t been home, hasn’t bothered to call. How could she, knowing that she’s wasted thirty-eight lunar cycles flying towards a dream that’s been dead for far longer?
Sohyun’s eyes crease with more kindness than she deserves and more wisdom than any twenty-year old ought to have.
Before she can respond, Yooyeon reaches out to feel the blunt edges of Sohyun’s dark hair, sitting handsomely above her shoulders. Sohyun’s mouth hangs slightly open, caught on the words she’s interrupted. Yooyeon can’t quite tell in the dark, but she imagines for a moment that she’s blushing.
The last time Yooyeon saw her, Sohyun’s hair was long enough to reach past her shoulder blades. Throughout the years, Sohyun’s hair length has waxed and waned with the inevitability of a moon cycle and the precarity of a middle schooler with scissors.
Yooyeon mourns the phases of her hair she’s missed in the past three years.
Running her fingers through Sohyun’s hair, Yooyeon whispers, “I missed you.”
She hadn’t intended for it to come out as breathless as it did. It hangs in the air between them, suspended and confessional.
Oh. Sohyun is definitely blushing. Yooyeon delights in the way that her lips curve into a shy crescent. “I missed you too,” she says.
Yooyeon aches at the thought of getting on that train.
The distance to Ewha University, only a couple hundred kilometers, pales in comparison to the distance to the moon. She can feel her heart fraying at the edges regardless, stretching at the seams to bridge the gap.
Sohyun holds her gaze, shy and resolute in equal measure. “I’ll be here if you come back.”
“I’ll be back soon.” This, if nothing else, Yooyeon knows to be true. She feels it in the tides in her stomach, as if the moon is relaying its agreement in cosmic certainty.
“It’s late.” Sohyun, says quietly.
A few meters away, the streetlamps greet them with a warm glow, quietly illuminating the roads and houses beyond the park.
On the sidewalk, Yooyeon looks back at the moon, at the selfless rabbit pounding rice into songpyeon, at the Sea of Serenity looking down at its mortar, at the trembling heart at the center, at Sohyun and her dark hair, forever waxing and waning and waiting.
Sohyun laces their fingers together. “I’ll take you home.”