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"What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.”
—James Baldwin, Nothing Personal
The first thing that Haewon does when she wakes up is fumble around for her phone to check the time. It's 9:46 in the morning, but that's not particularly important.
What's important is that in Australia, it is 10:46 in the morning, which means that Lily's flight landed in Melbourne approximately an hour and eleven minutes earlier, which means that in slightly under two hours she will arrive back home in Marysville, taking into consideration the spent waiting in the immigration line and baggage claim.
Haewon shoots her a text. How was the flight? Were you able to finish your book?
Despite her general grogginess from sleep and lack of coffee, Haewon's brain works automatically, the cogs turning without much intentional thought, having performed these same calculations over and over again. Doing them comes naturally now, like walking and breathing and thinking of Lily.
—
Lily complains, over a video call one night, about the still-brisk weather, about spring stubbornly refusing to give way to summer. If she had known she would have brought her leather jacket, she whines.
She's wearing an old sweater that she dug up from the forgotten depths of her childhood closet, one with a faded cartoon graphic on the front and that probably hasn't seen the light of day in years, given the way Lily's nose had scrunched up in disgust when she first found it and held it up to the phone for Haewon to see.
Haewon stifles a laugh. Lily had only packed t-shirts, shoulderless tops, and denim shorts.
The sweater looks cute on her, Haewon thinks, somehow simultaneously matching and clashing with the pajama shorts and fuzzy socks she is also sporting. Haewon tells her this and is rewarded with a pout.
Lily continues to rattle off a litany of grievances. She had been looking forward to going on picnics, she says, to sitting in the park with a good book. Amy and her were going to make a trip down to the beach. She was going to get her allotted exposure to vitamin D for the year.
Haewon nods along good-naturedly. She's sympathetic, of course. Lily only gets so much time in Australia, she wants her to be able to enjoy it to the fullest. But she's secretly grateful for the cold weather, although she's not going to say it out loud. Not while Lily is busy mourning her self-proclaimed hot girl summer.
Cold weather means lower risk of bushfires, of which Haewon has suddenly developed an irrational fear of ever since the first time Lily flew back home. She's more rational about it these days, but even now she can't help the sigh of relief that escapes her. All she wants is Lily to be happy, and more importantly, safe.
—
One week later, the chilliness explodes into a brilliant, blistering heat. Lily gets to have a few perfect days of summer before Haewon's worst fears come to life.
You should stay inside, Haewon urges, completely serious. She peers at Lily through her phone's front camera with gravitas.
From her place in the small FaceTime window insert on Haewon's screen, Lily huffs a little, eyes crinkling with an exasperated smile. The fires are in New Zealand, she points out. A whole ocean away. There's obvious affection in her voice. Haewon wishes she would take this more seriously.
But the smoke, she insists. It's a valid concern. The wind will blow more smoke over, and possibly even fire embers. Ash particulate could very well spell disaster, especially for singers like them. Haewon doesn't even want to imagine what a single inhale of smoky air could do to Lily's voice. Or general health, for that matter.
Lily laughs. It's hard for fire embers to cross the ocean, she says.
Haewon doesn't think that the Tasman Sea is a real ocean. She tells her as much, and Lily actually pauses to consider this, pursing her lips together before responding. It's still a bit of distance, doesn't Haewon agree?
Maybe. Haewon grumbles. She's starting to feel a bit silly.
Maybe, Lily echoes, laughing again.
—
Despite her apparent lack of shared concern, Lily does stay indoors, although Haewon suspects that it's less because of her insistence and more because the air outside Lily's windows has transformed into an alarming hue of orange. Haewon even feels a bit guilty, because she knows just how much Lily was looking forward to going home.
Haewon has only been to Marysville once, on a brief detour between concert dates, but she can still vividly recall how excited Lily had been to show them all the places and things she loved about her hometown, to share all the memories she accumulated while growing up there. It was a tiny town of only five hundred or so people, but Lily cherished it, and that was more than enough to make it special to Haewon too.
There's a bitterness in the back of her throat when she thinks about how Lily's been robbed. She swallows it down because Lily herself seems to have taken eveything in stride. Sirius and Mocha probably have it worse, Lily tells her. And the situation could be worse.
Haewon is acutely aware of this. The situation could be definitely be worse. Instead of being one fake-ocean away, the fires could be somewhere closer to Lily instead, like Melbourne. Or Marysville. Both would be terrible.
Haewon knows that Victoria is one of the most bushfire-prone regions on Earth. She's known this ever since she started paying attention to any news involving Australia. Ever since Lily Morrow made a meteoric entrance into her life, cementing Australia as a Very Important Place in Oh Haewon's Map of the World, despite it previously only amounting to some place vaguely south of where she lived.
—
Two days before Lily's flight back to Korea, the smoke finally clears up. Haewon feels oddly responsible. I'm sorry your vacation didn't turn out the way you wanted, unnie.
Lily's laying in her bed with the lights off, but Haewon can still make out her smile through the pixelated darkness. It's not her fault, Lily reassures her with sunny optimism. And besides, she still has tomorrow to have fun. In true Lily fashion, she says it with marked determination. Like it's a given that tomorrow is going to be the best day of her life.
Haewon finds that she believes it too.
Lily yawns. She asks if Haewon will remind her to check in for her flight tomorrow night.
Of course she will. Haewon already has a reminder set on her phone. She put it into her calendar three months ago immediately after Lily forwarded the email with her flight itinerary to her. But she's not even sure that she needs it, because Haewon knows every detail of Lily's flights by heart: when she left for Australia, when she's coming back, exactly how much time they've spent apart, down to the minute.
Haewon has spent an inordinate amount of time staring at that email, to the point that it's been committed to memory. Counting down the days, one by one, until she sees Lily again.