Sublimation(39)

“Grande Americano, black, and, um, one of those egg and cheese breakfast sandwich things?”

“Black coffee?”

Then Soyoung remembers: Rose liked her coffee with cream, with more sugar than necessary. Rose was caramel macchiatos and java chip Frappuccinos. Rose knew the names of the Starbucks breakfast sandwiches, had Star Rewards. Soyoung was the one who drank her coffee bitter unless it was for Instagram.

“Yeah,” Soyoung says. “They’ve got crazy amounts of Starbucks in Seoul now, did you know? I was so surprised. They sell these insane drinks that have like, pudding in them, sometimes. Frappuccinos on steroids. There weren’t really any coffee shops when I was a kid. Or maybe I just didn’t pay attention since I didn’t drink coffee.”

“Jesus, pudding?”

“You slurp it with the straw.”

Clarissa edges the car forward. Rolls down the window and rattles off their orders to the Starbucks employee. Soyoung passes her Rose’s credit card. Clarissa pushes it back and rolls the window back up.

“How was Korea?”

“It was good,” Soyoung says. Clarissa gives her a weird look.

“Cool.”

Soyoung bites her lip. Was “good” the right thing to call the trip? Is this what was expected of her? Would Rose have been honest here? Soyoung tries to remember. Her pasts blur together. She doesn’t quite remember what Rose-Before would have said. Only the clarity of her previous emotions and the outcomes.

She remembers calling Clarissa and asking if Clarissa could come pick up her cat, and explaining that Rose had to go to Korea for a funeral. She doesn’t remember whether she explained about her grandfather, whether she explained anything about why she was going, whether she showed any emotion through her speech or body language. She had felt very clear, in that moment. Like every action that followed was a natural outgrowth of the prior experience, water down a slope.

“So, um. Funeral went okay?” Clarissa asks.

“It was fine,” Soyoung says. “Kind of weird being back. But everyone was nice. It was kind of nice, I guess. To see my family again.”

These are the wrong words. She knows it the moment she says them. They’re too light. Rose had mourned her grandfather with the grief you would give to the death of a distant star. Soyoung had felt it like a wave that had scoured a piece of glass to a soft and edgeless finish. The flinch before the hit, so that the hit was almost a kindness. It was less that he was dead and more that a part of her childhood had died. That was too much to explain. It would have been too much to explain even if Clarissa had known Soyoung and not Rose. But she only knew Rose, and Rose’s sadness should have been a bloodless, clean thing. Intellectualized. Rose would have talked about how the trip had been a nostalgia bomb, how her other self had been weird, how the funeral was nothing like she had ever gone to, not in a bad way, just in a weird way, just in a way that divorced her from her past.

“It’s cool if you don’t want to talk about it,” Clarissa says awkwardly, rolling down the window so that the other Starbucks employee can hand them drinks and a limp sandwich bag that she passes to Soyoung.

Soyoung unwraps the sandwich. Takes a bite. Shoves down the nausea at that familiar-foreign taste. She almost wants to tell Clarissa the whole truth. Here’s what happened to me in Korea. Here’s who I am now. I am a different person than when my past-self got on that plane. Clarissa, your instance is three years out of sync. Get her back while you still can. No, never let her touch you. Clarissa, can’t you recognize that I’m no longer the girl who handed you a cat carrier, back then?

Soyoung takes a second bite of the sandwich. Crumbling egg, congealing cheese. It needs hot sauce. She remembers being the person who got overly expensive Starbucks-ciabatta-baconegg-cheese before class (not the person who got gilgeori toast for breakfast before class, even though the sandwiches were cooked in bad oil), remembers being the person who grew into the opinion that these were a pale imitation of a bodega baconeggandcheese. She remembers being someone who says baconeggandcheese all as one word.

“No, it’s fine,” Soyoung says. “I guess it was just an overall weird experience? Like I didn’t really know my grandfather that much, and so it really wasn’t that it was like … sad, as it turned out there was a bunch of business shit to sort out with his estate, and his house, and all that family junk. And I was staying with my instance, which was stressful. I mean, not because of the reintegration potential—she had a MERGEBREAK, I had a MERGEBREAK—but because, well, it’s not like a twin, you know? I mean, you know.”

“I get you.”

“Yeah, you know.”

As if repetition is truth. They merge back into traffic. The sun is blinding. Time feels like wobbly eggs. Soyoung feels like she’s made of wobbly eggs. Sleep deprivation is one of those forms of torture that they use on political prisoners; the sense of self starts to unravel. In Korea, it’s two in the morning.

“What’s your instance like?” Clarissa asks.

“A lot like me,” Soyoung says.

“Okay, I mean, paint me a word picture,” Clarissa says. “Come on, you talk with my instance all the time.”

Soyoung closes her eyes. Imagines herself. Her other self, in the present tense.

“Soyoung looks like me. Pretty much the same hair, just a little longer than mine. Dresses better than I do—I think that’s just cultural differences, though. Everyone in Seoul dresses so nice. Well, everyone our age. She wears makeup. I think her skin is a little worse? Not a lot worse, but I kind of thought it would be better.”