Sublimation(42)

You don’t know if you’re going to recognize Soyoung. But then she turns her head, and you catch the side of her profile, the straight line of her nose, the curve of her lip and that’s Soyoung, from high school.

Soyoung catches sight of you. She waves.

She grew up hot. That is, embarrassingly, terribly, the first thing you think. Your ancient crush on her means that you notice all the ways she’s changed: Her hair’s longer, she’s filled out in her hips, she’s got sort of a sharper cast to her face, like the last bit of her kiddie softness on her cheeks has been filed away, but the lips and her eyes have stayed the same. You have the urge to stand up straighter. To impress her. Oh, who are you kidding. When she looks at you, she must see the stupid teenage boy you always were with her.

But wait—no. This isn’t Korean Soyoung. The last time American Soyoung saw you, you were just kids. She has no memories of you as an awkward teenager. You can pretend that none of that ever happened.

“Soyoung? Hi, wow. It’s been a while.”

“Hi, YJ. It’s really nice to see you again.”

She holds out her hand for you to shake. You shake it. Her hand is warm. You really hope your palms aren’t sweating. She’s smiling at you, not like it’s an obligation, but like she’s actually pleased, a smile that twists her whole face in a beautiful crease.

“So, what’s up? Yujin said you wanted to meet up with me? Did you guys reconnect in Korea?”

“I had a really normal experience with him and my instance, yeah,” and she sounds exactly like you remember from high school, and it surprises you, that she would sound the same in two languages, in two lives.

You take a seat at the bar.

“Well, it’s nice to see you, even if it’s been a while.”

It’s the truth. You’d rather be here with an old friend, than sitting across a bar from a stranger. Though, you have to keep remembering: American Soyoung is a stranger. It’s hard to keep that in your mind, when you’re remembering her Korean self so vividly, along with all the things that come with her Korean self. The badly air-conditioned rooms in your high school. Going to the 7-Eleven and buying shrimp chips. It’s as if her presence is a totem pulling the memories out of your head.

Normally Korea feels like another universe. A parallel dimension. The country of your childhood and adolescence. Adulthood, for you, is synonymous with New York City. It’s synonymous with English. You don’t know the words for “leveraged buyout” or “taxable income” or the “blood-brain barrier” in Korean. Most of the time, you aren’t homesick. But now, looking at Soyoung, you suddenly miss being sixteen.

“What are you drinking? Anything good here?”

“Old-fashioned,” she says, holding up her glass filled with amber liquid. You must look vaguely puzzled, because she folds her arms.

“I like smoke,” she says. “I was one of those kids who wanted to like black coffee, too. Don’t be so sexist.”

“Hey. I just remember the last time I saw you drink it was green-grape soju.”

She laughs.

“When we skipped hagwon! And went to noraebang, and got Minsoo to buy us drinks, since he worked at the convenience store, and then—”

Soyoung hesitates. She’s also remembered the end of that night. Your pathetic confession. You really hate thinking about this, and most of the time you don’t—it lives in the part of your brain that contains your CSAT grades and the three weeks you seriously thought about walking halfway across the Han River bridge and climbing over the railing, except then some kid at school did that first, and after that, it would have seemed derivative.

Soyoung belongs to the period of time when you had felt like you could still be anything. One night you had all gone to karaoke, above the fried chicken place, and it always smelled a little like sweet spicy sauce and oil, but the place was cheap, and they didn’t make any fuss about the clearly underage patrons ordering alcohol, and they had a decent music selection, including a bunch of American music that Soyoung liked.

Soyoung had been wild about foreign music, then. You could take or leave music, but you had listened to some of it because she had liked it, and you had liked the way she stuck her pink tongue out while she was concentrating. Liking her had also made you feel pretty gross. Soyoung was Soyoung. She was “digging around in the dirt when you were six” Soyoung. She was “we didn’t talk for four years in middle school and the beginning of high school” Soyoung. What did you like about her? You liked her sense of direction. You liked the way she looked. You liked how she knew who she was.

It hadn’t been a planned confession. It had happened after you had stumbled out, filled with the good feeling of alcohol and camaraderie and you had mistaken all of this for closeness.

You had tugged Soyoung back behind the others.

“Kang Soyoung,” you had said. “I really like you. Will you go out with me?”

She had looked at you. And she had laughed.

But that was the other Soyoung, Korean Soyoung. This Soyoung hasn’t seen you since you were ten. You remember there had been a classroom party for her on a Friday. And then her instance had been back, next week. So this is who that ten-year-old grew up to be. You can’t blame her for anything.

In the present, Soyoung’s smile twists, a little embarrassed.