Sublimation(50)

And you imagined a world where you had absolute freedom to go wherever you want and still got to keep everything from your past. And you liked that idea, as much as both of you liked skipping the military service, as much as you were grateful that you were the one who left. If you could have everything, you wanted everything. If you could build yourself a future that you wanted to live in, you were happy to do so. So much of your adolescence had been subsumed in the mechanisms of success. You could keep going, for another decade. You had your whole life ahead of you.

You had asked yourself: “Do you want to reintegrate, someday?”

And you (the other you) had said, “Yes.”

It was nice, in a way. Two in the morning. Computer screen glowing. Imagining a future for yourself. One where the whole world was open to you, and there were no borders. Or, well, two countries, at least. But that was better than one. You don’t know why you wanted these things. You just did.





YUJIN


“Have you heard from Soyoung?”

Tae punctuates his question with a kick. The soccer ball goes flying, hits the target set up across the gym wall. It’s pouring outside. Sheets of rain thrum against the glass window. The streets are flooded, wind and rain going nearly horizontal. You hate monsoon season. The planned team practice had been canceled, so you had ended up at the indoor gym with Tae and a couple of the other guys.

“What?” you say. You toss another ball in Tae’s direction.

“Have you heard from Soyoung,” Tae says, bumping the ball a couple of times in the air with his knee before sending it slamming to the net.

You speak before you can think. “Man, she’s your fiancé. Has she not called you?”

This was rude. This implied that Soyoung and Tae had problems, which you knew that they did, because Soyoung had implied as much, because Soyoung was gone and not here. Tae was holding onto the fact that she hadn’t instanced a second time, when leaving last week. That he saw her singular self as proof of her eventual return to him. You and Tae weren’t the sort of friends that talked about feelings. And you had always felt that he didn’t dislike you, but you knew that he didn’t like the concept of you, as much as he thought you, as a person, were fine. You were Tae’s fiancé’s friend. His fiancé’s male friend. When things were good for them—which was most of the time—until now, it didn’t matter.

You would never bring this up with him. It would hurt his pride. If you brought it up, then he might ask why you were thinking these things. He might accuse you of sleeping with her. There would be no good way for you to explain that you wouldn’t do that. You didn’t mind jerking around people you didn’t care about, but like you told your instance, Soyoung is—you like Soyoung. You like Soyoung a lot, actually. Too much to sleep with her. If you slept with her—wow. That’s ruined forever. You don’t have a lot of friends who are girls.

Soyoung’s the only person you really feel like you can talk to, other than your other self. She’s—the thing about Soyoung is that she’s been really kind to you, as an adult. There’s a part of you that’s forever going to be the kid who got turned down by her, but you always go back to thinking about the night after you instanced, when she let you fall asleep in her dorm room and helped you avoid your family while you figured out how you wanted to handle things. Soyoung got you. You got her. You wanted her to be happy.

And yeah, okay. If Soyoung had been single when you reconnected, you might have asked her out again. But by then she had apparently found the only nice man in all of Seoul, so you gave that up easily as a loss. You didn’t want to try twice, anyway. That was too much for your pride. You didn’t have so many friends that you could lose one. And it kind of helped that your best friend was a girl. It made other girls trust you faster.

“She texted me when she landed,” Tae says. “But I was wondering if she had talked to you, because of her plans. Your instance.”

“Nope, she hasn’t called me,” you say. You don’t want to tell Tae about your conversation with your instance. That’s not his business.

You take a shot yourself. Feint to the left, then kick. Clean corner shot.

“Nice,” Tae says.

You never really understood what Soyoung saw in Tae. You didn’t really know what women wanted, actually, other than by trial and error. Women wanted a nice guy, except when they wanted a bad boy, except when they wanted you to read their minds.

“Why Tae?” you had once asked Soyoung. This had been soon after you had reconnected. Tae had seemed just—bland. Just some guy.

She had frowned a little, scrunched up her nose.

“It just feels comfortable with him,” she had said.

“I don’t get it.”

“You’ll get it when you meet the right girl,” she had said, drawing the last two words out all dramatic. You had rolled your eyes at her and thrown a napkin at her, and she had shrieked, and you had laughed.

You pick up the ball, bounce it a couple of times, off your knee, off your elbow. Horsing around. Not getting anywhere. You glance at Tae.

“Why didn’t you go with her?”

“She didn’t want me to,” Tae says. You toss him the ball. He catches it. Tosses it a couple of times in his hand. “She said it might look suspicious.”