Sublimation(60)

“I should come up here more. But I always forget. I always want to do things, and then—where’s the time? I always feel like I’m wasting New York.”

“Ha—that’s sort of what Soyoung thought about Seoul, too.”

You lean against the table. You open the plastic takeout containers. You realize that you’re stalling for time with Soyoung. The food smells wonderful. You realize you’re also starving.

“You really shouldn’t have.”

“I have two full-time jobs, I can afford to buy you dinner,” she says.

You frown.

“How’s that working out?”

You hadn’t thought about the logistics of her situation before. If she hasn’t told anyone what has happened, then she’s responsible for two lives—two jobs, presumably, two sets of friends, family, two different schedules and worlds and time zones.

“It’s going okay,” she says. “I couldn’t keep this up for longer than a few months, but it’s doable for now. I think it’s going to start being obvious what’s happening after that, but—you can get a lot done by just telling people you’re sad, or traveling, or by posting photographs online of you doing things. Mostly people are busy with their own lives.”

She picks up a fork, rips the plastic. Takes the noodles. If you didn’t know she was reintegrated, there would be no way to tell. She furrows her brow.

You make a sort of apologetic gesture. You hadn’t meant to be caught staring. You feel like you’re stalling for time, because you are, but you also feel—depending on how the next conversation goes, you might not have the chance to talk with her again. She might no longer want to talk with you. The thought of that makes you kind of sad. You want to keep talking with her.

“If you don’t mind me asking, how does it … How do I word this? How does it … What is the feeling of remembering like?”



* * *



You had taken a class on diaspora, in college. You had thought that as an instance, as a first-generation maybe immigrant, you could get an easy A. You could write some bullshit about how you felt alienation from the culture around you in ways that were indescribable.

Did you feel alienation from the culture around you? You remembered being a kid, and being picked last in soccer games. You remembered getting yelled at by your mom and your dad silently looking on. You remembered standing in the middle of a crowded bus in Seoul and getting a breakup text. You didn’t know that the feeling of landing in JFK was qualitatively different from that.

You had written a lot of nothing, for that class. But the interviews stayed with you. You remember watching the old interviews of instances while sitting in a very uncomfortable plastic desk chair and then going back to your dorm room and comparing their reactions against the way you felt.



* * *



Soyoung frowns. She puts the noodles down. Drums her fingers against the table. Her gaze pinned to the skyline. Her profile is almost flat, just the sharp and elegant plane of her cheek.

“It’s like it happened twice, and they’re both real.”

She shakes her head.

“No, that’s not helpful for you. It’s more like you have twice the amount of data in your brain, but you don’t really get the context. Or when you do get the context, it’s the wrong context. Like, hm. Okay. Soyoung had never been to New York, right?”

“Sure.”

“She’d never been to the States at all. But she had wanted—well, she wanted a lot of things, but one of those things was to have everything that Rose had. All of her life. So she’s bringing this crazy perspective of, almost a sort of wonder, to the way she sees New York. And it’s so fucking infuriating as a filter on the way I see the world, because I can’t deal with wonder. I’ve lived here for years.”

“So it makes it obvious you’re not from—”

“Not even that, it’s just—there’s a mental gap. Like a glitch between what I know and what I also know. It’s—you’ll get it, when you reintegrate.”

“Sure,” you say, again.

“What’s that tone?”

“Nothing.”

A jolt of surprise somewhere in your neurons that she was able to read the apprehension in your voice so easily.

“Your birthday’s soon, right?” she says. “Yujin was worried about—”

“Military service. I know.”

The sword of Damocles that hangs over your other self’s head. You know. Three years of your life. His life. You know. You know. You have been thinking about this all day. It had been the malicious undercurrent to the conversation with Drew. You have been thinking about this for the last ten years of your life.

Soyoung smiles faintly, apologetically.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t needle. We already talked about this, anyway. The gap—” she says, gesturing back at her head. “We can just talk business. I shouldn’t pry.”

“No, it’s fine.”

“YJ,” she says. “Wait—YJ or Yujin, actually?”

“Either is OK,” you say. “Maybe YJ. Since. Well, everyone calls me that. Is it Soyoung, for you?”

You laugh. She smiles. She holds the takeout container out to you with her pretty manicured fingers. There’s a chip in her index nail. You don’t want to compare her to Petra, but there’s something about the eerie domesticity of it, the way Soyoung feels comfortable enough to hand you an open takeout container and the fork she already ate from.