Sublimation(69)

“No, she’s still not answering my calls. Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” you say, and leave it at that. You want to tell him about Megan’s visit, or that you’re going to be sending him a package by proxy, but that seems like too much to tell him over the phone. You wish you were in the same place. This is an impossibility. If you left—you know that you’ll instance again. You know that in your bones. You don’t need a third version of yourself running around.

But you think this conversation is strange enough that he would use his brain.

“You talk with Soyoung again? She told me everything was set.”

For a moment it looks like he’s frozen.

“Why’re you talking about Soyoung?”

His voice is very even. You frown.

“We’re friends,” you say. “I think you guys would get along okay. Since me and her, you know, we’re friends.”

“Just because I said yes to helping her doesn’t mean she’s going to want to be friends with me,” he says.

“Soyoung likes me,” you say. “She’d like you. We’re the same person. Just to be clear.”

“Yeah, I got that. What’s with you, today?”

You give an exaggerated shrug. “I’m fine. Just kind of tired. I’m going to head up and go sleep.”

“Sure,” he says. He looks very calm. “’Night.”

You hope he picks up what you’re putting down. You hope you’re similar enough, still, that your thought processes can be a clean mirror of his, that he’ll take your advice and talk to Soyoung, and by then, the USB drive will have gotten to her, and this can all be his problem for a bit.



* * *



What YJ doesn’t understand, and what you have no interest in telling him, is that there’s no future here for him to come back to, for the two of you to live here. There’s just the military service and Hell Joseon. Maybe the world for him-and-you is better, because then the combined self has an American degree, which helps, but then what? Just a job that takes twenty-three of your twenty-four hours.

Those thoughts make you feel like a bad person. You might be a bad person. You might just be having a quarter-life crisis. But you don’t know what else you would be doing with your life. On the bad days, you feel like you are putting your life on hold for YJ to live. And it’s stupid. You know it’s stupid, that YJ is having a hard time too, but you think he knows the same thing you know, in his heart. After all, you had wanted to leave. Just an accident of consciousness, of remembrance, that left you here and sent him forward.

Your worst fear is that YJ calls you one day and tells you that he got citizenship, but he’s not interested in reintegrating, and he is never coming back.





YJ


You’re not on a date. Or it is a date, but not in the way you’re accustomed to thinking about dates, where this is a step in trying to build something larger. Or it’s not a date, because you and Soyoung hadn’t defined your relationship other than an impermanent friend-something. Not exactly romantic. Not exactly anything that had long-term viability. You haven’t talked about your relationship with her, though you’d texted a little about when to meet up next.

But right now, the sun is shining and you’re walking through Central Park with Soyoung.

“Soyoung wanted to do tourist things,” she had said when you met her at the Columbus Circle entrance, beneath the big statue. “Stuff she had seen on TV.”

“Am I part of tourist things?”

She shrugs. She hands you a coffee. It’s your order: sweeter than coffee has any right to be, no milk.

You must look surprised, because the next thing she does is laugh.

“It’s just, you and Yujin have the same coffee order. Kind of funny,” she says.

“Thanks.”

“I didn’t want to go alone,” Soyoung says. “Seemed a little lonely. And no one else knows about…”

“Well, if I’m the only option.”

“I just thought it might be fun.”

“This is fun,” you say. You’re surprised to find that you mean it. You’re happy to be here.

“Okay,” she says, and she smiles, and you feel about seventeen years old.

You weren’t lying. It feels really good to be doing something so divorced from the rest of your life and relationships that it can exist in its own little bubble of feeling. And the fact that it’s completely temporary is a breath of fresh air. The thing with Petra—the thing with all your relationships—is that you always had to think about whether this was forever. About whether the version of you that had integrated Yujin back into your self could love that person. But here, there’s no future. Soyoung, as you know her now, will no longer exist. Whatever she and you do, in the moment, won’t last—there’s an expiration date built into the whole endeavor. Like having a relationship with a living ghost.

She doesn’t look like a ghost, though. She looks very human and alive.

“This part of it is okay,” she says. “Soyoung had always wanted to travel more. She would be really delighted to be here. Is really delighted, I guess.”

“How do you feel about it?”

She wrinkles her nose.