Sublimation(98)

You’re a half hour away from home. You don’t really want to go back to your apartment. You walk slowly down the dark, tree-lined street. You don’t know where else to go, except home.



* * *



It’s a disproportionate consequence, really, for God to divide the world and send his creations out into the wilderness just because they made one mistake. They had no idea what the punishment would be. It was the first time this had ever happened. The punishment doesn’t fit the crime.



* * *



You end up defaulting to taking the subway back to your apartment. It’s less crowded than the way over, the commuter crush having dissipated. You snag a seat and try and distract yourself with a game on your phone, but the little animations of bubbles exploding don’t cut the gnawing bad feeling out of your brain.

Too many people want things from you, that’s the problem. Megan wants you to follow her plans. Drew wants you to follow his. Yujin has wanted your life for your entire existence. Soyoung-Rose wanted your help before you even met, and what does she want now? She wants you to somehow come up with some … solution to the Mitosis problem? She wants you to thread the political needle that fits whatever sense of ethics she has, while not screwing yourself over? She wants you to blow up your life? No one is asking you for things that are reasonable to give.

You don’t know what point that Soyoung said you were missing. Unless she meant that she cared about the Mitosis rollout, how IIS and Mergebreak would handle it. Which was ridiculous. Of course you knew she cared. You had argued about it. You didn’t like what was going to happen, either. But you had to live in the world as it existed. You couldn’t create Soyoung a different one.

I’m sorry, you type and erase.

I was trying to stand up for you, you type and erase.

You think about it for a moment. You imagine being Soyoung.

I really wouldn’t have said anything, you type. You stare at the words for another moment. You erase them. You set your phone on do not disturb, and put the phone back in your pocket and close your eyes. You know this is a dumb thing to do on the subway, but you do it anyway.



* * *



There is no way for the man on the other side of the Auraji to know if the woman wants him back.



* * *



You manage to keep yourself from checking your phone again until right before you go to sleep. Then you finally take a look at your glowing screen, squinting in the darkness of your lofted bedroom. There’s nothing from Soyoung. You want to send Soyoung paragraphs. You want to explain everything you’re thinking. You want to believe that by explaining every line and facet of your thought process, you could convince her. You know this is a bad idea.

There was a thing you used to do, back when you were in school. When you wanted to procrastinate on a subject, you worked on a different class’s assignment instead. Lateral moves. Math problems exchanged for history essays. History essays exchanged for English workbooks. It made it easier.

You exit out of your messages and you go to your contacts. You go to favorites before remembering she isn’t there anymore. You find Petra’s number. You hesitate, and then call it.

You hope she picks up. You hope she doesn’t pick up.

She picks up.

“Hi, Jay?”

Her voice is bright, and it sounds like she’s cooking something while she’s talking to you, there are vague kitchen sounds coming from her end. You’re thrown into a vivid sense memory of all the times you cooked with her. You haven’t been cooking much since she left.

“Why did you break up with me?”

The words fit in your mouth like they belong there. You’ve wanted to say them for so long.

Petra’s quiet on the other end. Just the sound of a tap running, the click of a burner being lit. She has you on speaker. You close your eyes. You imagine her in the kitchen. Drinking a glass of wine and stirring something. You imagine yourself in the room with her. Bringing her tongs or a cutting board or a second glass of wine.

“What could I have done, to fix things?” you say. “What did you want from me?”

She’s still quiet. You close your eyes. You feel very alone in your bedroom. Then she finally speaks.

“Jay, I think the things you could have done about our relationship, or the things I could have done, were all things that we would have had to have done a long time ago. At the beginning of everything, when we started dating. There wasn’t anything left to do, at the end. I didn’t want anything specific from you. I just—it wasn’t that serious. You hadn’t given me the opportunity to make it serious. I guess, in my heart, I just wanted to leave.”

“Okay,” you say. You don’t feel any better about Soyoung, but at least it’s a different sort of hurt in your chest now. You feel as hollow and as light as a shell. “Sorry to bother you. Thanks.”





SOYOUNG-ROSE


Soyoung puts the food away. She gives Dr. Crouton his dinner. She sits at her kitchen table under her single overhead light with her phone in front of her. She’s thinking about how everyone is so bad at knowing what anyone else wants. About how people can be so bad at knowing what they want for themselves. About where the line is, between wanting and knowing. How you can go and be sure. How you can stay and never be sure. How a foregone conclusion is only a foregone conclusion after the fact of its happening.