11:47 p.m. Juno snatched my phone from the corner table of the café. On the screen: a single note titled “Tomorrow.”
She will be smaller and warmer than in her photos. In a month she will say, “Should we slow things down a bit?”
The other nine lines stay sealed. Juno glared. “You’ve already written the breakup script for someone whose face you haven’t even seen.” I pretended not to hear and gulped my Americano. The future had already lodged, icy, on the back of my tongue.
Dress Rehearsal
Why, the night before we meet someone, do we picture the moment they turn cold? It wasn’t fear. It was certainty: that I would come to love her, and that she would leave. The vision was so sharp my heart kept clenching and unclenching. Am I falling in love so I can be wounded? Or practicing the wound so I can love?
Fragments of the Past
1. Minseo
March 2019, first night of the orientation trip. I drafted and deleted a Kakao message to senior Minseo twenty-seven times.
“May I lose my other half over a beer with you and tell you the story?”
Fourteen minutes later: “lol why ‘other half’?” I already knew “I’m embarrassed this morning” would arrive at 8:27 a.m. So nothing ever began.
2. Sujin
Autumn 2021, a dating app. Matched with designer Sujin. Before meeting her I had already pictured “our eyes meeting in the Line 2 platform after work.” That night I even scouted the convenience store near her flat. The date was brief. We traded not our words but an unspoken “It was nice, but…” that hadn’t yet arrived.
12:12 a.m. I still haven’t closed the note
I’m heading out to meet her now. Only two of the eleven lines have been revealed; the rest lie sealed like envelopes.
If she ever reads this note, she might choose not to leave.
I open the door. Even as I step outside, the note remains open. The sentences hold their breath, waiting for an ending still unwritten. The screen refuses to dim. Its glow spills across the dawn-empty street.