Yujin’s voice trembled through the receiver. “Jisoo’s gone. This morning.”
My hand clenched the bedsheet, cold sweat beading. Just hours ago Jisoo’s laugh had filled a two-a.m. Instagram Live; now it was finished. I swallowed an absurd laugh. And I’m not even sure why it tastes like relief.
A Black Tide, Red Lips
At the funeral-hall entrance I first saw Yujin and held my breath. Eyes swollen, hair uncombed, she walked toward me.
“I’m afraid I’ll catch a cold. Will you hold my hand?”
A small white hand emerged from her black suit, blue veins like a blurred map after rain. I took it and squeezed. Yujin shed no tears; instead she squeezed back.
Jisoo is dead? So the road is finally open, isn’t it.
Inside, the hall heaved with mourners. In the drifting incense I caught the scent of Yujin’s ex-boyfriend. Even in darkness her lips glinted crimson. They were hers, and they were the “forbidden zone” Jisoo had guarded for years.
Line Two, and a Memory Twisted
A week before Jisoo died I ran into Yujin’s ex on the subway. He had burrowed his face deep into his coat.
“She still remembers my cologne,” he murmured.
All evening he’d kept his head down, but now he lifted it. His eyes were clouded.
“No matter how I scrub, the scent won’t wash away. It’s like I’m still lingering on her skin.”
For a moment I thought of Jisoo. Perhaps she had smelled that same trace. She had been the sentinel of Yujin’s past.
As the train entered a tunnel, my reflection in the window smiled back at me. The sentinel is gone.
Whispers in the Chapel
“That guy used to be Jisoo’s boyfriend.”
“No, Jisoo didn’t have one.”
“Then who is he?”
Leaning against the wall, I let the gossip wash over me. I allowed them to believe I had been her lover. In savoring the misunderstanding, I was fingering the gift that someone’s death had laid in my palm.
Yujin approached. “Thank you. Jisoo would’ve liked that you came.”
I nodded. She doesn’t know: what Jisoo loved was the safeguarding of your past.
Basement Level 2, Section B
One month after Jisoo’s death, 11 p.m. Yujin and I stood in her apartment’s underground lot—Level 2, Section B. Fluorescents blinked like dying stars over an empty concrete plain.
“Actually, the day before, Jisoo asked me,” Yujin said. “She asked if what was between you and me was real.”
I tightened my fist inside my pocket.
“I told her it was. She smiled and said, ‘Then you’ve erased your past. Congratulations.’”
The air turned colder. Yujin stepped closer; the scrape of her heel echoed.
“I want to forget, too.”
She leaned against me. Caught between a cold pillar and colder shoulders, I summoned Jisoo’s last expression.
Had she known? That her death would guide these two bodies together.
The light died, then flared again. Yujin’s breath grazed my ear.
“Here, only the two of us exist.”
In the mingled smells of concrete and engine oil, I suddenly wondered if Jisoo was watching us even here.
The Vacancy Death Left
Like a lullaby drifting from the chapel, Yujin’s breathing seeped into me. Jisoo is absent. So the path is clear.
Overhead, a CCTV dome swiveled lazily toward us. A red light blinked.
We mourn. Yet inside the mourning we tally what another’s death has granted us. That is human.
The growl of a car entering the garage drew nearer. We did not let go of each other. Jisoo was dead, but the forbidden zone she had guarded still lived.
And I have moved in.