“How long’s ‘a while’?”
He rubbed the back of his neck. “Maybe, like, November?”
I frowned. “November? I turned my phone off for a week or so afterwards–”
He cut me off. “2021.”
“A year later?” I exploded, and then laughed. “For fucks sake, Tae.” I dropped my head into my hands, shoulders shaking.
“Hey, look, in my defence, I had a lot going on.”
I waved his sort of apology away.
“Anyway,” he said, shifting position on the floor, “I couldn’t get through. I didn’t recognise your number today, so I assume you changed your number.”
I nodded. “I did. It felt like the healthy thing to do.”
“Right on. Y’know, I also tried to send you a message on your social media. You never accepted the request.”
I scowled. “I feel like I’d remember seeing a message from Min Taeyang in my–oh, wait. No. Never mind,” I broke off with a giggle.
“Why are you laughing? What ‘never mind’?” He was grinning with me, but I could see that he didn’t know why.
On an impulse, I pulled my phone out and turned it back on, my giggles only increasing in volume as I waited for it to load so I could bring up my inbox. Eventually, I found what I was looking for, and handed the phone to him.
“Holy fuck,” he burst out before laughing loudly. “I can see why you ignored me.”
My inbox was filled with dozens, if not hundreds of message requests from so called K-pop idols. Soloists, groups members, older generations, new generations. Multiples of each, even. Page after page of people pretending to be various celebrities, for whatever scam they thought might work. Some of them were pretty convincing. Some of them… less so.
“Yeah,” I said once I’d calmed down enough to speak. “You must have gotten lost in the mix.”
“You’re a scam magnet,” he said with some admiration.
I shrugged. “Comes with the territory, doing what I do.”
Tae smiled at me. “You’ve done bloody amazing, you know that? I know I was an idiot, but I tried to read your stuff when it crossed my path. I don’t know if I get to say this – but I’m proud of you, Pom. You did what you set out to do. Good for you.”
I dipped my head as warmth bloomed across my cheeks, but it was probably the beer.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
After that, as if by unspoken but mutual agreement, we moved onto safer, less heavy topics.
We caught up on surface level gossip, life events and the pointless skills we’d picked up during the pandemic, and my not so pointless online journalism course that had essentially propelled me into my career.
Korea hadn’t gone into lockdown the way the rest of the world had, so he’d mostly spent the time writing lyrics, which was a skill I hadn’t known he possessed.
“I’m not called on much to use it,” he laughed wryly. “Bad boys can’t be poetic.” He winked.
That’s how it was. Until the sun smudged across the horizon, we spent the time relearning each other, and I reclaimed the friend I’d been making before my future had changed.
I wasn’t ready to consider the angle that his silence had been a kind of protection. I don’t know when I would be, because it also meant dealing with my mounting anger at how everyone had seemed to want to protect me at the expense of my own autonomy.
That was a slippery slope because if I accepted that, then I needed to accept that in part, I had allowed it to happen. I had not always put myself first, or even in the race to begin with, and it was only now that I was living for myself that I had come to realise it.
Bigger than my frustration was my grief. It was still there. A gaping wound in my chest that never seemed to heal. A void that was filled with the future I’d planned that would never come to pass. Instead of closing, it sometimes felt like it was expanding, because that’s what my future was supposed to have been. How do you close off something like that?
In the cracks of the conversation, in the quiet space between words, I wondered what my life would have looked like if I hadn’t been cast out. Would it have continued as it was, whereI allowed myself to be overshadowed, or would I have stepped into my own light? And would our relationship have survived either course?
