“You know we’re only messing, love.” She said as she moved to stand beside me, watching the bees.
“I know,” I shuffled slightly, “it’s just a bit weird.”
“What is?” I felt, rather than saw her body turn towards me.
“I mean… I’ve never brought a boy home before…”
“You still haven’t,” she said drily.
I toed a clump of weeds. “You know what I mean.”
Mum sighed. “I know. It’s weird for us too, y’know? You’ve always been so independent. You ran off to London the first chance you got, and then it was LA. And don’t get me started on Korea.” She scoffed. “Sometimes I worry.”
I waited for her to go on, but she doesn’t for so long that I think she wont, until-
“I worry sometimes about how much you’re so like me, and yet you’re also so different.”
I turned to face her, but she was looking at the bees, but maybe seeing something, somewhere else.
“I think you have the same drive I had – that urge to go somewhere, to do something, to be someone. But I also think you’re more grounded than I am. Maybe more sensible.” She laughed, a small, self-derisory sound.
“There are worse things to be than like you.” I said, quietly.
Mum turned her head to look at me, smiling as she reached out a hand and rubbed my arm.
“So, tell me about the flowers.” Her tone was as much a change in mood as it was like starting a new chapter in a book.
Taking the hint, I cleared my throat and said, “Well, according to the card, today is our one year anniversary.”
Mum’s eyebrows shot up.
“Blimey, kid, you’d barely touched down in LA this time last year!”
I laughed, because she wasn’t wrong. I’d started at Pisces in February, we were barely into April.
“Technically, this is the day we met. When he first came to the studio,” I clarified.
“You started dating the day you met?” If Mum’s eyebrows ascended any higher, they’d be fighting her hairline for dominance.
“Not exactly,” I mumbled, embarrassed, but I couldn’t help smiling as I remembered all the times Jihoon and I had happened upon each other. In dark rooms, corridors, stairwells… It felt like a lifetime ago. A world apart from the one we lived in now.
“He says it was our ‘day one’, but we didn’t actually go on a date until about a week after we met.”
It felt strange explaining our timeline to Mum, because summing it up made it sound so linear, so normal, when living through it, it had been anything but. I hadn’t known for monthsif we were a couple, or just two people ‘seeing’ each other. I had hated the uncertainty.
But, seeing that card, seeing the way he’d called the first day we’d met ‘Day One’ made me realise the uncertainty had been mine alone. Jihoon had always seemed so sure about us. I had never really understood that.
Mum made a humming noise that somehow seemed to convey a lot with no words.
“You know,” she started, “most people have a conversation about becoming boyfriend and girlfriend.”
I snorted, the words sounding like something you’d overhear in a playground.
“But your fella,” she went on, oblivious to my reaction. “He just decided that for you?”
“It wasn’t like that, Mum.”
“No?”
