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Admissions Team
London College of Arts
Chapter 22
September
Iheld the phone away from me as I called up the stairs. “Mum! Do you know where my UCAS paperwork is?”
“What’s UCAS?” Jihoon asked, bringing my attention back to my phone.
He was in a car, heading home to Busan for the week to visit his folks and Grandma. I hadn’t spoken to him in days. He was always so busy. More, these days. Or so it seemed.
“It’s university related paperwork stuff,” I replied distractedly.
“Oh. You sound busy, Ky, I should go.”
I looked down just in time to see him lean his head against the window, closing his eyes briefly. My stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch.
“No, it’s fine, I just–”
Someone said something to Jihoon from off-screen, and he leaned forward to reply, before turning to me.
“It’s fine, Ky. I’m going to go. I’ll call you later, okay?”
“Joon, I’m sorry, I’ll–”
He was gone before I finished speaking. I leaned back against the wall and slid down until I was sat on the stairs, looking down at the phone in my hand. I stared at it until the screen faded and then went blank. It seemed like an uncomfortable metaphor for our relationship these days.
I drew in a shaky breath, suddenly not giving a damn about papers or registration forms. I just wanted to be given a set of answers for how to fix whatever what going wrong between us.
October
It was like someone had flipped a switch on the weather. Almost overnight, the wind had picked up a chill that wasn’t there the day before. While the sun still shone brightly, it now had a colder edge to it that seemed to cut through the sparse greenery that clung stubbornly to swaying branches.
Crisp leaves danced across the road, a near-constant hiss as they skimmed over the asphalt or performed acrobatics on an errant breeze.
Mum didn’t rise so early any more. She’d finished her chemotherapy last month, so now she was free to rise with the later sun, and not with the constant ache of her bones or the anxious feeling of perpetual nausea.
I had gotten into the habit of getting up early, though, and I found that even if I wanted to, I could rarely stay in bed past 6 am. I was still taking early morning Korean lessons twice a week, so I’d probably conditioned myself.
So now I took up Mum’s place on the porch outside the kitchen doors, coffee in hand, fresh from the fancy machine. I kept vigil in the garden as it grew darker every morning. Sometimes the crows kept me company, sometimes I was on my own.
I found these mornings to be cathartic. Once upon a time even an 8 am alarm was bad enough. Now, I’ve come to learn that there was something special about the way you could see the day beginning. It was peaceful. I could see why Mum liked it so much.
Sometimes, like this morning, Jihoon and I got time to talk, though not always. More and more, our conversations happened over text instead of calls.
I was trying to be understanding, but there was a distance between us, and I didn’t know how to bridge it. He regularly missed our calls, took hours to message me back, and when we did speak, there was something between us; a shadow I couldn’t put my finger on.
I worried, but I didn’t know how to articulate that in a way that wouldn’t make him feel like I saw him as less than who he was.
This morning, I had resolved to to ask if he had been seeing his therapist. It hadn’t gone well.
