I sniffed, running the back of my hand across my cheeks.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.” My voice shook, and it was an effort to push the words past my lips.
He cursed, and though it was in Korean, I understood it just fine. Then he said something I didn’t understand, even though it was in perfect English.
“That’s because only one of us is actually trying to speak the same language.”
It felt like a slap. All the feelings of inadequacy came flooding in, despite all my early morning Korean lessons.
I was trying. I was trying so hard to remember that he was hurting – had been hurting for months, but at what point did that stop being an excuse?
I closed my eyes, tried to breathe, tried to remember I had hurt him, too.
The silence seemed to stretch between us, growing thinner and thinner with each passing second until it began to feel like a elastic band. Ready to snap.
He sighed.
“Kaiya, I’m sorry, I should not-”
“Don’t.” I surprised myself when the word seemed to say itself, more so when they kept going. “I don’t… I don’t know if I can do this.”
I was so exhausted I could barely think past the way my heart thumped, trapped in a cage of bones, the only thing holding it in my body.
He was silent again, until he wasn’t.
“This fight? Or us?”
“I don’t know.” I regretted the words the second they were out, because that wasn’t at all what I meant. I didn’t think.
I heard him inhale sharply, and gasp, like he couldn’t breathe.
When he next spoke though, the words were clear.
“If you don’t know, then the answer is no. Let’s end this.”
The world spun on its axis.
“What?” The word caught in my throat and choked me.
“This.” I heard him swallow. “Us. We’re not working anymore.”
I hunched over, the weight in my chest pulling me down.
“You want to break up?” Had I said that? I couldn’t tell.
“Yes.”
“No. Joon, no. We’re… we’re just mad,” I stuttered, just as my heart seemed to stutter, an erratic staccato beat that was in real danger of faltering until it stopped. “Let’s just-”
“I’m sick of being mad, and you’re not here-”
We couldn’t seem to stop talking over each other, a constant struggle for words and meaning.
“It won’t be forever,” I pleaded, “they say in the new year-”
“I don’t want to wait anymore. I didn’t want to be apart. I never wanted this. I don’t want to wait anymore. I don’t want to live under the constant threat of exposure.”
His words hit so viscerally, the detonation threw up questions, denials, expulsions of words like the ash that smothered the air after a volcanic eruption.
