One of my first memories was of me as a three year old shoving my friend Jimin’s favorite Barbie doll into a VHS player, curious about how it would look like on the TV. The head broke before it could even get halfway in, and I remembered Jimin crying and telling me in a wail that she wouldn’t want to be my friend anymore. But she was bluffing, apparently, because the next day she came to my house and apologize--although it wasn’t even her fault--and made me promise that we would forever be friends. Clearly, we had been friends long before that, even before my brain could document my life.

Yoo Jimin had always been there for me. Even after I left the confines of my hometown and her behind, she would always call several times a week to check up on me. You can never get rid of me, she said once. I guess I was so used to the idea that Yoo Jimin was and will always be a permanent part of my life, that it all just seemed more like a bad dream than a bad news.

“Are you okay, Hyein-ah? Can you make it?” Hyomin--Jimin’s sister--’s voice rang clear in my left ears. It had been years that we last talked. We weren’t that close to begin with, since the only thing we had in common was we’re both the people that had known Jimin all her life. Jimin. My phone trembled in my hand. 

“Jongin said he’ll pick you up from the bus station. It takes about four hours from Seoul, doesn’t it? You’ll arrive before five if you go now. Can you make it?”

“Hyein-ah?”

“No…” I trembled, almost couldn’t recognize my own voice. “It… it couldn’t be.”

“I know, it must be hard for you to take in. It’s okay, Hyein-ah” said Hyomin.

No it’s not. It’s not okay to lie. Jimin was alright, I was sure of it, and she would call me tonight to ask how my day was. She couldn’t be dead, let alone that I was the last to know.

“She had been battling cancer for two years. We only found out last month when she fainted while visiting our mom. She said not to tell you. I’m sorry, Hyein-ah,” she continued, carefully as not to set me off.

“No… she said she was busy a month into opening her new bakery.”

“I’m sorry, Hyein-ah. She didn’t want you to worry. The last two weeks has been rough for her. But she’s in a better place now.”

She’s in a better place. 
I thought that as Jimin’s sister she would know better; that the better place for Yoo Jimin was in Jinhae, Changwon, South Korea, a phone call away from me, surrounded by people she held dear, where she was chasing her dreams of running her own bakery; not on the Other Side. 

But of course I couldn’t say that to her, nor could I bring myself to utter any single word more. 

So with the tremor in my hand, I pressed the red button as it kept being replied in my head like a broken record, waiting for me to believe it:

Yoo Jimin is gone; pronounced dead today at 11:47.

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This wasn’t how home supposed to be like: unfamiliar, like you had never been here at all and the eighteen years you spent here might as well be a lie. It felt like an empty shell that I had left for another, and now that Jimin was gone it felt like visiting the ruins of an earthquake-stricken city.

To say that I was overwhelmed would be an understatement. Six hours ago I was lounging around in my apartment, waiting for my hair to dry, excited to meet my new client this afternoon. And now I was sauntering around the place I had sworn would never come back to, wanting to call my bestfriend and ramble about my discomfort, only to remember that she was the sole reason I was here.

Jimin is gone. 

I didn’t know what to do with that fact, or if I could believe that it was a fact at all. A piece of me was scoffing at how preposterous it was for a person who always nags at me for eating junk food to die before me--and of cancer, at that. But a more logical side of me was buying it; in the grand scheme of things, even a person larger-than-life, like Jimin, was still a speck of dust in the space. We humans are like grass after all, there one moment and gone the next.

It was as if a plethora of different emotions hit me alternately, then all at once. First it was denial, trying to coo me to calm down, that all of this was merely a bad dream. Then the realization, that if this was a dream my heart wouldn’t feel like it had been crushed into a million pieces, and that if this was a joke it had gone too far. Then the anger; at fate, for taking my best friend without letting me see her the last time, then at Jimin herself for leaving me in the dark about her deteriorating health; then at the all-too-familiar man standing in front of me.

“I’m sorry, Hyein-ah.”

Jongin was standing right in front of me, about a meter of distance between us. He looked torn between closing the gap to comfort me and letting it be, afraid that stepping any closer to me would set me off. For someone who was walking on eggshells he looked calm, almost too calm. If I didn’t look thoroughly at his void eyes, denial would’ve hit me all over again.

I never knew that the day would come that I get mad at Kim Jongin, but it apparently did. How could he keep it from me? 

“How could you? Why am I the last person to know? Am I nothin