Chapter 16: Letting Go

Eighteen seconds. I spend seven of them looking distantly into Jessica’s eyes, three of them staring down at my shoes, two trying recall how to breathe, and then six looking at the door handle, trying to will myself to attempt to open it and, maybe, leave. Maybe. All of this clumps together into eighteen, long, lengthy seconds, and in those eighteen seconds, despite my inner turmoil, approximately one million fifty-one-thousand and two hundred minutes of wishing comes to life.

A million and one things leap to the tip of my tongue and push against the seam of my closed lips. I stare and I feel my brain liquidize, leaking out of my ears and dripping down my collar.

She shifts her weight from one foot to the other, her lips slightly parted, her hands holding themselves, as if she has something to say, but has fear over what might happen if she does.

Heavy and light emotions come and twist together within every available part of my body. I don’t know what to do.

I’ve spent an excessive amount of time pondering over what it would feel like and what I’d do if I ever got to see Jessica again, and now I’m here, seeing Jessica again after so long and suddenly, I don’t know what to do.

She lifts a graceful finger, gestures to my wall where my drawings hang. “You’ve gotten a lot better.” And then she smiles, small, with an undertone of sadness.

I curl my fingers into a fist, press the side where my thumb protrudes out against my lips and clear my throat uneasily, uncomfortably, and all at once, I’m suddenly conscious of what I must look like to her right now.

To me, I think I must look quite pathetic. To me, she looks quite beautiful. To me, it must look like an absurd contrast, if looked at from a distance. I feel it must be a contrast that has always been there, recognized but not said.

To her, I must look like a mess. To herself, she must look guilty. To her, we must look insanely odd, staring at one another like this.

But to the both of us, it must feel the same.

My hand, away from my lips, digging back against the lining of the inside of my pocket, and I notice how the light is coming in through the window, white and bare against everything inside the room.

I want to shrink away from her, into a corner and hide my face from her pretty brown eyes, because, still, even after all of everything we’ve been through, she is everything that I am not and never will be. 

And then I think about Tiffany, and what Tiffany would want me to do. Thinking about Tiffany in this moment is good because she is not Jung Jessica, she is not Choi Sooyoung, and she is most definitely not Kim Taeyeon. I need to think like Hwang Tiffany because thinking like Kim Taeyeon is not enough. Kim Taeyeon is never enough.

With my hands dug deep, I take a step, a heavy, loud step that makes the floorboards creek and the orphanage groan under its impact. I move and it feels as though the walls, the floorboards and the furniture all begin to swim together into one confusing blur. But Jessica stays clear. Jessica always stays clear.

Without knowing, without remembering, I make it there. I stand beside her, scared to look at her, because if I looked at her now, being this close to her, there’s that underlying option of falling into her eyes again, and again, and again.

She’s looking at me, I know she is, and I am looking at the wall, at all of the drawings I had done over the years, and I feel she must know what I’m doing. I’m looking at drawings of Jessica, but I am unable to bring myself to look at the real picture beside me.

I always figured that if Jessica ever came back things would fall into place and suddenly I’d have it all figured out. But that’s not the case in any way, shape or form. Having Jessica here has knocked my equilibrium, my already unsteady equilibrium.

It’s deadly quiet. A hollow silence filled by our hollow breathing and our shaking hearts.

With her shadowy eyes bearing down into me, and my palms sweating profusely, I swallow down the bubbling concoction of words pounding against the back of my teeth.

“Do you want to sit down?” She asks, softly. And I wonder whether she is feeling the same way I am, because it doesn’t seem like it.

I turn my head and look at her, unable to meet her eyes so I stare just past her head, at the wall. “Yeah…sure.”

It’s then I realize that my desk has been pulled out into the middle of my room, my swivel chair at one side and the chair that normally sat by my painting easel at the other.

We sit, my back to the sunlight and my face to Jessica and the rest of my never-changing room. I lace my fingers together, my insides swirling sickeningly.

She sighs, places her elbow up on top of the desk and rests her chin in her palm. My eyes remain locked on anywhere else but her.

“So…” She pauses, presses her palms against the surface of the desk, her fingers spread apart and her eyes down. “…how have you been?”

I almost want to break out into a hysterical fit of laughter, displaying signs of lunacy, but I don’t. I look at her freshly manicured nails, and think about how her nails never used to be manicured before.

She shifts again when I don’t answer and pulls her arms closer to her body, tugging her sleeves over her hands. She releases a breath. “I know we have a lot to talk about, but I can’t do this alone, Taeyeon.”

Hearing my name from her lips causes a shiver to rake itself down my spine, my hairs standing on end. I’m slightly disbelieving that she still has this effect on me.

The clock ticks and more time is wasted.

“You’re not going to say anything?”

The words automatically cause my eyes to flicker to hers, because I thought she knew how much I didn’t like talking. The air gets pushed back into my lungs, because as I look at her, stare at her, I realize that she doesn’t look much like the Jung Jessica that I remember seeing at fifteen years old, and then I begin to think that maybe her whole being really was just the frivolous imaginings of a love-struck teenager.

The sight of her brings a wave of nausea with it, and I can’t bear to look at her anymore. So I stand, my chair scraping, and then I go and stand by the window, trying to block her out. I breathe deep, pushing down the bile swishing inside of my stomach.

“Typical.” She mutters. I hear her chair move against the wood of the floorboards. “Do you think this is easy for me, Taeyeon?” I hear her footsteps. “Do you think it’s easy for me to be here again, standing in your room, trying to talk to you? Do you really think this is easy?”

I lean against the windowsill, swallowing down hard, my knuckles white with the clench of my fists. Easy? When was any of this ever easy?

“Typical Taeyeon. Doesn’t have a backbone in her body, too scared to say what’s on her mind.” She’s closer now, maybe an arms-length away.

My teeth grit, and black begins to seep through my veins, and I feel a sudden urge to destroy everything, maybe even her, so I manage to move away from her again, away from the window and around to the other side of the desk. I pace back and forth between the door and the bed, and all she does is watch me. The anger builds.

She sighs, takes a step forward. “I don’t what you want from me. I really don’t.”

I stop and look at her for the second time. “You don’t know what I want?”

“You have no idea how hard this has been for me and all you-“

“For you!” Extrication. “You’ve been gone for god-knows-how-long and you think you have the right to waltz your way in here and tell me how hard it’s been for you!”

She stares at me, shock smeared on her face and I feel myself unravel before her.

The pent up emotions of two years were now spilling. Back and forth. Deep breaths and clenching fists. It becomes too much.

The chair in front of me is kicked, flying into the wall, scarring it, crashing loudly. I push the desk out of my way, causing it to topple over onto its side and Jessica’s eyes are wide, scared like before, looking at me as if I’m a monster of her own creation. And that’s exactly what I am.

With the black now rushing through my body, red mist over my eyes, I suddenly have her against the windowsill, not remembering how, but my fists are shaking and her brown eyes are big and round with a similar fear that I remember all too well.

“You…?” My voice is just above a broken whisper and it continues to get louder, but no less broken. “How hard this has been for you? How do hard do you think this has been for me? You left, Jessica!” My fingers press into her shoulders, into the material of her coat, my eyes searching in a manic attempt to find her. I ram my fist into the wall, again and again, just by her head. Everything is heightened, the pain, the emotions, but it feels therapeutic, I feel loose. Tears burn and sear at my eyes. “You just left! I had no idea where you were or who you were with! I didn’t even know why! I had no idea!” I shake her slightly, my whole body trembling with the things I had kept pressed down and away from other people for so long. The blackness, the red mist dissipates from my body, leaving me hollow once more, leaving me to be filled with things that may or may not even exist. “…I had no idea…but you were just gone all of a sudden…two whole years…nothing…how do you think I felt…?” My voice diminishes and my throat closes.

She pulls me close, away from the world, resting her forehead against mine. I can hear her breathing over the roaring in my ears, and as the bare light comes in through the window and rests against her skin, as her eyes gaze into mine, I think that this Jung Jessica has begun to look a lot like the Jung Jessica that I remember. I’ve finally found her.

* * *

“You haven’t changed one bit, you know that.” Her eyes are closed, her lips tugging into that charming little smile that I’ve never failed to forget.

Our knees are touching, our calves and our ankles overlapping, my arm beneath her and her arm over me. The silence between us is as silent as silence can get in an orphanage full of troubled kids and teenagers, and neither of us are one of them for a change. We weren’t troubled for once.

My eyes are open, gazing at her as if she is a dream, breathing her in as if she is air.

Her scent is that of nostalgia and memories. She is the same, but she is also different and it unsettles me slightly. 

“I haven’t?”

“You haven’t.” She says and her eyes open, looking at me as if the past two years haven’t happened. “Your eyes, your lips, your voice…everything is exactly like I remember them to be. Exactly the same since I last saw you.”

Opposites, again.

“Is that a good thing?”

She shifts slightly, coming a little closer, coming more into my arms, and I don’t know how we got here. I’ll never know how we got here.

“I don’t know.” Her finger slides over my pulse, down my skin until it reaches where neck meets shoulder. She doesn’t meet my eyes, just staring into my neck, into my chin, into anything but my eyes.

I just watch. I just watch and breathe and think about her. I think about her even though she is right here in front of me. It’s become habitual – just always thinking about her.  

As I feel the coolness of her fingers pass by the back of my ear, her eyes flicker to mine and she opens , ready to say something, but then her lips close again and she shifts her gaze. It was like she was wrestling with the things she wanted to say, pushing them back even though she knew it’d have to come out at some point.

Serenity with impatience in the air, pressing down on us softly, I want her to talk. I want her to talk and explain and spill the contents of her heart over me. I want all these things without having to push her for them.

She comes closer again, tucking her head into my neck, her hair against my chin, I breathe out against her, fingers against her scalp.

Maybe I need to be the one to talk. Maybe talking will actually save me from d