second.

you come home knowing things are not quite the same, will never be quite the same, as they once were. this comforts and discomforts you all at once – this sidewalk you stand upon does not feel the same underneath the soles of your shoes. they are different shoes, you are different people, these are different times. it all escalates – strange, foreign, not the same.

you will never be the same.

minute.

my neighbors smoke their cigarettes. they may live on either side of me – closer to the beach or farther – they may be trying to quit. all i know is that their smoke and smog find their way through my bedroom window on uncomfortable summer nights – the ones that come well before june twenty-first, before summer vacation.

but life is not bad like this. having them quit would be weirder, suddenly having a concern for the lungs of the girl next door. they mind their business, i mind mine – smoking their lives away (and mine, second-handedly) while i indulge in their indulgence, life drawn to the lives of others.

5.

the floors of her house are dusted with flimsy film and lost souls – things that just missed the vacuum. the bathrooms have a tendency for a silverfish problem, late at night when no one else is home. she traps the ones she cannot bear to kill in half-cleaned glass jars of imported jam, the numbers of faceted contraptions multiplying as the years go on.

he tells her she reminds him of a dream-catcher. feathery things, with nets and beads and the capacity to hold more than they should – blocking the evil things out through her little jars, sealing whatever time they have left in cylindrical walls.

15.

she let you hold her hand that summer, two or three years ago – too precious to be an exact memory. you romanticize it, you realize, and probably more than you really should. her fingers tightened around yours for a brief moment, like she was trying to send shockwaves through your being to transmit to yoonji, who was on your left. (she succeeded somewhat – all the charge got stuck in you) like she might have, could have, in some tiny crevice in the nonexistent fifth chamber of her heart – loved you.

you burned orange in the sunset. she was gold, yoonji was pink. she was her family’s lavender beach house – blue-violet planked and grey tiled roof – a rare smile in the spite of summer heat, wavering like an illusion in the sahara.

you loved her then.

30.

i see jaeseop every morning from the patio. he knows yoonji lives fifteen minutes away now. we wave at each other from across the street, he follows me to the convenience store sometimes. we don’t say much. he lets me cut in front of him in the express line, lets me not reply to every attempted conversation, lets me fall further into myself like this was all premeditated and accepted in his mind.

i told him people learn a lot from being alone. i assume he believes me.

i see yoonji on weekends, when she doesn’t have work. she lives closer to town, in this weird, pale-yellow house with her cousin. it doesn’t suit her, though the thought didn’t come to me as we sat under her ceiling fan. she still loves us, the three of us, but she has changed the most.

she traps her silverfish more often now. i saw her aunt let one out from a jar and kill it when i went to the bathroom.

45.

no one’s talking, she tells him, first thing when he comes over to see her. he sets the jar of jam he bought her on her bedside table, glass deafening. she shields her ears. lays down beside her – not close enough.

we don’t want to grow up, he sighs, forearm draping over his eyes. the sunlight catches the dust they breathe into the air. it touches him. it keeps the memories intact, yoonji.

it doesn’t touch her. jaeseop jiyeon. yoonji. but we have to, her hand small in his. his eyes focus, suddenly apparent to her need.

(no one’s talking. three shadows, feet in the muted waves.

clock ticking in the background. silence.

no one’s talking.)

jiyeon’s mother picks up the phone when she calls.

jiyeon never gets on the other line.

hour.

you almost trip over a jar lying on the floor of yoonji’s room on your way out. a silverfish wriggles inside, begging for life.

you fetch a spare newspaper. carry the thing out the door (earning weird glances from her cousin), letting it loose on the grass – where it can begin its journey back into the house once again.

this doesn’t change.

you don’t see jiyeon on her patio for a week. then another. she picks up your calls but remains frustratingly silent on the other line, like she doesn’t even exist.

are you lonely? you finally manage to ask. the other line is crackling, dying and gutted out on the inside. you imagine her shifting positions on the couch – the beat up one you got a nosebleed on when you were nine.

we love you, you know? jiyeon. hey.

i love you.

day.

my neighbors yell at one another from opposite sides of the house. affectionately, i’d like to assume. unaffectionate, they’d assume about me. unaffectionate, so i try not to assume.

it’s raining on the day i go back onto the patio. jaeseop sits on his, torso under the awning, long legs sprawled across the walkway, jeans splattered with rain. going over to yoonji’s at eleven, he yells across the empty street, nine AM too early for disruptions. so what is he waiting for? the rain gutters gurgle and gush water onto the lawn, oversaturating the green into mud. what is he waiting for? we love you, we love you, we love you.

hey.

i assume continuum is a form of growing up. keeping old habits and learning why – why you choose to do them, why you chose to start them, why you keep doing them. why you cannot quit them.

my converse soak down to my socks. he’s only wearing sandals. we step in all the puddles we can see, and all those we can’t – running on empty streets of a vacant resort town, disregarding stoplights.

we don’t have time for that, i realize when we pass a red. we don’t have much time at all.

year.

they hold hands and run into the water, waves on waves, feet swallowed by ravenous wet sand. and for a minute, she believes they are seven, nine, and eleven once again.

the obvious answer is that they aren’t: yoonji works now, jaeseop and jiyeon are going back to college in the fall. futures uncertain, close enough. close enough to touch.

silverfish find their way back inside her house. she will trap them under glass jars again.

this will not change.