The first thing she notices when she comes to is the air. Or the lack of it as she blinks her eyes open. Everything is white, cold, boring, where she is—the walls seemingly closing in on her as she turns her head left and right. She is in a hallway with a wall of windows some place. It is eerily quiet; save for the soft, steady beeping of machine [“We need to stop the bleeding and intubate! Give me that tube now!”] she cannot fathom coming from somewhere.

She looks out at the windows and sees nothing but darkness and rain. None of the moon and stars. No streetlights or cars driving by. [“She’s losing too much blood. Where the hell is she bleeding from?”] She sniffs and smells nothing but stale, dry air. Closing in into her lungs in a way that would have normally suffocated her by now—but she feels perfectly fine. [“She’s going to VFib!”]

That worries her, so tentatively she takes a step.

And instantly wishes she didn’t.

The mysterious beeping intensifies. And then doesn’t. Shuts off.

“.” She whispers, head dipping down with palms up for inspection and then back again to the windows and sees… nothing.

[“Patient’s Bed 504—Jung Soojung, age 22. Time of death: One-oh-fifteen, April 19, 2013.”]

(( Soojung wakes to see bright, white light from above her. Alone and lost as everything comes back to her in waves.

I’m dead, she thinks, blinking back nonexistent tears burning behind her eyes. I’m dead.

She wonders if this is how it’s supposed to feel. To die so young… is it supposed to feel so surreal? She feels alive. She can feel herself breathing, can feel blood coursing her veins—and yet she can do neither. Is it supposed to be like this?

She finds herself walking forward aimlessly. Passing doors with numbers and names that mean nothing to her until her feet stop just outside of one. She lifts her hand up to touch the wood of the door and instantly she is inside the sterile room, staring down at her own body. Her body fills with something akin to fear, but she doesn’t feel it bubble up the way she expects it to. Instead, all she can think about is how horrible it would be for her family to see her this way: ghostly pale and with cuts and scratches lining the periphery of her once flawless face. Her hair is wet and stringy and she immediately wishes she had washed her hair first before going out and dying but then she stops—chuckles, sobs, curses at herself for being so vain at the most inappropriate of times.

“I’m dead,” she says aloud and the idea begins to stick.

She feels alive though. How is that fair? ))

The next thing she knows she’s in another room, staring down at another body.

Taemin lies in his hospital bed, cut up and bandaged, breathing heavily through a ventilation tube. He looks so… broken, all purple, black and blue in places she wishes she didn’t have to witness. His eyes are wrapped tightly with white gauze, blocking out the bright light from the hospital ceiling. It is almost a merciful thing for him to be devoid of the dazzling brilliance of the light in the room. She is dead and even it hurts her eyes, and she thinks that he doesn’t need any more pain. All he needs is sleep. To close his eyes and never…

The emotions—real this time; biting and painful—well up inside of her and overflows.

Close his eyes and never wake up? “No, he can’t die,” she lets out loudly, sobbing. “You can’t die, Taemin. Please don’t.”

It falls on deaf ears. Dead and alone in the room, she knows logically that no one can hear her. But when Taemin twitches just a bit, Soojung thinks that he must have heard her.

He must have, she knows because she believes it.

“I’m sorry I was such a brat, Taemin…” Soojung tells him so sadly, her knees give underneath her and she collapses to sit on the edge of the bed. She closes her eyes and tries to recall what it was they were fighting about before all of this happened. She doesn’t remember much but she knows, knows that it must be important because it just has to be if I’m dead like this and you’re hurting.

“Why do we always fight?” She asks, more to herself than to him. And as she watches his chest lift and drop, Soojung is comforted that at least he is breathing the way she wishes she did too. No matter how many times they disagreed on things, death is never something she wished on him. Or anyone for that matter, but especially him. She doesn’t know if she could have taken it… to find him dead and not find him elsewhere, like her, after.

She doesn’t want to hurt herself and him that way. She has to believe that he doesn’t want that too.

But the question is out before she even thinks it completely through.

“Why do we hurt each other?”

Her mind supplies her an answer in rapid succession—Because he’s sick of you and your childish ways, your jealousy for his focus on his studies, how little he values the things you values, the dates you set, the promises you want him to make—but none of them feel right. Soojung isn’t stupid. She knows that Taemin, despite his best intentions, do not care for her the way she wishes he did. But he does, do, care.

Soojung knows because she believes it.

**

He wakes up hours later, coughing and gagging as the medical personnel removes the tube from his throat before helping him to breathe on his own.

It’s horrible to watch him come back to the world, kicking and screaming as the pain from his injuries sets in. The pain stifling his very breath as he chokes, heaving oxygen in and out as though it is everything but is not ever enough. Soojung finds herself wanting to push and hit the people around him to do something quickly. Save him! Help him! But her fists meet only empty reactions and the ache hurts even more knowing that nothing she does now will mean anything in the real world.

It’s practically hours later after when he calms and only the doctor explaining to him what had happend is left in the room that he finally speaks his first word since—“Soojung?”

Soojung has heard him say her name a thousand ways before, all of which are catalogued in her head. This is the first time she’s ever heard it being said in such a detached, defeated tone. The syllables fall so heartbreakingly sad from his mouth that she feels… empty.

The doctor pauses and when Taemin turns his head, fists clenched and eyes still bandaged from the light, Soojung knows what he does too.

**

(( Taemin is zonked out on morphine when another doctor comes in. This one is female, slender and tall—beautiful by all accounts, even as she looks like she’d been through hell warmed over. Soojung understands why. It’d been a long night for her as well. The seconds ticked by in the same span of normal hour. Everyone that had come in and out of Taemin’s room were bone-tired and it would make sense that this new doctor would look no different.

But still, Soojung feels on guard as she steps into the room in half-a-dozen long, uneasy steps, hair tied in a low ponytail though you could see that it was clumped in knots.  The embroidered name on her coat reads Im Yoona, MD – General Surgery and is achingly familiar. Her eyes puffy and red as though she’d been crying for hours…

Soojung wonders why and opts to wait as the doctor comes closer, watching from her seat on Taemin’s bed. She isn’t too sure if she should continue listening once she does speak, the words spilling out of her in waves and interspersed with disappointment and defeat.

After all… what is the good in hearing how you died?

“I… I’m sorry. For not saving her. I tried, believe me, I did. There was so much blood and I couldn’t find her the source of the bleed in time. She was already breathing so shallowly when we got her out of the car. I’m… I’m sorry for causing this. I didn’t think when I… I’m so sorry. So sorry…”

The beautiful doctor dissolves into wrecking sobs that Soojung feels like doing as well. The pain in her heartfelt apology ringing in her ears as she watched her wrap her arms around herself and cry. She almost reaches out to her when Taemin’s doctor—the tall, stoic one—comes in and pulls the young woman into his arms.

“It’s not your fault, Yoona.” He whispers and Soojung immediately knows that he feels as guilty and defeated as the woman he’s holding. His tone soothing as he brings his lips to her hair and breathes. “It was an accident. It’s not your fault.”

The caress of his mouth on the young woman’s hair is loving, and even Soojung knows that the action was no fluke to comfort a friend. And when the doctor finally stills and looks up, the light in her eyes tell Soojung everything that she needs to know. “It is, though. It is.” She says, pulling away from the arms holding her up. She is unsteady on her feet but her posture is rigid, closed off, and the man is left to step back. The sobbing young doctor immediately becomes competent and sure before her eyes, standing straight and speaking business-like after wiping her eyes dry. “I’ve already contacted the girl’s sister and parents. The sister will be here by tomorrow morning but the parents won’t be in until Thursday. Have you handled Patient Lee’s parents?”

“I have. I’ve also contacted a friend of the patient’s. He should be here in a few minutes.”

“Good.” The woman nods but avoids his eyes.

He takes a step further back, fist clenched. Defeated.

Soojung sits transfixed at the display in front of her, wondering how people could be so in love and not be willing to say it.

She understands though. She wonders but she does understand.

Looking back to Taemin’s prone figure on the bed, Soojung knows why the three words have to remain secret. ))

Their parents arrive separately, days apart. Reacting the way she expects them to. There is anger and sorrow. Yells and tears.

It is Jongin, Taemin’s best friend, who handles them. Calming and comforting them at the same time while papers are processed and laboratory results are explained. He is unnervingly steady during the whole ordeal—informing everyone who mattered in each their lives of what happened in a quick, almost painless fashion. Jongin takes in all the outrage and grief and gives care and sympathy back.

Soojung wonders how he can hold himself together when she’s always known him to be on edge. Always tittering over a cliff of whatever situation he finds himself in.

She stands beside him when her sister, Sooyeon, arrives again on the day her parents come and marches straight into Taemin’s room. She watches as Jongin closes his eyes as her sister wails at her boyfriend, breathing heavier and heavier as each second passes. And when Sooyeon screams “She loved you!” at Taemin, Soojung is more than shocked to find Jongin break down in heaving sobs.

“I ing loved her too.” He whispers, clutching at his knees as he falls to the floor, shaking terribly. “I ing loved her too.”

Soojung feels tears fill her eyes, and she wishes—more than anything—that she could touch him. Comfort him in the way he had been doing to everyone she’s ever cared about. She’s never really known him enough before but she thinks that she does now. “I ing loved her too” resonates in her head and the pain burns in her chest again.

She drops her forehead on his trembling shoulders and wraps her arms around him. Non-existent she may be, she wishes he can feel her… even just once.

Jongin is still heaving his breaths, though his tremors eventually stills. She likes to think that it is her doing but knows it couldn’t be so she keeps her arms around him even as he looks up and rests his head against the wall.

Anything she does now means nothing in the real world.

All she now is not enough to ease the pain but she’ll try anyway.

“I ing loved her too.”

She’ll try because he isn’t just Taemin’s best friend, he is hers too.

The nurse assigned to Taemin is pretty. Her hair was dyed a sort of chesnutty reddish-brown and short, reaching only her chin and flaring outwards. She was cheerful in a way that was much more endearing than it should be. Soojung actually grins for the first time since settling in Taemin’s hospital room when the nurse introduces herself. Partly grateful for the distraction (watching their friends file in and have nothing to say was grueling and it still hurt to watch Jongin keep to himself, speaking in a clipped way that wasn’t who he was) and partly curious to how at ease the nurse’s presence feels to her. She doesn’t know why that is but Soojung thinks it helps her (and Taemin) breathe easier. That was enough reason to let the stranger in.

The nurse is bold, wrapping a hand around Taemin’s arm as though she’s known him forever and speaking in a tone that was almost this side of ecstatic.

“My name is Choi Jinri. I’ll be your nurse.” She says, grinning from ear to ear that Soojung just has to copy. “We’ll be good friends, Mr. Lee.”

Soojung snorts at this but believes it. And as Taemin nods, doubtful as she expects him to be, she knows he’ll come to believe it too.

**

(( Taemin gets nightmares more often than she wants him to have.

Soojung watches him toss and turn, limbs flailing as though he was reaching out for something (or someone) that isn’t there at all.

He cries her name sometimes, tears leaking out by itself from the corner of his eyes. The syllables of her name cracking into the sounds she’s come to hate since he first did so when he woke up from the accident. The kind of pain he is in when he is lost in his dreams makes her feel like dying over and over again, because no matter how strong or detached Taemin tries so hard to be when he is awake—his true emotions come unhinged in the darkness.

The sobs he makes in his sleep tell her everything she’s always wanted to hear from him. (“I’m sorry, Soojung. I didn’t mean to, Soojung. I wish I could have been more, Soojung. Forgive me, Soojung. I miss you, Soojung. I love you, Soojung.”)

When he wakes, all stock still and silent, Soojung keeps on clinging to him—curled up at his side and responding,

“I’m sorry, Taemin. I didn’t mean to Taemin. I wish I could have been more, Taemin. Forgive me, Taemin. I miss you, Taemin. I love you, Taemin.”

She wishes it was enough. But it isn’t. ))

“Take care of him for me, please.”

Soojung says this each and every time the nurse Jinri comes in the next month Taemin is detained in the hospital. Smiling as she flits in and out, chattering all the while Taemin tries to ignore her presence. Soojung knows Taemin enough to her his interest in the young nurse has evolved to something more and while it should hurt—

… to see him react to another’s touch,—

… to think that he’d move on eventually,—

… to know he’ll love someone else; love her better—

All she wants is for Taemin to be loved the way she loves him.

“Love him for me, please. It doesn’t have to be today, or tomorrow. But love him like I love him. Please. Make him happy.”

She thinks this is enough. It has to be.