The 8th Beginning

I awoke four hours later.

The sun was streaming endlessly through the blinds, pulling harshly at my eyelids. I watched my dream catcher twirl slowly in a numb breeze.

I could smell her perfume in the bed sheets, feel the words we exchanged the previous night weigh heavy on the air…heavy on my chest.

My mother’s fist rapping on my door made me rise from the mattress. I casted one glance around my bedroom before I left, knowing that once I stepped out, things would never be the same again.

I watched the other passengers stuff their hand luggage into the overhead compartments, and considered how Hyukjun had made Jessica his girlfriend by kissing her on the platform of the city center’s train station. I thought about it, a little bitter, very much sad, telling myself that sunsets would always beat out train stations in terms of romanticism.

“You look like you haven’t slept.” My mother said from her seat, leaning toward me as an overweight man squeezed himself down the aisle.

I tried not to sigh. “Because I haven’t.”

“Were you nervous about the flight?” Her face knitted itself into concern, which I felt undeserving of.

“I don’t stress over flights. You do.”

She chuckled a little, leaning her head back on the headrest. “True. I hate flying.”

I looked away and stared at the safety procedure bolted to the back of the seat in front of me.

“When did Jessica leave?”

“Early. She said she had to go home and work on her portfolio or something.” I shrugged, shaking away the feeling of those sinful lips.

“That girl works herself too hard sometimes.”

I hummed in agreement, scared to meet her gaze. She settled into her seat and closed her eyes. The both of us fell into a contemplative quiet, sinking into our chairs as the plane took off and lifted into the sky.

I looked out of the window as the city shrank beneath me, brought back to that one time we went to Florida with my cousins when I was eleven.

I turned to my mother after a moment. “Have you spoken to uncle Panyong since…you know?”

Her reaction was slow. “Not really…Just polite formalities and that’s it.”

I considered, for a moment, those kids, those teenagers and then those young adults who used to be my cousins. “Do you think dad still cares?”

She opened her eyes and looked at me, watched my face with tired pupils and I realized that she hadn’t slept either. “What’s with the questions all of a sudden?”

I shrugged. “You haven’t spoken about them in a while.”

“Because they’re not part of our lives anymore.” She answered gently.

I wanted to tell her that I still thought about them often - my cousins, my uncle, my aunt, my nieces who I never saw grow up. But I didn’t tell her, because for some reason I felt as though it’d be showing some form of weakness, that it’d almost be like betraying her and my dad.

When I was reading The Godfather at age fifteen, my dad took the book from my hands and inspected it. He told me, once upon a time, that him and my uncle Panyong were millionaires. My mum told me, later, that they lost it all due to ill advice given by a shifty banker that my uncle knew from college.

They stored their fortune in an offshore account to avoid tax, only to be pinned down by Inland Revenue. They found themselves dealing with a huge amount of debt, and thus, the millionaire brothers became just brothers.

But that’s not why we stopped talking to them.

We owned business with them - six stores. The rent earned from those stores was put into a separate account to pay off the debt we all owed, but little did we know that Panyong and his wife were taking large sums of the rent for themselves – essentially stealing from us.

And I know you probably don’t care about my uncle or his wife or my cousins, but when you lose people you think you can trust, it hurts - really ing bad.

My dad and his brother never really spoke after the matter was kind of sorted out, and that makes me sad, even to this day.

I think that if my family knew that I wished some day I’d bump into my uncle or my aunt or one of my cousins, just to see them, they wouldn’t really understand. Hyukjun definitely wouldn’t understand. So I kept my weaknesses hidden, for the sake of being accepted.

Kind of like how I’d change my she’s to he’s in my poetry – to be accepted.

After we touched down in London, I watched my mum rent a car in her rarely used, yet fluent English. I helped load our luggage into the trunk, and watched the English landscapes roll by as we sped down a dry motorway, my mum rattling off her old stories from when she was young and growing up in England.

The room Hyukjun was renting was in Shepherd’s Bush, five and a half miles from Central London. White houses lined the sides of the street that seemed to go forever, looking like an army of reversed dominos.

I held my breath after the doorbell sounded.

The door swung open and there he stood.

Arms reached out. I was pulled into his chest. He hugged me tight. With my ear to his beating heart, I pretended that I didn’t know the taste of his fiancé’s lips.

He dragged us into the building, through a door, down a narrow corridor and crammed us into his tight, one-person room.

He sat on a rickety swivel chair that he got cheap from IKEA and my mum and I settled on his bed, which took up majority of the space. We talked for a long while, capturing the parts we’d missed of each other’s lives.

My mother recounted to Hyukjun the story of the drunk guy who came into the shop looking for Ginger Nut Biscuits and a mop and I took the opportunity to look at him. Really look at him for the first time in months.

To me, he didn’t look like himself. The t-shirt that once fit him nicely, hung somewhat loose over his body. And his skin looked red, agitated from constantly having to be shaved. The mischievous glint in his eyes had disappeared, and he looked so tired.

I swallowed down.

“What shoul