1934

My love,

I saw a bird today that reminded me of you. It followed me around all day, trying to be sly even though I kept seeing it around my peripheral vision. You might hate it to know that a scruffy pigeon makes me think of you but I don’t really care if you don’t like it. I spent most of my life trying to please other people and we decided I wouldn’t do that anymore.

I’d like to keep that pigeon as a pet though. That is if I could catch it, but I know I won’t. It deserves to be free, to live…

Like us.

~*~*~*~

BoA takes to writing letters three weeks after successfully moving to a little ding of an apartment in Chinatown, Manhattan, NY. It’s small and reeks of dirt and heavy floral scents because of the flower shop downstairs but it is theirs, and after over half a year in America, she is ready to live on her own two feet.

Sooyoung’s contact and a friend of Siwon’s going by the name of HanGeng meets her by the docks once her ship arrives, smuggling them out of the vessel with little to no trouble with the Immigration system. No one in Little Fuzhou questions the appearance of a Korean face in the midst of a Chinese-American population. They are nobody here, a ghost, and BoA thinks this is exactly where she wants to be in life.

“I’ll move you elsewhere once I get you new papers drawn up,” HanGeng tells her, smiling warmly as he fluffs a pillow. She sees the specks of dust floating around the yellow light, dancing to some silent tune she wasn’t privy to but seems to know by heart. Dum-da-dum, da-dum. The song goes, playing in her head and she smiles despite the exhaustion in her limbs, only half-listening when her caretaker continues speaking, “Would you like to change anything? For the new papers, I mean.”

BoA nods, lips still upturned into a tiny soft smile. “Yes. I’d like to be known as Jung BoA. If you don’t mind.”

HanGeng understands (of course he does) and bows his head in reply, “Not at all.” He leaves her alone to her thoughts after a while, handing off a blanket into her hands as though it were a child. He knows as well as she that she’ll need the practice.

After all, she’ll be a mother soon.

~*~*~*~

My love,

You have to stop following me.

(And yes, I mean get off that windowsill and fly.)

~*~*~*~

(( They make it as far as the exit to the freeway when Yunho recognizes the sleekly colored cars following them immediately from a mile off and turns early into another exit miles off where they should be going. He knows it’s risky to veer off course but he had expected them to catch wind and follow. The family has never given up when they should—and it is unlikely they would start now when the daughter of the kingpin is at stake.

“Yunho—” BoA stutters, eyes wide as she looks back and sees the cars coming in closer and closer, “They’re gaining on us.”

His foot presses down on the acceleration, dodging the few cars slowing them down and overtaking them in a blur of dust. BoA holds on for her life, one hand clutched on the armrest while the other grips his forearm—trembling as the engine rumbles and shakes louder beneath her feet. Yunho shakes her hold off of him for only a second, grabbing onto in on the next as he steers past another car—a white truck this time, carrying cages of chicken in the back—and speeds further and further away.

“We’ll lose them.” He tries to assure her, his tone flat and unconvincing. It doesn’t help but it makes her smile, and the fact that it does makes it so much easier for her to believe it to be true. She squeezes his fingers and nods, looking out resolutely at the open road.

“We’ll lose them,” she echoes, grasping his hand on the steering wheel. They’re awful liars and it isn’t enough but it has to be. “We will.”

Yunho drives on, glancing behind and winces as the cars they’d hoped to dodge stick with them still. He moves the hand she’s holding into the gear shift, and pulls down so fast their heads spin as Yunho makes a U-Turn and speeds past their tails, leaving them blubbering in the dust. It gives them just enough time to be on their way to the right exit. To the docks where the ship Sooyoung told them to be in will be. To freedom.

Yunho laughs as BoA does, throwing her hair back. Freedom is close, they think. It is. They can taste it.

He brings her knuckles to his lips and kisses them, feather light and b with all the love in his heart. His eyes twinkling as he mutters against her skin, “Hold on tight, baby.”

And she does. Tight and sure. ))

~*~*~*~
My love,

The sweet old man downstairs gave me a bouquet of the most beautiful peonies today.

They smelled as sweet as his disposition so I had to give him a little kiss.

You don’t mind, right?
~*~*~*~

She fills an old shoebox with her letters and keeps it under her bed.

Sometimes they are long and winding, ranging from five to ten pages depending on her mood. Other times they are only a few sentences long, a random thought or quote written in longhand and in the darkest ink. The words smudge sometimes when she finishes and arranges them behind one another, leafing through the cards and envelopes in the box before shutting it and lying on her side. The shades are drawn by then and only the very faint light from the street corners can get through the room.
Her hand skims from her sternum down to below her belly button and sighs.

She’ll write again tomorrow. That as much is certain.
 

~*~*~*~

My little love,
You are late.
~*~*~*~

 

HanGeng visits sometimes, making his famous fried rice on nights when it is too warm to cook anything else. He’s often carrying a message, little tidbits of information that makes her stomach turn—

“My friend is foolish for letting her slip away. I know she would have said ‘Yes’ to his proposal. Don’t you think so? …I suppose nothing ever does last.”

—and flutter into flight.

“But the thug did finally wear down the dancer. They are marrying in the fall on the roof of her nightclub. Is