“I don’t think we should stay together after the summer.”

I nodded, because you seemed really sure, and all of your reasons for it made sense, so I nodded, and I couldn’t say anything because my throat had snapped shut with the effort of holding back my tears. You hugged me, and I thought I was nodding more until I realized that I was rubbing my face against your shirt.

That’s why right now, as you sleep, I cling to you so obscenely tightly, feeling the warm peaches on your breath from the last day of summer wafting across the bridge of my nose. I’ve long since stopped crying over the fact that you’re leaving tomorrow, but I can’t seem to unravel my fingers from my shirt or pull myself from you.

In two hours, MyungSoo, who slept easily through my lachrymose insomnia, will be gone, and I’ll be here, thinking very rationally about why we separated. I’ll remember that we’ll be going to schools in different places, and that MyungSoo doesn’t want to hold me back, and that it’s easier to part cleanly like this than to drift apart with ugly fights in the next year or so.

Except that I don’t feel very reasonably and raging inside of me is a thunderstorm of adoration that doesn’t understand distance or logic or that we’re being cut in half like this, MyungSoo to be carefully stored in someone’s lunch box, and I myself to be dropped on the floor with my contents careening from me.

In the morning, MyungSoo’s laughs are all short and a bit choked, but he offers them anyway, and a hug and a kiss and a goodbye. Look at how sweetly he can look me in my eyes and how gently he destroys me.