Seoul
Three Years Later

Breathing is not an optional activity - but Seulgi found the opposite to be true. To live without Yoongi, she had to stop.

Her final breath had been the gasp she had taken when the bomb shredded Yoongi to pieces. It was the last lungful of air she would take as Yoongi's wife and in it was all she had left of him. 

Seulgi held her breath and mimicked the motions of life with a white-hot pain in her chest. Walking and reading the paper were activities that were easy to fake, carrying a conversation, not as much. Eventually, she learned that most people were satisfied if she logged in the appropriate number of nods as they spoke. With some practice, she became proficient enough to keep even her most enthusiastic friend, Wendy, happy.

Seulgi's ability to go through motions wasn’t surprising considering that she had been schooled by the best. Her dad died when she was very young and she grew up watching her mom paint on the brightest smile with the ripest shade of Revlon. At a tender age, she learned the concealing magic of red lipsticks. Mrs. Kang's red-tinted smile was an impenetrable mask coating endless nights of tears. There had been days when her happiness had seemed so real that Seulgi almost believed it. 

In the months and years since Yoongi's death, Seulgi had learned how to master the art of faking to exist. She started from the things that were easy to retain moving toward memories that are too painful to even consider.

The "Long Song" was by far the easiest. It was a game Yoongi invented. He would whip up a note and a word and Seulgi will match a song to it. Her voice heals, Yoongi would often say, that most of the time he would let her go on singing - forgetting that they were in the middle of a game. There were instances when Yoongi would rap his way on his turn and the game ends with Seulgi tenderly holding his chin before shutting him up with a kiss. If before the house echoes music, now a thick blanket of silence hovers. Yoongi's studio where he cooks up his mixes remain dust-free but largely untouched. It took a while for Seulgi to listen to the radio or open her iTunes app again.

Chicken and eggs were Seulgi's next hurdles. In her case, it was the egg that came first. She had banished eggs from her kitchen when Yoongi was killed. It was how she had managed to survive Sundays without him.

Sunday morning had once been her favorite time of the week. It was only then that not waking up in Yoongi's arms made her smile. The sight of his empty pillow only meant one glorious thing: egg rolls are coming her way.

Seulgi had fallen in love with Yoongi's egg rolls and cheese almost as she had fallen in love with Yoongi himself. They were in Yokohama when he first made the dish for her and the dance crew she was part of. Since then, egg rolls would be a part of her Sunday rituals. But Yoongi was gone and now Sundays coated with gritty bits of grief.

She learned to cope by bypassing most of Sunday with the help of watching re-runs of old dramas. But after countless days of rising at noon, she finally found the strength to wake up to the emptiness inside h