A/N: Formatting's a tad different for this one since it's the halfway point now, but the content is the same (minus a tense switch in Part 2, from past to present, it's all good though). Enjoy! And as always, comments/discussions much appreciated, I read every last one! <3

VIII, PART I:  CAGED BIRD

"I just want to see you shine, 'cause I know you are a Stargirl."

Cold and quiet. Soft breathing.

In the early hours of the morning she lay on the floor listening to that quiet rise and fall as if to be sheltered from it would be to never hear it again. The mechanical wheezing of her chest. A dry sun was rising in the east. Cloudless morning. Irene rose and turned towards the bed. For a while she observed Seulgi much the way a parent studies their child, a sort of empathy running in her heart. Such a close space between them. Dim and lightless. She looked ethereal to a fault there, hands tucked under her head, breathing softly, face contorted in some wincing rictus of pain or emotion, talking mutely in her sleep, almost crying.

Irene just watched her. A certain fire rising in her. A fire of the soul. The sort of eternal agony one feels when confronted with the very possible truth that the future holds an uncertain destiny and there is no stopping nor returning from that point, a violent hurtling towards that singularity regardless of intention to turn and run from it. And for Irene much the same. A hollow thrum in the hole where her heart should be. Watching Seulgi. She was so fragile, so alone. This leptosome spirit adrift in worlds of sleep. Worlds other than this. Hair tangled about her face, cheeks flushed, stinking of old drink and used perfume and sweat and looking like something raised entirely from a dream. What was to become of them? As she watched she realised now she didn’t quite much know and daren’t ask. What was this, what were they. Questions of new lovers or accomplices banded together by a questionable and intertwined fate. What would Seulgi say when she woke up? Would she be mad? Would she even remember? Should she leave and when? Now?

Instead of leaving she went into the kitchen, careful not to make a sound. Beams of light from the crowning of the sun. It was almost seven in the morning. She thought about going back to sleep and then debating whether to leave or not again and in the end she sat at the table with a glass of water and drank it slowly and listened for signs of Seulgi breathing. After a while she set the hob on and looked in the fridge. Strips of bacon, some ham, other assorted foods. She took the bacon and set two pots of coffee on and cooked it on a medium heat for a while. By the time she was finished splitting the bacon between two plates Seulgi had emerged from the bedroom. She looked like some being homologous with life after life, her tangled hair and bloodless complexion and visage defiled by her soot makeup. Irene had brought the plates to the table with the coffee and she stopped and looked at Seulgi there in the doorway without a smile or sign much of anything on her face. A quiet fell between them. A strange and alien tension neither much liked.

‘Good morning,’ Irene said quietly.

‘What are you doing here?’

Irene shrugged. ‘Good first question, I guess.’

‘Did I meet you last night? Or ring you?’

‘Sort of.’

‘I sort of rang you?’

‘Well, you sort of met me.’

Seulgi rubbed at her eyes. She pushed her hair out of her face and winced. Cast up in that spear of sunlight she appeared closer to death than she realised. ‘How can I have sort of met you?’

‘I mean, you were pretty drunk.’

‘I know.’

‘Like, very drunk. Sit down. I made you breakfast.’

Seulgi studied the plates carefully. As if not quite understanding or perhaps believing what she had seen. Irene nodded again. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Did you make this?’

‘Who else would have?’

‘Thanks,’ Seulgi said softly. She sat and began immediately tearing into the bacon with her hands. Stink of alcohol still hot. ‘So what happened last night?’ She hesitated. ‘Did we?’

‘Did we what?’

‘Did we sleep together?’

‘No,’ Irene said. ‘Do you not remember at all?’

Seulgi shook her head.

‘Wow.’

‘Happens often. Honestly, probably too much.’

‘There were people taking pictures of you. I’m guessing they recognised you. And probably me too, then.’

‘Happens from time to time. I tend not to think about it too much.’

‘Really?’

Seulgi didn’t say anything. She finished a strip of bacon and chased it down with a mouthful of black coffee and winced again. She looked at Irene across the table. A glimmer of something not quite there in her eyes. Something she did not speak on. ‘If that really happened,’ she said, ‘you might want to lay low for a while.’

‘What do you mean?’

She took up another strip of bacon. ‘Well, if you really did take me home, or whatever, the papers will be all over it. And the internet blogs, too. like that travels around. You’ll probably get paparazzi on you.’

‘Are you serious?’ Irene said.

‘Yeah. Sort of. I honestly can’t tell you more than that. Since, you know, I can’t remember any of it.’

‘Yeah.’

‘So what happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, how did you even find me?’

‘I found you in Mission.’

‘Obviously,’ Seulgi said. She finished another mouthful of hot coffee with a sigh. ‘But, why were you there? With your friends again?’

‘No.’

‘On your own?’

Irene nodded.

‘Wow. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with. It’s what I do. What I did last night. But still. Why were you there on your own?’

‘Looking for you.’

Seulgi laughed. She looked at Irene. Irene did not return the favour. ‘Are you serious?’ Seulgi said.

‘Yeah.’

‘You were looking for me?’

‘That’s what I said, isn’t it?’

‘I mean, yeah. I guess. I just didn’t expect that.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why didn’t you expect it.’

Seulgi was quiet a moment. She finished up the last of the bacon and wiped the grease on her fingers against the plate and then she said: ‘I can’t really answer that. I just didn’t expect you to come looking for me, is all. Especially when you have my number and everything.’

‘You weren’t replying.’

‘What?’

‘To my texts,’ Irene said. ‘You weren’t replying to any of them.’

‘You could’ve just rang me.’

‘Are you kidding?’

‘What?’

‘I did. A lot. There was no answer.’

Seulgi shrugged. ‘I must’ve forgotten it somewhere,’ she said. ‘I can’t honestly remember.’

‘Well. I’m just saying, that’s how it happened. So I came to look for you. I was worried.’

‘Worried?’

‘Yeah.’

‘About what?’

‘I don’t know. Just worried.’

Seulgi didn’t say anything. She looked at Irene for a while. Searching for a changing expression. She pushed her plate across the table and nodded meekly. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

‘Don’t mention it. How you feeling?’

‘Not too bad. I’ve felt worse.’

‘You were a bit of a mess. It’s a surprise you didn’t throw up.’

‘I’m good at not throwing up. I’ve had a lot of practice at it. Not really sure whether that’s a good thing or not but I’m leaning towards no. Anyways, thanks. For the food. For looking after me. Bringing me home.’

‘It’s alright.’

‘No, seriously.’

‘It’s fine. Really.’

‘Thanks for looking for me.’

Irene didn’t say anything. She ate her bacon quietly and sipped her coffee and by the time they were finished the sun had risen in a full and pink dawn. They watched it for a while. Long arcs of light, cloudless and arrant in the sky. Seulgi played with her cup. She ran a finger around the rim and pushed it around the table and she wouldn’t look at Irene nor speak. Irene studied her a while. Wondering what to say. She looked so vulnerable, so different to how Irene had come to know her. Where that other girl gone? The one who had stolen her breath with a glance and kissed all down and giggled wicked, a wretched husky laugh. Where was all of that? She sat debating with herself the nature of this change and of what it meant for Seulgi and for them as a whole and came to the startling conclusion that she had no idea. Couldn’t tell at all. She watched Seulgi a while longer.

‘Hey,’ she said. Seulgi looked at her. ‘What’s your favourite Pynchon book?’

‘What?’

‘Your favourite Pynchon book. I know you said Cervantes and Faulkner were your faves. Or maybe McCarthy, right? But what about Pynchon?’

Seulgi seemed to change as if on the long end of a switch. A glimmer returning to her eyes so sudden it warmed Irene’s heart. A life in that pallid texture again. She sat up as if raised by some phantom locomotion to converse once more and she said: ‘My favourite Pynchon book? That’s pretty tricky, to be honest.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why’s it tricky?’

‘Well, I mean, I don’t know.’ She looked down at her cup again and shrugged.

‘C’mon,’ Irene said. ‘I love Pynchon.’

‘For real?’

‘Why would I lie?’

Seulgi turned her face up again. She looked for a fraction of a moment so fragile, so fit to break. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘that does sound stupid. But you wouldn’t be the first.’

‘Wait, what? Seriously?’

‘Yeah.’

‘People lie to you about books, of all things?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Why?’

‘They think it’ll make me like them more. And to be honest, it does. Until I find out they’re lying, of course. They think it’ll make me sleep with them again, or take their picture, or give them my number. They do it because I’m a celebrity, and they can brag to their friends afterwards that they got to spend a morning with me, just talking, and they can say things like Oh, she’s super cool and down to earth, yeah we were chatting for ages about everything. That’s kind of what most people I meet do. Even other celebs. They treat me like I’m this object for them to parade around as some sort of accomplishment. Like I’m a trophy they need to collect for Instagram or whatever.’

‘Jesus, that sounds awful.’

‘I’ve gotten used to it. And I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not.’

Irene sighed. She could see Seulgi’s hand trembling on the table. ‘I promise I’m not like that. Really. I’m not lying. That’d be the last thing on my mind. I genuinely just want to know your favourite Pynchon novel, since he’s my favourite writer.’

‘I remember you saying,’ Seulgi said.

‘Yeah. Not often you meet someone who’s a fan of the same authors as you, you know?’

‘Yeah. I get that.’

‘So, what is it?’

Seulgi thought for a moment. ‘I mean, the cop-out answer would be Gravity’s Rainbow,’ she said, ‘but I honestly think Mason & Dixon is a little bit. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both great. Just Mason & Dixon speaks to me more. It’s genuinely so moving.’

‘Yeah. Agreed.’

‘What about you?’

‘My fave?’

Seulgi nodded.

‘Probably V,’ Irene said.

‘Wow, really?’

‘Yeah. I mean, I know that’s an unconventional choice, but I’ve read it about ten times and I still love it, so it must be doing something write. Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon are amazing but I can’t just pick them up off the shelf and read them in an afternoon, you know? I’ve got to be in the right mood for them. The right mindset. V’s not like that. I just pick it up and flick to the first page and boom, it’s amazing all over again. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of it.’

‘Yeah. I can see that. I still think it’s a great book, to be honest.’

‘Yeah.’

They remained quiet again for a time. It was Seulgi that spoke first. She asked what other authors Irene liked and Irene told her, and they spent a long time debating the intricacies of the modern canon and literature and pulp fiction and the role it played and they both talked openly and laughed and shared a thing there that they hadn’t much before, not with the drinking or the clubbing or the or the smalltalk in the morning or with the arguing either. A genuine connection, a feeling both could sense instantly though neither spoke of. When they had exhausted their conversation utterly Irene took the plates to the sink with the pots of coffee and poured out two more cups and came back and handed one to Seulgi.

‘Thanks,’ Seulgi said softly. A thin blue hue on her face from the coppering of the sun, distorted in the glass glimmer. They drank their coffee in silence. Irene’s hands shaking. She thought for a while about the last time she had felt such a way and concluded if she had ever felt like that at all then it was a very long time ago. There was a silence fallen between them and it was not comfortable. Seulgi fiddled with her fingers. It was Irene first to broach that quiet. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘About last night.’

‘I don’t remember any of it, so there’s no point asking.’

‘You asked me to stay.’

‘What?’

‘When I was in the bedroom. I tried to leave and you told me to stay with you. So I did.’

‘I don’t remember any of that.’

‘You did.’

Seulgi shrugged. ‘Must have been delirious,’ she said.

‘Jesus,’ said Irene.

‘What?’

‘Why can’t you just talk to me straight?’

‘I told you, I don’t remember.’

‘But still, it’s not about that. You told me, plain as day, to stay. You held a hand out for me. Why? Does that not mean anything? Do we not?’

‘I must’ve thought you were someone else. It’s not that it’s you, it’s that it was anyone. To stop me being sick and .’

‘No it wasn’t and you know it.’

‘I don’t know anything. I was very drunk.’

Irene sighed. ‘You know what?’ she said. ‘I’m not even going to let it bother me. I’m not going to think about it. Because the more I do, the angrier I get. Because I’m trying and trying for a straight answer and you won’t give me one, so you know what? I’m going to do what’s best for me: I’m not even going to ask anyone. I’m not going to get upset, and I’m not going to press you. I’m just going to take it as it comes, whatever that means.’

Seulgi just looked at her.

‘I’ll leave,’ Irene said. ‘Leave you on your own for a bit.’

‘No, wait.’

‘What?’

Seulgi was quiet. Then she said, in a very quiet voice: ‘Don’t.’

‘Don’t what? Leave?’

‘Yeah. Don’t.’

‘Why? Do you want me to stay?’

Seulgi sighed. She looked back towards the window, a glimmer of painted light on her face, like a mute and golden clown. When she turned back to Irene her bottom lip was quivering slightly. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I don’t know, alright?’

‘Don’t know what?’

‘I don’t know anything. I’m so ing lost right now and I don’t know how I feel about it or how I want to feel about it or anything like that. I’ve no idea. I haven’t felt like this in a long time and I’m not sure I’m ready to feel it again and I don’t even think I’m ready to talk about it yet. I’m sorry. I am. I’m just with my emotions and I don’t know how to express myself and everything I’m feeling. It’s a long and complicated story. I’ve had a lot of piled on me and I’m just now trying to get over it and I don’t know how to, really. I don’t. I’m just sort of cruising. That’s me. I’m on some dumb autopilot and I don’t know where it’s taking me or what’ll happen when I’m there or anything like that. So I’m sorry.’

She was playing with her nails as she spoke, a low and anxious voice. Irene studied her in silence. She smiled. ‘That’s alright,’ she said. ‘I mean it. That’s fine. I just wanted an answer, so thank you.’

‘I’m sorry.’

Irene smiled again. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. She stood to leave and Seulgi stopped her.

‘Wait,’ she said. Irene turned. ‘Do you want to do something tonight?’

‘Like what?’ Irene said.

‘I don’t know. Go for a walk or something?’

‘Go for a walk?’

‘Yeah. It’s one of my favourite things to do, even if it is pretty hard. Being a celebrity and all, you know. But I love it. Just like, walking along the riverfront, know what I mean? It’s calming in a way. Sort of life-affirming.’

‘Yeah,’ Irene said. ‘Sure. I’d love to. What time? And where?’

Seulgi smiled. ‘Maybe around nine? There’s this big firework display going on tonight and I sort of want to catch it. I don’t even know why, but it’s been like ten years since I’ve seen fireworks properly.’

‘What about New Years’ parties?’

‘I tend to be too drunk to pay attention to them.’

Irene laughed. ‘Makes sense. Sure, I’ll go. Sounds fun.’

‘Sweet.’

‘I’ll see you there then?’

‘Yeah,’ Seulgi said. Soft and quiet voice. So small in that huge space. ‘See you there.’

For the rest of the day she walked alone. Down streets long and sunbaked, a blearing heat from a cold sky, clouds voided in the early afternoon. She thought of Seulgi a lot. And Yeri and Wendy and Joy, but mainly Seulgi. And of herself.

She thought about all she had amounted to in the past three or four years and all her life’s assets weighed against her debits and she realised in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t happy. It was almost a revelation of sorts, a feeling she had grown so accustomed to and yet never really paid much attention towards, a sort of paradox of the mind. She was just Irene. Just who she was. She worked and she met her friends and she did things. That was her. She did things, and none of them were fulfilling. None filled that hollow in her heart, the void in her soul where naught lingered or lurked or remained from her earlier years, from better times. As she walked she reflected on those times. Where had she wanted to go? What path laid out for her to follow? Where did she wish her future to culminate and was it here? She knew for a fact that it was not. It was back along that road but clouded as to not see the end. To not see the destination so longed for. A sort of murk or haze on her ambitions, her dreams. And now what of Seulgi? What did she bring?

Was it happiness? Or a satiation of some primal yearning hunger of the soul or more earthly desires? Who knew. She found it hard to formulate an answer coherent enough to satisfy that query. They were not lovers nor friends but they shared something and still she could not tell what it was. But it was good. It was growing stronger. Seulgi had talked to her, however brief, and that was different. It was the breaking of the first wave against the beachhead of her own worries and troubles, her own fragile insecurities, her tempered ego, a soundless desire to express more, to tell Irene everything, to give herself up entirely. It was going that way, Irene thought. They were on that path. She found herself smiling involuntarily, there on street corners, framed in dappled light, her shadow cast out amongst the dancing clouds of the heavens, formless shapeless thing of a higher fate. Of what fate? And what besides? She thought she would soon find out.

VIII, PART II: THE TRIUMPH OF ECSTASY

They don’t say much.

Just before nine they meet shaded under one of the bandstands on the grass behind the path and they talk for a while there, resting on the balustrade and hiding from the wind. A wind picked up earlier in the afternoon and a bleak night to accompany it. A shine to the universe in those stars up there. They watch them quietly, heads peeking out from the space under the roof, observing with full eyes the turning of the cosmos, Orion and Rigel and the many constellations in their arms, their ferine shapes and tendencies soaring, smiling and laughing and pointing them out. Afterwards they say little else. Already a crowd has begun to gather down on the embankment. They can see the water from there, a faint black like graphite in the murk, and the big boat floating out on the river, and otherwise a quiet in the air, carless roads on the bridge far to their right, small voices and whispers from the curious followers of that coming display. Seulgi nods to a space down on the grass. It is empty, and the grass neatly cut, but there are other people around, and Seulgi has dressed in a loose-fitting black hoodie and a pair of sweatpants, and she pulls the hood tight around her face and follows Irene down and they sit there, small and damp in the mist, already a clamour building steadily. There is a small hotdog cart coming along the path, and two boys run to snatch up the fresh buns for themselves before anyone else has chance, and by the far end a makeshift stall for burgers and chips and onion rings and behind that an icecream van idling in a groove on the embankment, scrawled over the glassface an assortment of treats, of lollies and whippy cones, bright spectra muted in the darkness.

Night has fallen fully by now, and it’s a cold night for sure, but she is right where she wants to be. She wants to be on the riverfront, surrounded by a flush of faces and chattering mouths and hair aflutter on the wind, taking in the soft scent of honeycomb and cottoncandy and greasy burgers, burgers with too much onion and not enough meat, and the sweet and nauseating tang of amber from Seulgi’s throat, and with Seulgi right beside her, knees tight to her chest, sheltered so minutely from the cold, watching across the river the metropolis of steel and wrought iron adrift in pinpoint holes of citylight and in their shimmering they beckon the origin of a new time, a time she thinks for a while, for that small corridor there on the grass with Seulgi next to her her, might just be better, might be what she’s finally looking for, what she’s been searching for all her life and never even realised it.

They wait patiently. The energy in the air is electric. She can taste it, reach out and grab hold and feel it in her hands, the all-encompassing buzz of that nervous tension between them all, and how many of them are there now? Two, three hundred. When she looks around she sees nothing but more faces, groups of girls come for the show with their phones out, families talking over pramhandles and babies mewling through pacifiers, a pair of construction workers in mudstiffened jackets and hardhats tucking in to foamboxes of fish and chips, an old man and his wife watching, a woman leaning her head against her lover’s shoulder, a bunch of kids maybe ten or twelve and they’ve got a dog with them, it’s a little Cocker Spaniel and it wobbles about on the grass with its big tongue aloll and finds a place to lay down and then the kids call to it again and it totters off and they all laugh, they’re all having a dandy time.

She notices that they are all smiling. It’s a dark night but she can see the looks painted on their illuminate faces. They wait quietly, murmuring amongst themselves, watching like onlookers at a unique zoo exhibit, forming strings of words with their shapely mouths and pointing out to the barge floating there amongst the soft collude of the waves, its own shadow impressed on the water like an illusion of a shape distended in light, a goliath pattern all ugly and strangelooking on the face of the cold river. There is only one light on the barge – or perhaps it is boat, she wonders - a solitary shape, a heraldic light shored up in the murk for all of time to bear uncountable witness to, and a calm quietude falls over the crowd of onlookers as the clock strikes nine thirty and they hold their breath and then so does Seulgi, and Irene too.

There’s a certain monument to that moment, that solitary second before all pandemonium is loosed over the eve. It’s a special sort of thing, a real tangible achievement not just for Irene or Seulgi or any of the other eager spectators but for all of them as a collective, as one great individual, swaying and undulating and umming and ahhing to the rhythm of that soundless metronome, all waiting arm in spurious arm for the arrival of that starbust of light, that flare that denotes in its coming the essence of something more, something so absurdly powerful that they can feel it even though they will never quite know what it is, never quite understand it, or even come to grips with that energy running through each of them in turn. It’s a brilliant thing, it is in truth a sort of transcendental experience, this display of fireworks, this riverside electric loosed wet and steaming over all the earth. It is a coalescence of some greater destiny, a sort of human collaboration the likes of which is so often overlooked in its real importance, a loud and extravagant bonding of the base of all people, that which makes us so different from one another and yet so very similar, it’s a merging of the ideals by which we attribute our continued existences, a wave crashing and breaking on the shores of human kindness, a time however small and insignificant as to bond the souls of those lost and poor and those perhaps not as much and indicate for however short a time that they are all the same, they are all birthed from the same dawn. It’s a staggering display of companionship, and for a few minutes there on the banks of the river they all forget about everything else, they discard the past, rid themselves of its useless and terrifying baggage, and they let themselves go.

The first firework goes skittering into the black sky and then it explodes and in that instant, cast out in a brilliant white flare of light, they look so achingly different, so at peace with one another, man and woman and child, even the dog is watching now, and it hates it because it cannot stand loud noises, and it wags its tail and yelps and scuttles off but for that moment, for that brief second, it too had shared that energy, that tethered spirit, that love of what is truly capable, a brief understanding of what is squandered in the process. Then another five or six burst overhead, and the air is immediately filled with the smell of gunpowder and glycerine, ribbons of fine material in a spectrum of colour, red and gold streamers adrift in the wind, and then the sky begins to light with more and more, until all they can see there in that space in the dark is the advent of some epic and quivering solar eruption, perched like a vast and falling pendulum of light, sound exploding, sound caroming off the face of the earth itself, sound enough as to open a wound in the very stomach of the world, and more small papercones go trailing into some distant orbit and blooming in flowers of white and gold and more streams fall across the river face, and it begins to rain in this nebulous shower of citrine and magenta, of cinnabar and teal and crimson, this parade of the extraordinary, of that which shouldn’t be possible and yet is, and they all clap and gasp and sit wide-eyed and loose-jawed and breathing much too heavily, unaware of the world as it exists outside of that sphere of influence, that incredible spectacle, like adenoidal shapes whose manifest destiny is to bear witness to that sight until it is dashed from the rocks of time forever, and soon it will be, and as another trident of streamers go tearing through the night Irene moves her hand over Seulgi’s, and she takes it soft and cold and raw in her own, so small and alone, and she expects Seulgi to move back but she doesn’t, there is no resistance, and she grips it tighter and holds it in Seulgi’s lap as the last of that display breaks across the sky like some godless thunderclap extant from the heavens, that light the last of all lights raised sourceless like the great body electric or some kite of destiny withering to naught and then gone entirely, subsumed where it lay, and the last linger of the echoes seeps slowly away, and she catches sight of the very final wisp of hot zinc simmering bluely, and they are left at last in a dim rumble of their own voices, and Irene looks about and sees the crowd begin to disperse and she knows at that instant, with Seulgi still watching the river beside her, and these others enraptured so utterly by that momentary signal of light, that this is the genesis of all species, this is the beginning and the end, and all is at it does, for better or for worse. This is what it means to truly be human. This is us. It is the last light of the evening, the light posited just along the rim of the horizon without fail, along every horizon, a sliver of scarlet faint as pastel and fading slowly to naught, to a cold and quiet solitude of darkness, and then it is gone and there is nothing. But sometimes you can see it there in the west, where no other light exists or even should, and if you look very closely you can see that small glimmer for what it truly is, and what it holds – it is the first light of the morning, to bring us without ceremony or display to the shores of a new dawn.

It is the waking day. And you can still see it from there. You can see it from almost anywhere.