17 February 2014

Jihyo didn’t like to mention the blocky grey device constantly clipped to her finger, just waiting for her body to screw something up.

They all hated it.

But leading up to her tenth year of being hooked up to the machine, she figured her body had been giving up on screwing her over again like when she was eight.

So when Jihyo finds herself waking to a room with just one bed and doctors surrounding her whispering away, she knows the irregular beating of her heart and the white spots in her blurred vision aren’t just because the bright lights around her are a little intimidating.

In a flash she’s back to eight-year-old Jihyo, trying to find comfort in the sting of sterilised air as thoughts of the irrational rhythm in her chest makes her falter, as if her body hasn’t lost enough strength already. The bed seems a little too big, and the Japanese mumbled around begins to become foreign again from the mouths of people in coats instead of patterned gowns.

Soon, Jihyo learns through painfully dragged out sentences uttered in a low voice with eyes too glossy and focused on her own, that her body has indeed decided to screw her over, just a year and a half short of the end of her ten year observation period.

Jihyo never liked her heart, her old one for ditching her all of a sudden, and her new one because it was never hers.

But when Jihyo first woke five hours after the closing of glass doors behind her, she’d been told she had a precious heart. When her mother came over for the first time four days after, she’d been told she had a brave heart. And when Nayeon and Jeongyeon spent their first week with her, she’d been told she had a beautiful, kind heart. And so Jihyo grew to like her new heart, embracing it as her own and always trying to make it a better one.

Right now, she hated her heart. It had taken her five years to take it, another three and a half to make it warm, and a day for it to abandon her again. 

Jihyo wonders if everything they said was a lie.

Her heart wasn’t precious or brave or beautiful or kind, it was a new kind of s