Jin enlisted in the marines the day after his 18th birthday. I'd thought I was prepared for it, but when he stopped by my house on the way home from "processing in," I burst into tears and ran up to my room. I didn't want to look at him.

At school the next day, we snuck out when we both had a free period and went outside, behind the school where we couldn't be seen. Jin kissed me up against the wall. It was June by now, and as hot as summer. We stood in the shade.

I threaded a finger under the chain he wore his fake dog tags on, and I lifted them out of his shirt and held them in my fist. "These don't make you make anything," I said. "They don't tell you who you are."

Jin uncurled my fingers, let the tags fall back onto his chest. "I'm going to get new ones," he said. "Real ones. So you're right. These are nothing."

"You're going to die," I said. He rolled his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said without actually sounding sorry. "I'm sorry that I obviously did such a great job of convincing you that my hallucinations -"

"Delusions," I corrected him, thinking I knew more about this than he did. Why didn't he trust me?

"Whatever," he said. "I'm sorry I convinced you they were real."

"They are real. Listen. You're going to walk into an apartment building Iraq. You're going to see a boy holding a radio that's really a bomb. You'll lock eyes. He'll pee himself. The bomb will go off. And then you will die."

"You have to cut it out, Suzy," he said. "You're going to end up in the mental institute."

"You heard me, though?" I said. I pulled him close to me as I could. I wrapped my arms around his waist and held him to me in the shade behind the gym. "You're going to die. You will die of burns."

"We're all going to die," he said.

I squeezed my eyes tight against the tears. "You're going to die sooner."

˭̡̞(◞⁎˃ᆺ˂)◞*✰

Jin was gone by the Fourth of July, training in Pyeongchang. For six weeks he couldn't even call. He came home at the end of the summer, just after I'd started school, but then only for four days.

I didn't see him again until Thanksgiving. I remember we were at pizza place waiting for our pie to be cooked and he was telling a long, bragging story filled with military acronyms, and I stood up and pretended I had to go to the bathroom. "If he uses another acronym as if I should know what it means," I said to myself in the mirror, "I am going to scream."

Add to that his comments about the college I'd applied to early decision being "fancy."

My college wasn't fancy. It was small, way out in the middle of Gwangju. My senior year, I hung a poster of it in my room and pictured myself there even as I took Mr. Mang's advanced course on Fennie and won and lost debate rounds and went to parties with Shinhye and waited for Jin's visits home, during which we fought as much as anything else.

Eomma worried I was so excited for college it was going to be a letdown once I got there, but from my first moment on campus, when Eomma and I showed up with my three enormous duffel bags, a standing lamp, a 2PM poster, and a year's supply of toiletries, I loved it. The kids on my hall stayed up until four in the morning talking about everything there was to talk about: music, the existence of God, the inevitable corruption of politics, what the deal with Mr. B from the The A-Team, who of all of us was the most likely to become famous.

When Jin got notified of his first overseas tour, and I explained it to my new friends, they said "Really?" in this half-choking way, trying to hide their surprise and distaste. All my friends were pacifists, like me. I'm sure they were wondering how I could even know someone in the military, let alone be dating him.

Jin was sent to Saudi Arabia. We said goodbye over my winter break. I remember crying. I remember tasting the salt of my tears, they were following so freely. Then he was gone.

And just as he'd said, he was the one who finally wrote the breakup message. He sent it from Saudi Arabia. He wrote:

I guess this shouldn't come as a surprise to you.

He wrote:

I don't see how we can even consider ourselves to be together when we don't write for weeks at a time.

He wrote:

I don't know what you're doing at college and I don't think I want to. It feels pretty irrelevant from where I'm sitting.

He wrote:

I had three days' leave in Dubai, and I did some thinking there.

He wrote:

We are not in the same world. We are not going in the same direction.

I was a sophomore by then, and my suite-mates baked me a cake to celebrate Jin's departure from my life. They called him GI Joe: they found the idea of him - the picture of him fatigues with a gun - creepy. They were relieved to have him gone and thought I was too, because that was what I told them. That was what I told myself.

This story is coming to an end; then I will focus primarily on Starry Night!

Thank you all for reading!