July 2019.

She looked at Irene there on the stage with the certificate rolled in her hand and she had never felt prouder of anything in her life. The outfit was perfect, she was perfect. She doffed her graduation hat and smiled and waved to Seulgi and they read out her name and they all clapped and Seulgi the loudest amongst them and when they were finished clapping and Irene had come down from the stage she took her in her arms and kissed her and told her how proud she was, how much she loved her right there, and Irene said I love you too. I’m so proud of you, Seulgi. I can’t believe we’re finally graduating.

*  *  *

They sat by the window of the café watching the bad weather come over the evening and they talked against the hum of chatter around them like static lost in a void. It had been raining for most of the day. Raining since the night before. In the street the people looked like matchstick figures fashioned out of coal. Or like grainy hiccups on an old film reel, slowly yellowing, coppered by the long pinchbeck dusk. At the edge of the world the sun in its low perch sat warming the bluff of shadow comprising the butcherpaper mountains somewhere far across Seoul. Seulgi watched the rain as it fell. It was falling in fat pebbles in the streets and over the pavements and it was falling over the neonboard signs and the window decorations and over the cars in the streets and it was running everywhere, in Busan as in Seoul. She watched it streak over the dusty pane like slow forms of planarians. Falling over all the world.

‘Surreal, right?’ Yeri said. She was sat across from Seulgi and she stirred her coffee absently. It bubbled into volute onions of cream, small patterns on the surface. And then it was gone again. Joy sipped her coffee beside her quietly. They all seemed to share some sort of unspeakable truth that was profoundly upsetting and they all realised that while it may be in some ways immature it was true and it was strange, it was something that they all knew was coming to an end none were prepared for. None except Seulgi. She sat wondering. She had seen friends come and go. Some had stuck around, some had not. Some had died or gone away. All had died or gone away.

‘Almost three years,’ Irene said. She took one of the creamers from the chinaplate and emptied it into her coffee and stirred it three times. Seulgi watched her. Always three times, no more. A habit.

‘It’s going to feel so weird next year,’ Yeri said. ‘I mean, I know we’ll see each other all the time and everything, but still. Not living together. Not seeing each other every day. It’s going to feel so strange. Like something’s not quite right, you know?’

‘Oh come on,’ Wendy said. ‘Don’t be a big baby.’

Yeri grinned. ‘You’re one to talk for once.’

‘Personally, I can’t wait to get rid of you.’

‘Feeling’s mutual.’

Wendy laughed. They drank their coffee. Seulgi remained silent. She regarded the darkness with a sort of cold detachment, studying the turning of the night like one studies animals at a zoo. Only when Irene put a hand over her own did she turn. Irene smiled softly. The others were talking together and they hadn’t noticed her lack of concentration but Irene had. Irene always did. For that she was grateful, always grateful. It stopped her thinking about what was to come. About what was going to happen in the future, for her or Irene or for any of them. About how she would have to live knowing something that they could never know or would never accept or maybe both and it hurt. It hurt so much. So she didn’t think about it, she kept it hidden away, as if to merely acknowledge its presence was insidious in and of itself. And perhaps it was. She never spoke of it and every time she looked at Irene she would force herself to think of something else and by now it had become a habit of her own, so much so that when it began to fade she never even noticed.

Irene finished the last of her coffee. ‘So,’ she said, ‘what are you actually going to do now?’

‘I don’t know,’ Yeri said. ‘I mean, I know I’m going to work for a while, but I don’t know where yet. And I don’t know how long for.’

Irene turned to Joy. ‘What about you?’

‘Same,’ Joy said. ‘I kind of still want to do a master’s but it can wait. I need the money.’

‘Me too,’ Wendy said.

‘Well,’ Irene said, ‘that makes a bunch of us.’

‘You finally decided what you’re doing?’

Irene shook her head. ‘I just know I’m not going back into education just yet,’ she said. ‘I’ve had enough of it for the time being.’

‘I know that feeling. What about you, Seulgi?’

Seulgi looked at each of them in turn. They were so young, so fragile. So very unlike her. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m like you guys. Going to find someplace to work for a while, maybe go back into a master’s next year or the year after. I haven’t really planned that far ahead.’

‘Forgot we were so close to the end?’

‘Something like that, yeah.’

‘Feels weird, right?’

‘Really weird. But it’s good. It’ll be good to do something different for a change. To get out there and into the world.’

‘Right. More coffee?’

Seulgi declined politely. When they had all finished their drinks they said their goodbyes and promised to meet again over the summer and they all did so with a certain sadness circumscribed by those specific conditions they had fallen under, as if each knowing in their own way that they would never be that full five again, at least not like that, for in some way university held a special bonding that none could ignore nor ever forget. It was a life within a life. They had each in their own manner come to learn to be proper people, to have grown together, to have laughed and cried and failed and ultimately succeeded. They had become adults, and that was a thought that scared each of them. Even Irene, years older than all of them, felt that change. They all did. All except Seulgi. What could she feel? What after so long was there even left to feel anymore? What difference did any of it make. But as they walked she looked across at Irene and immediately she knew that it was different, that it did matter, because Irene was there and Irene was just that. She was Irene. She was indescribable, like the detailing of a fable conjured from some foreign tongue. She was mythic. She was Irene and she was Seulgi’s entire world no matter how much Seulgi wanted to deny it.

*  *  *

‘Hey.’

Seulgi looked at her.

‘Want to get a house?’ Irene said. Seulgi didn’t say anything. Irene sat with her hands folded in her lap on the bench. The wind blew her hair about her face and she squinted and winced in the cold and so did Seulgi and she was silent for a long time. Then she said, slowly, ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean, want to get an apartment together?’

‘Me and you?’

‘Who else.’

‘Well.’

‘Well what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Don’t know what?’

Seulgi didn’t say anything. She studied the face of the Han River. She studied the streets behind them. Rising out of the cold and dim murk of the evening the city stood like a field of menhirs erected out of some devonian reckoning, lank and black in the shadow of the bald moon. She looked back at Irene. Her lips slightly parted, head tilting to the side. As if expecting something.

‘Are you serious?’ Seulgi said.

‘Yeah I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be?’

Seulgi shrugged.

‘What do you say then? I mean, you don’t have to decide right now, of course. Obviously not. I just thought I’d throw the option out there, you know? Just figured, since we’re together and stuff, and since I don’t really fancy moving back in with my mum while I get something settled, it’d be better for the both of us. But I get it if you think differently, you know? I totally get it. Some people just don’t like that. Maybe you think I’m moving too fast or something, I don’t know. It’s up to you.’

‘Irene.’

‘I won’t be mad or anything.’

‘Irene.’

Irene looked at her. She was picking idly at her fingernails and she didn’t even realise it. Seulgi giggled. She took Irene’s hands between her own, so cold and pale and small. The hands almost of a child. ‘Of course I want to,’ she said. ‘Why would you think I didn’t?’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Duh. Why not?’

‘I mean, I don’t know. I just thought…’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know, honestly. Just me being stupid.’

‘What else is new.’

Irene sighed. ‘Don’t push your luck.’

*  *  *

She stood by the wide window looking out across the horizon at Seoul as it slept. In the evening brume it looked like a drawing marked on some ancient tableau. Each tower stood in its own way obscured in the fog and all like a set of spines positioned up against the sky and below cars hemmed into the intersections. Here people passed like ghosts over the avenues, small and oblique in the dustmottled light, and as the sun leaked away over the cusp of the world the brown and crumpled tissuepaper mountains seemed almost to quake in the waning heat, like quivering sculptures formed of some ethereal substance. Like something of another world entirely.

She watched for a long time and as she watched she compartmentalised each place in that vast metropolis and formed for herself an image of the city from a time before, from years past, before Irene or her other friends had ever even been born, when there had been so few cars you had to squint to hear them at all, and the air had been so clear you could see the round peaks of Bukhansan from the other side of the city, like a great snubbed nose left there on some enormous vertical base, and when you could still smell the stink of sulphur from factories miles from wherever you were at that time, and meat was a luxury not a triviality, and all memory of the war was still a clear and present thing and not something only cited by those old enough to remember it, and there were American troops on the street corners and in the restaurants and coming down from the army bases for those weekend trips, and when the great spire of Namsan Tower had not existed at all, had been nothing but the earth and the soil, had never even been a thought at all.

Back then she was still a child. She could still play with her friends oblivious to the nature of her course and where it would take. She had grown with them from the age of four, since they had first met. Her first friends were two girls called In-sook and Kyung-hee and they had become best friends at school and they had stayed that way for a long time. In-sook helped run her parents’ grocery store. Kyung-hee worked in a steel mill. They had been friends throughout their twenties and sometime around there though Seulgi could not be sure of when she had stopped aging entirely. She had ceased to age altogether. When they first noticed it they laughed but five years later they were not laughing anymore and five years after that they had fallen out of contact with Seulgi and she had not heard from them again until years later.

When she met Kyung-hee again it was 1993 and Kyung-hee was old and wise and she had not changed one bit. Her skin was sallow and red from years of alcohol abuse and her teeth crooked and her hair greying at the temples and on top and already she looked twenty years older than she actually was. And Seulgi had not changed at all. She was still young and slim and pretty and she kept all her hair and she just was, she always had been just that. Kyung-hee said very little. She said she didn’t know what Seulgi was or what happened to her and she didn’t want to and it scared her and when Seulgi joked that she just had good skincare Kyung-hee began to cry and then she left. Seulgi never heard from her again. Twelve months later she learned that Kyung-hee had in February of that year thrown herself onto the subway tracks of the Bundang Line and that was that. That was the end. And she never heard a word from In-sook.

As she remembered this she turned to Irene. She was stood there dressed in a thin white camisole and a loose pair of loungepants and she was smiling from ear to ear. In the low light of the room she looked like something raised from the other side of life, like a spirit. ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Well,’ Seulgi said, ‘can’t deny the view.’

‘I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sure what to think before we got here.’

‘Me neither.’

Irene came up beside her and put an arm around her waist. Seulgi could smell the faint scent of lemon on her again, as always. Always that same perfume. A long time ago she’d read about the olfactory smell and the effect of smell on the recollection of emotion and now she was sure of what it truly meant. To smell something that might not be there. Like an imprint of something left long after it should have disappeared. In winter the snows mask all evidence of navigation upon the ground and all proof of motion at all but when the warmer weathers melt out that snow and leave in its place just the mud and the stone the ridges and the grooves in that earth serve as a way to remember the past, like a palimpsest of something effaced, like a breath on a mirror, and through that you can remember it just as it was. You can still see the snows there.

Irene let her head rest against Seulgi’s shoulder. ‘I’m glad we got this place,’ she said.

‘Me too. It’s nice.’

‘For the price, I don’t think I’ll ever complain again.’

‘Yeah. Me neither.’

‘You know it still feels kind of weird.’

‘What does?’

‘This. All of this. Finishing university, I mean. A few years ago I never thought I’d see the day. Never thought I’d ever even go. And now I’m here, and I don’t know yet if it was worth it.’

‘It will be. In the long run.’

‘I hope so. I just don’t know what I’m going to do next and that’s kind of scary, you know? I know people that’ve gone their entire lives not knowing what they wanted to do or what they were ever even doing at all. And I don’t want to be like that. I want to find something I enjoy and settle down and just do that. I want to find something that’s good for me. I hope I will, at least.’

‘You will,’ Seulgi said. ‘I know you will.’

‘I hope you’re right. You know there’s a famous proverb that says you can live a thousand years without really living? I wonder if that’s true.’

And to that Seulgi had no response at all.