June 2020.

In the early morning she woke before the sun had peeled away the dark and lay there watching Irene while she slept. In the predawn twilight she looked almost inhuman, like something formed out of a cruel dream to remind Seulgi of the terrible reality of her situation. She lay there listening to Irene’s slow breathing and she watched the rise and fall of her chest. In the quiet of the bedroom it was almost painfully loud. She was painfully beautiful, each and every part of her, the sharp line of her jaw and what remained faintly of her makeup from the night before and her hair tangled over her face and her lips so parted as to allow each thin and shallow breath and her hands tucked under her face as she slept long and peaceful and so stark in the cool red light of the window. Like something formulated out of some perfect spring. Sometimes in her more vulnerable moments Seulgi would lay beside her and watch her sleeping and cry to herself and it would take a long time for her to ever stop.

Irene slept for most of the morning. In the dewy light of the day the sun rose newborn pink and incunabular in a cloudless sky and Seulgi watched from the window. It was a long window and a glass door out into the hanging garden overlooking all the land to the west as it lay in some eternal slumber, like a place fit only for some mythic race of people. The sunkissed beach all russet lay empty and silent and there was no wind and she watched beads of light race across the sky like fighting doves and an eagle came and perched on the edge of the pool at the end of the garden and sat squat for a while and then like the vespers of some feverdream disappeared again into the white heat of the sun and the day until it was swallowed up part and parcel into the quaking morn.

She had not expected to ever come to the Maldives and in some way that was strange because she knew she would live forever and it was likely in some place amongst that infinite timeline she would visit every place on earth but that was something she never truly believed. Yet as she stood there soaking up the sun it all felt very real and very sudden and she was almost crying again. The heat was everywhere, on everything. It was in the shade and hidden in the shadows and hot enough to breathe in the dry air and there was no escaping nor reprieve from it but Seulgi didn’t mind. Neither did. She looked back at Irene, nestled there amongst the white silk sheets like an infant bird, softly sleeping. The room was small but homely and for the price neither could complain. All the furniture was furnished out of old bamboo and teakwood and smooth and polished marble. Seulgi stood there for a moment longer. She looked at Irene. Slowly and without a sound she took her phone from the beside table and took a picture of Irene there, soft and silent and so painfully beautiful, and then she put it back again and dressed in a thin shawl and went down and out to the bar on the beach.

A soft chime was playing from the radio behind the counter and in the shade the man regarded her with a warm smile and she ordered a bottle of wine and sat drinking it. It was still quiet save the arrival of a soft wind. She listened to the lapping of the waves against the beachhead. It looked like some paradise drawn from a Renaissance painting. The water was so blue she could see reflected against its face the distended eye of the sun and in the heat everything in the distance seemed to seep away like melting glass, or like something seen from underwater as it slowly diffused, gaunt and shapeless and white pale against the tall and slender sun. She drank her wine and thought about very little. Tried to keep her mind away from Irene. From what she would eventually have to tell her.

She remembered with great clarity the night they had spent drunk and in which she had confessed to Irene her condition. Or whatever it was. Curse. Importuned visitation from some spectral entity. Whatever it could be. She remembered how Irene had laughed at that and implied she had been drinking too much and suddenly she wanted to cry again.

It wasn’t the thought of losing Irene that scared her, no matter how far away it may still seem. It was the thought of Irene never knowing, never having come to terms with the true nature of Seulgi’s being, of what enormous and unspeakable weight she carried on her shoulders, of what she really was. And what she wasn’t. What she could never be. She could never be that one, that lifelong lover, best friend, companion, confidant, because her life and Irene’s existed on different spectrums and to pretend any other would be to post both herself and Irene to fraudulent destinies. She would never grow old and grey beside Irene or any other and the thought of that scared her more than she would ever admit and it would not go away, it was insidious, it would follow her around and tell her that she was for nobody but herself and she was unique and she wished every night in some capacity for that to not be true but it was. It always would be.

She sat on one of the stools with her feet making whorls in the sand and she was still sat there when Irene came down from the beachhouse and sat beside her and poured herself a glass of the wine. She was wearing a white sundress and a straw hat and just to her look at her was enough, like a panacea of all Seulgi thought wrong or incorrect or hurtful, as if to turn to her was immediately to forget everything except Irene. And maybe that was good, she thought. Maybe it was what she needed.

‘I thought I’d let you sleep in,’ she said.

Irene drank her wine. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘I felt like I needed it.’

She stretched her arms and winced against the coppering of the sun. A blue husk of skylight seemed to be captured on her face if only in passing and she looked for a moment unnaturally pale. ‘I can’t get over this place,’ she said with a smile. ‘It feels like something out of a dream. Like one of those places you hear about when you’re little or something, you know what I mean? Like Atlantis, or El Dorado.’

‘It’s the ocean.’

‘What is?’

‘That feeling. That it doesn’t feel real. It’s so blue. It feels like it shouldn’t be that colour. Like it should be a bit greener or whatever. Or brown. I don’t think I’ve ever seen water that clear before, not even in a bottle, and here you’ve got an entire ocean of it.’

‘I think I could probably see the bottom of it if I tried,’ Irene said.

‘Right.’

‘Want to go for a swim?’

‘In a while. I just want to relax for now.’

‘You sure?’

Seulgi nodded. Irene finished the last of her wine and set the glass down on the counter and thanked the bartender and he smiled at her. ‘Alright,’ she said. ‘I’ll see you in a bit. I’m going in.’

Seulgi just smiled. As Irene walked off she watched her from behind. The slender curves of her hips and the taut outline of her back through the sundress were so apparent but she wasn’t paying attention to any of that. She was thinking of Irene in a different way. It was becoming apparent to her in those long days of summer on another continent that she was better when Irene was around if only for her own selfish reasons, her own personal happiness. Thinking on that was strange and painful. She had lived through three generations and yet whenever Irene was around she felt so young, so full of life. So different than what she was. It was like the act of losing track of time when surrounded by that which makes you profoundly happy except it wasn’t time at all for time was inconsequential to her, but the past. Her old memories. Times when she had sat by the side of the Han River skimming stones over the surface, stones she’d picked up from in the streets after the end of the war. When there were still stones to be found there. People she’d seen and met and lost. Always lost. Times gone to the annals of history forever. Things to be learned about in textbooks. Things she had lived through and survived. Things to make you want to forget the world.

When she was with Irene she forget it all. There was no past nor anything at all save Irene, save all that she was, all she stood for. A wholeness in Seulgi’s life and Seulgi in hers. They had talked at length since they had first met about their aspirations and their goals and where they wanted to be in life and both agreed that there was a part in each other’s life for the other. That they were good together. But whenever Irene was not around Seulgi would think on that and with tears in her eyes she would begin to think that she was wrong, that they both were. There was no place for Irene in Seulgi’s life because Seulgi’s life had no destination nor endpoint nor would it ever, and for Irene to spend hers in company would be to waste it entirely. Would be to give yourself to someone who could not do the same for you in turn. To love and to lose or to never have. As she watched Irene at the edge of the water she thought on that. Soon she was smiling again.

*  *  *

They were silent for most of the evening. Both seemed to realise that their time there had been something of an anaesthesia. They sat across the table from one another sipping their wine and finishing their food and when they had done they sat studying each other with faint smiles. The light cooled against their faces and in the scarlet fall of the evening they watched stars the shape of diamonds break out across the sky like sculptures etched into the ceiling of the world. The sun had gone low and here in its copper wake the light fell forever across a soundless sea where no man nor woman nor creature of any design had ever touched or ever would.

Seulgi looked at Irene again. She said nothing. Irene smiled softly, a tired smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘For what?’

‘For this. For everything. I needed this. This whole thing. I needed some time away from everything. Just to get my head sorted.’

‘I know. I could tell.’

‘Really?’

Seulgi nodded.

‘Well,’ Irene said, ‘I didn’t think it was that obvious. Guess you know me too well.’

‘Guess I do.’

‘I just needed some space to think, you know? It’s been a year since we graduated and it feels like I haven’t gone anywhere at all. Feels like I’ve just been spinning my wheels and stuff for a year, and I know that’s alright because it’s only a year, and I’ve got a bunch more of them in front of me, but I’m not that young anymore. I mean, I am, obvious, but I’m not twenty-two, I’m not freshly out of my teens. I’m twenty-eighty years old, and I feel like I’ve been doing nothing at all. That’s why I suggested this place. Because it’s a world away from the world, you know what I mean? It’s somewhere you can just go and forget about everything. It’s like heaven. Not even. It’s like another planet. Just the sun and the sea and everything’s so clear.’

‘And has it helped?’

‘Being out here?’

‘Yeah.’

Irene shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I really don’t. I hope so. I guess I’ll just have to wait until we get back to Seoul to see how I feel. Decide what I want to do. What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘Your future. How are you feeling?’

‘I don’t know,’ Seulgi said.

‘Same as me, huh?’

‘I guess so. Sort of. But I tend not to worry about it.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why not what?’

‘Why don’t you worry?’

‘Worry like you do, you mean.’

Irene laughed. ‘Yeah.’

‘I don’t know,’ Seulgi said. ‘I just think the longer you spend worrying about yourself in the future, the more time slips away from you. The more you think on what you want to be doing the more you lose track of what you’re doing and what you want to be doing. I think the best thing to do is to just let the world come at you, piece by piece, bit by bit, and take it from there. I think all we can do is lie in wait. I think to believe any differently is almost naïve in a way, because you never quite know what’s going to come your way next and the more you try and worry about it, the more you try and predict it, to pre-empt it, the more you’ll begin to lose sight of the fact that you can’t really ever know at all. You can only guess. And that’s what life is, I suppose. At least to me. It’s a blind shot in the dark. It’s a search for something you’re never really quite sure you’ll find and you never really know what it is. Job, money. Security. Happiness. Whatever vague notion it is keeps you occupied because if you weren’t you’d realise that there probably isn’t anything worth fretting over and never has been. So I try not to worry about things like that. I’ve learned not to over the years.

'And people say that’s wrong because they tell you that its no more than a platitude and the real world has very real consequences and you’ve got to think about the future because it’s real, it’s there. It’s almost tangible. Everything you do has an impact on you and it affects you no matter what you choose, but that’s not right. It’s dangerous to suggest that. It’s human instinct to persevere. To find something else once we fall flat, or we falter, or we give in. It’s been that way for all of time. So it’s no use worrying about where you’re going to be in five years or whether your job’s going to fit you as well as you expected in high school or anything like that because ultimately where does that leave you? It leaves you losing time. And time is all we have, really. Time is the basest element. Time is god.’

When she had finished Irene just looked at her. ‘What?’ Seulgi said.

‘You know, sometimes you sound like you’re wise beyond your years. I feel like I’m talking to a wise old sage or something.’

‘Is that surprising?’

‘Not anymore. I’m used to it. But it’s not something that happens often. It’s like you take on this whole different personality, like you become someone else.’

‘Sorry.’

‘No, don’t.’ Irene smiled. ‘It’s good to hear you. You’ve taught me a lot of things, Seulgi. A lot of things.’

‘I don’t know whether that’s good or not.’

‘It is.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ Irene said. She smiled again. ‘It is.’