January 2024.

She walked through the hills and along the roadside and walked for a long while and by the time she came out again at the top of the woods looking down on the skyline of Busan adumbrate against the cold evening shade she was almost crying with exhaustion and with every breath seen clearly in the vapour of the damp air like an imprint weft into the very fabric of the world, an impression mezzotint of some colder era yet to come. The snow by the roadside lay in the burrows of mud and the reedbeds like a palimpsest of a darker winter and here the tracks of rodents and birds and other small animals sat slowly thawing in the architecture of the ice like fossils uncovered from an ancient time. She watched the sun decline against the pale pigment of the earth and she watched all the light that remained curve downwards in parabola like some quaking semaphore of gold in the sky and she listened to the mute call of the city and there searched for some form of answer or reason to her worries but as always there was none.

She waited there until after nightfall, sat awkward and dumblegged against the railing at the side of the road listening as the flatbed trucks from higher in the quarries passed with the cars and for most of the evening it was rather quiet. Here very few people wandered in the cold. In the caves in the hills some other power spoke but of that voice who would hear it? Who but her. Seulgi sat for a long time without moving. In the trees overhead the snow hung like ragged cotton and each shape figured there in the darkness shone translucent and scattered in the slender moonlight like constellations. In the sky she searched for the arm of Orion. She looked for holes in the cosmos. Where against the fragments of the faded universe those of older races might calibrate their wayward destinies. Perhaps she could do the same. But the sky was quiet and there existed nothing there against which she could measure herself or ask any question of her origin nor could she ever.

The walking had become a habit and she was not so sure it was a good one. She walked every morning, every evening. She walked not ten miles and then again at night and she never told Irene where she was going nor did Irene ask and to that she was cautious. Where she walked never mattered, but it was away from the city. Take the bus out north. Take the subway. Wherever she went must be calm and lifeless and desolate, a place away from any place. And in the hills around Busan she wandered like a vagrant in her overcoat and her old gloves and her steady stumbling legs like a pilgrim and each time she would turn her face up at the darkness and weep and cry out and beg for some other life but it was not so, and who was there to answer her? She was beginning to think it was no one.

Irene had not asked much and Seulgi had not said anything back. What was there to say? What conversation to possibly have that could amount to anything more than what they had before? By which metric would she be measured, and could Irene ever believe her, and should she? Her existence was in and of itself a mystery, at best a presumption of the highest cosmic order and little else. She should not exist and she should never have existed but she did and that alone was cause for concern and Seulgi knew. Had always known it. What was the proper response to learning of immortality? Of its truth, its constants. Of all it stood for. And what could it bring to the world? What of its implications. Of these questions Seulgi could answer none. She had closed herself away from the world for so long she couldn’t answer much of anything anymore. Each and every friend she had departed save one. Save Irene. And Irene was never just a friend. Irene had always been more. And the thought of giving her up in the same way as the others was to Seulgi just as impossible as her own immortal conundrum.

The last time they had spoken with any severity had been six months ago. She remembered it as she remembered almost everything and sometimes in her quiet moments she would question whether that was a factor of her immortality as well, the curse to remember everything, each memory of her eternal life, to play them back across her infinite timeline like a helical sequence. As if to punish her for something beyond her control. The time they had spoken Irene asked her what was wrong again and Seulgi said nothing. I was just thinking some stuff over. Just had a lot on my mind, is all. But it was a lie and she knew that even Irene was aware of that but she said nothing. She just left it. But there had been that look in her eyes, the one she always recognised no matter how insignificant its glance, its lustreless glimmer. The look that said Please, Seulgi. Please just talk to me. I can’t help you if you don’t.

The way home felt like some road to a terrible fate, like a pendulum balanced on some precarious axis above her. It was only a matter of time before Irene asked her again and she knew that with certainty and she knew it would maybe be the last time they ever spoke on it because Irene would want an answer. Would want the truth. And who wouldn’t? What relationship can survive if the foundations are fashioned out of mistruths and secrets? What could ever thrive under those circumstances?

Seulgi walked for a long time and when she arrived it was almost midnight. Irene was already asleep. They spoke less and less and between work their conversations were like passing thoughts in the wind, smalltalk here and there, brief encounters between the two of them. She turned out the lights in the kitchen and made her way up to bed and brushed her teeth and when she was finished she sat on the edge of the bed watching Irene sleep for a while. She was so beautiful, and always would be. But she had changed. That much was apparent. Her face was not as tight as it once had been, her eyes more tired, her lips not as full, her smile rarely there. Seulgi in darkness studied her as if to lose sight would be to misplace some treasured artefact and soon she began to cry. Oh God, she muttered. Don’t make me go through this. Don’t let me. I can’t bear it. I can’t.

*  *  *

She arrived home in the vespers of the day bearing against her the cold of the eve and the lashing of the rain and she stood in the doorway between the warmth within and the outer dark like some violent apparition come into the world through misery and time and left there to wither. Irene was sat at the kitchen table. When Seulgi came in she didn’t look up nor say anything beyond hello. The TV was on in the background playing the news. Seulgi set the kettle on and took off her coat and ran a hand back through her hair and turned and when she saw Irene again she wished she hadn’t. Irene was almost crying. She refused to look up.

‘You know, this place still feels weird,’ Seulgi said.

‘Yeah.’

‘How long has it been? Six months? Eight?’

‘Eight next week.’

‘Still doesn’t feel quite like home, you know?’

Irene didn’t reply. ‘Irene,’ Seulgi said. ‘Irene.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Look at me. Irene.’

Slowly she did. She was already crying or had been and her hands were shaking and when she smiled it was filled with such unbearable sadness that Seulgi had to turn away for a moment as to compose herself. ‘What’s wrong?’ she said. ‘Are you okay?’

Irene said nothing. Seulgi sat across the table from her. She looked for signs of some noticeable problem there but whatever ailed Irene was entirely alien to her. ‘What’s up?’ she said. ‘Why’re you crying all of a sudden?’

‘Look at you,’ Irene said. She tried to speak again and all that came out was a strangled whimper. When she had wiped her eyes she tried to speak a third time to little success. ‘What do you mean?’ Seulgi said.

‘Look at yourself and then look at me,’ Irene said. ‘I’m thirty-two years old, Seulgi. And so are you. And yet, you don’t look a day over twenty-two, twenty-three. I do. That’s for sure. I’m not an old woman or anything but you can tell and I can, too. I’m aging just as I expect to. But what about you? You haven’t at all, and I mean that in every respect. You look exactly the same. Your hair, your face, your body. Every part of you is unchanged and I don’t understand it. Is it just good genes?’

‘What’s brought this on?’

‘Nothing. It’s not this sudden thing. It’s just something I’ve noticed. I’ve been thinking it over a lot recently and it got me remembering that time we talked. It got me thinking about a lot of things over the past few years about us. And you know what? You know what’s ing stupid and entirely crazy? And what you have every right to call me out on? I’m not entirely convinced you were pulling my leg, you know? When you said you were immortal or whatever. I thought it was just some stupid joke to get me to shut the up. To get me to stop prodding you for what was wrong. I thought it was just your way of saying you wanted to be alone, without actually saying it. It was, right? Tell me it was, Seulgi.’

Seulgi just looked at her. In her later years she would look back on that moment when she had sat there in silence as the moment Irene had first realised she was not lying and had never lied. Irene studied her cold and wet eyes. They were so terribly old, so worn down. As if some other being inhabited the same body as her Seulgi, some ancient creature fathomed from the dwellings of lost time. A being sick of its own conscious existence. As if something was fighting to die inside of her. And when she saw that she began to cry again and she didn’t quite know why but it scared her.

‘Irene,’ Seulgi said.

‘Jesus.’

‘Irene. Look at me.’

‘Tell me you were just being stupid and joking about and you want to sit down and tell me what’s wrong. Tell me that, Seulgi. Please just tell me that.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Why? Why can’t you?’

Seulgi smiled softly. She wiped her eyes with one of her sleeves and held out her hands for Irene but Irene pulled away. ‘Irene,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. Look at me. Please, look at me for a minute.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Please.’

‘Why? What are you going to say to me? What can you possibly say to make this less insane than it already is? Am I losing my mind? Do I need to be locked in some asylum somewhere and treated? Do you? Are we both crazy? I don’t understand anymore. Why does it feel like neither of us is making any sense at all? Why?’

‘Irene.’

She moved to take Irene’s hands again and Irene stood and backed away from the table and wiped the tears from her face. For a moment she was very quiet and it disturbed Seulgi. ‘Just...’ she stopped and looked about and back at Seulgi. ‘Just let me by on my own for a while. For a day or two.’

‘Why?’

‘I need to think through.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t know, alright? Jesus, I don’t know. Whatever mental we’re both speaking about. One of us needs help and I’m not sure who yet. That’s what I need to figure out. Because I can’t do this much longer. I can’t be in a relationship built around secrets and lies and stupid cryptic messages. I just want the truth, Seulgi. I just want some answers. Jesus, I feel like I’m living some bizarro world where nothing makes sense. Like I’m living inside a fever dream.’

‘Irene, please. Just sit down.’

Irene looked at her again. ‘I’m going to go for a walk,’ she said. ‘Don’t wait up for me.’

‘Irene.’

‘I’ll be back in a couple hours.’

‘Irene, wait.’

But by the time she stood Irene was already half way down the stairs and nothing she could say would stop her and then like a spirit she was gone and Seulgi was alone.