V

When she arrives, she finds Yonghee in the kitchen preparing supper. Soup, Yongsun reckons from the different ingredients out on the counter: mushrooms, onions, white fish, tomatoes, an array of spices — their mother’s recipe for fish soup. Yongsun takes an onion and begins cutting it, at least now she has something to blame for her tears.

They eat in silence, clean and wash up in silence but sleep is difficult to get when the past looms over their heads like a grey cloud. Yongsun remains awake, reading a book she brought with her. Yonghee asks what she is reading and Yongsun tells her it is a textbook. They fall into a conversation about theories and Yongsun is instantly lost in her own words as she speaks fondly with a glint in her eyes because she enjoys theories.

They begin with an idea, a what if, next comes the hypothesis, then the theory itself. Yongsun has learned about many theories and discovered the most beautiful one of them all when she was fourteen: the theory of relativity. Yongsun had been fascinated by it and learnt that the universe is endless, that space does not enclose us, it immerses us, inclines us, bends us.

Yongsun shudders as she thinks about her own theory, the one she uses to keep herself safe and sane in this mad world. Her theory is about life — The Theory of Life, she calls it — it ignores the emotions, the digressions and the details that shape us, form us, focusing solely on the beginning and the end. What happens in-between is insignificant.