The Rain

Now Playing

"Ever since the rain, I've been living days too slow,

Lie around and wait for a heart I used to know,

They say that over time, there'll be nothing left to lose,

But I still can't find the light, I've given all my love to you."

The very first thing she realised when she woke up was that she was in someone else’s bed.

The next thing was that last night was not a dream and it had all happened and by fortune or curse she could remember every detail.

It took a long time to adjust herself to the reality of her new situation. felt dryer than it had ever felt. A thin and disgusting alcoholic fur lined her tongue and her head felt as if it would split in two with even the slightest of movements. Her entire body felt much the same. She opened her eyes and winced and closed them again. Even that was too painful. A slender arm of light woke her again sometime after midday and she rolled over and rolled back and coughed a vile phlegm she was forced to swallow back down.

Moving make her want to be sick. Thinking back on whatever occurred yesterday made her almost follow through with that. On the bedside table was a paperback copy of IQ84 and a little lamp and a tall pitcher of water. Wendy sat up against the headboard. Everything felt alien and confusing. It was not her book and not her water and not her bed. She looked down. It was not her shirt either. Her clothes were folded in a neat pile on the floor beside the bed, jeans and polo and ruined trainers. She closed her eyes and groaned and held her breath. The urge to vomit was almost overwhelming.

Half an hour later she pulled herself to the edge of the bed and grabbed the pitcher of water. There was a glass about half full and this was ignored completely. She sat up and held the pitcher to her lips and drank directly from the spout like a cavewoman having discovered the magic of hydration for the first time. It tasted lukewarm and stale and yet excellent. Any water at all would have tasted the same. She finished half the pitcher and set it back on the table and wiped her brow. Her hair was sweaty and matted in her face and her teeth held that terrible sensitivity to them that comes so often after vomiting. It hurt to do much at all. She knew where she was and why she was there and the truth of this hurt more than any amount of alcohol ever could.

For a long time she sat and listened. Gaps in the space of things. The silence. Somewhere beyond the bedroom did a clock tick and there were cars on the street outside but that was all. No footsteps, no movement. Wendy took in the room. It was a small and cosy bedroom with the blinds still tightly shut. There was a cork noticeboard on the wall behind her with pinned pictures of Joohyun at various stages of her life. Pictures with parents and family and friends. Smiling in all of them, that same toothy and ever so slightly crooked smile Wendy had come to cherish so much.

Her own phone was nestled behind the paperback on the table. She hauled herself up and grabbed it and checked but there were no new messages. A handful of irrelevant news notifications and nothing from Seulgi or her parents or even Joohyun. She listened again. All that came to her was the ticktickticking of the clock and another car in muted reverb. The light from the blinds was shallow and pale in the afternoon. She sat and watched and drank from the pitcher. Motes of dust turning and falling through the plastercast light seemed the most interesting part of her day and nothing made any noise at any point in her long session of silent contemplation. She checked her phone a second time. It read 1:06 PM. And still no new messages.

She thought perhaps it would be best to wait for Joohyun to come and check on her. That to do anything else would be in a way forcing a confrontation between them that Joohyun wasn’t ready for. But the pitcher was empty and still dry and so after a good deal more deliberation Wendy pulled herself up and sat on the edge of the bed and wiped her eyes and stumbled out of the bedroom door and into the kitchen.

Joohyun was nowhere to be found. The curtains had been pulled shut over the window above the poetry table and she could hear the clock’s incessant counting of the time and otherwise only the silence of her solitude. It smelt of lavender and very faintly of vomit but the tiles had been cleaned and the mop and bucket sat leaning against the kitchen worktop, rinsed and dried overnight. On the kitchen table was a foil packet of tablets and a bottle of fresh mineral water and a piece of A5 paper with a message scrawled on it. It read:

Gone to work. Be back by 6

Tablets are vitamins for headache but you should only take one

I washed your clothes overnight if you want to get dressed. Spare toothbrushes are in the bathroom cupboard under the sink

P.S. there’s leftover food in the fridge if you’re hungry

Joohyun x

Wendy read it and put it back down on the table. She didn’t quite know what to make of it. There was nothing that could be inferred from the tone or the length or anything. She pushed out one of the small orange vitamin tablets and washed it down with the water and searched in the fridge for whatever Joohyun had left her. On the top shelf was a plastic container filled with chicken and rice and broccoli and a sauce that looked like barbecue or soy or maybe even gravy. Wendy peeled off the lid and set it to warm in the microwave and went back into the bedroom to collect her clothes.

She ate at the table in silence, but there was no peace. Just a torrid mayhem of thoughts floating around her head. Mostly containing Joohyun and herself. Regret chiefly there among them. It was the same sort of regret her anxiety left her with after everything she ever did, no matter how small or insignificant in the grand scheme of things. That parasitic voice at the back of her mind saying: What if? What if this, what if that. What if what if what if.

What if she hates me? If she’s just being kind for the sake of it?

What if she’ll never talk to me again?

What then.

And one other thought in particular. It had her stomach turning so violently that if there had been anything left in there she would've undoubtedly thrown it up:

She said she loved me. She did. She said, "I love you too." I heard her say it.

Wendy thought about it. The conclusion she came to rather upsettingly was that she had given all of her love to Joohyun and there was not much more she could give in her state of being and it had taken every ounce of courage and every shot of vodka to bring her there in the first place. What happened next would happen. There was no altering that which could not be explained properly. No bargaining with the darkness. Nor that which was out of reach, out of control.

When she was finished with her food she washed the plate and the plastic container and her cutlery and left them to dry on the drainingboard. In the bathroom she tried best she could to clean herself up. The pale and inebriated corpse shambling about in the wake of the mirror looked no more human than something excavated from a digsite. Even when she had showered and found a spare toothbrush to brush her teeth with did she look still quite drunk. Standing barefaced and pinktinged and still smelling of vodka and Sprite. It hurt to look and hurt to look away. This walking mourning paradox.

It was almost three in the afternoon when she sat and checked her phone. Still nothing. The closer it got to six PM the more the room began to close in around her and the more her heart began to race. The lingering thought of what comes next. Always the future, one step ahead. She sat at Joohyun’s little table and thumbed idly through her books of poetry, doodles and dawdles and scribbles and scratchings. The latest was a very simple four-line refrain in blue ink, written in English:

This love of mine

Is right, is true,

This love of mine

I’ll give to you.

Wendy folded shut the notebook and left it there. She sat wondering whether it was best to leave now and text Joohyun and apologise for everything. But where would that get her? Back to running in circles. By the time she had stopped debating this with herself it was ten past six in the evening. She had opened the curtains to let the spring light in and the dim pinchbeck glow was such that when Joohyun walked through the front door at thirteen minutes past the hour she looked at first glance like a vision from a dream, haloed there in the warm amber doorway. She set her bag down in the hallway and looked at Wendy at the kitchen table and froze. Tick tick tick went the clock.

‘Hi,’ Wendy said, almost a whisper.

‘Hey. How are you?’

Wendy shrugged shyly. ‘Not too great, honestly.’

‘Well, that’s to be expected. Have you eaten?’

‘Yeah. Just what you left in the fridge. Thanks.’

‘Did you want anything else?’

‘No, thanks. I’m okay.’

Joohyun nodded. She disappeared into the bedroom and then the bathroom and Wendy again was left with her solitude. It was becoming a dangerous place to be, on her own. Joohyun came back into the kitchen and set the kettle to boil and stood behind the kitchen counter watching the window. She stood there for so long Wendy thought she might be purposely avoiding eye contact. But then she poured her coffee and glanced at Wendy and smiled softly and said, ‘You smell like my perfume.’

‘I had to use something. I stank. Sorry.’

‘It’s okay. Do you want anything?’

‘Water, please.’

She poured a fresh glass and passed it to Wendy and sat opposite.

‘Sorry for last night.’

‘It’s okay,’ Joohyun said gently.

‘No it isn’t. I embarrassed myself and I probably embarrassed you. I should’ve said something first. Not just barge in like that uninvited. And drunk. But it was the only way I was ever going to work up the courage to say something. And I needed to say a lot of things.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Thanks for, you know…looking after me. You didn’t have to do that.’

‘Guess not. But I wanted to. I’m glad you’re okay. You looked pretty bad.’

‘Yeah. I haven’t been that bad since uni, I don’t think. Sorry about your floor.’

‘It’s fine. Well, apart from the smell. Think that’s here to stay.’

Wendy just laughed. Joohyun looked down at her coffee and put the cup on the table with a sigh. When she looked at Wendy again it was with a sort of trepidation Wendy didn’t much like the look of. Almost too vulnerable. She opened to speak and closed it again and bit her lip. Her hands were pale and trembling in her lap. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m just going to come out and say it.’

‘Say what?’

‘I love you.’

Wendy just looked at her.

‘There you have it. Out in the open. I love you. Romantically, emotionally…all the others. Just like you said to me last night. I tried telling you last night, but you were too drunk and you vomited in the middle of me confessing.’

‘You love me.’

‘Yeah. I do.’

‘You love me,’ Wendy said again.

Joohyun shrugged. ‘I wasn’t trying to avoid you on purpose,’ she said. ‘Well, I was, but I thought I had reason to do it. I needed time alone to think on what I was feeling and come to terms with it. It’s been something I’ve been trying to come to terms with for a long time and I didn’t know how to do it.’

She looked as if she wanted to confess a great many things and so Wendy let her. ‘I’ve struggled with relationships for a long time,’ she said. ‘For years, really. Ever since I was a teenager. Mostly with my uality. Partly with feeling I wasn’t good enough for people. I guess a lot of it goes hand in hand with the fact I’ve always had low self-esteem, and that’s always bled over into my poetry and my writing and whatever else. Into basically every part of my life. But relationships especially. And my last two relationships have been, well…’

She glanced at Wendy and tried to smile and could not. The glimmer in her eyes was glassy and distant and full of pain. ‘Let’s just say that when you spend half your life convincing yourself other people think you’re not good enough, and then they actually come out and say those same things to you…well, it sticks with you. It sticks with you an awful lot. I didn’t know what to do, or how to confront it. And this is something I’ve only really, properly confessed to two people. My mom and Yeri. And even they are in the dark about a lot of it.’

‘You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to,’ Wendy said.

‘I want to. I do.’

Wendy nodded.

‘All of my relationships except one have been with men,’ she said. ‘I spent the longest time ashamed of my uality. I don’t know why. I was never really raised in a conservative or religious household or anything. Maybe it was the culture. I think it was the general sort of shunning of that sort of thing that made me feel like I wasn’t worth anything. So I hid it. I pretended it wasn’t real. Like it was just a phase, like growing out my hair or wearing dark clothes or enjoying a certain band. Something a bit like puberty. I’d just get over it.

‘But, well…yeah. And my last boyfriend realised it pretty quickly. He was supportive, to an extent. Understanding, at least. And then when I finally called it off and apologised and everything he said he understood but he didn’t, not really. Nobody ever could. Then my last relationship, that was the first time I’d ever fallen in love with a woman. I thought it would be better. Thought I’d feel like I could be myself. Turns out that was a ing stupid thing to think for a hundred different reasons.’

‘What reasons?’

Joohyun shrugged. ‘I couldn’t exactly feel comfortable going around telling people. A lot of people are accepting, but some still aren’t. And that was the least of my worries. The very least. It wasn’t a healthy relationship by any means. There was a lot of arguing. A lot of calling names. And there was worse. She—’ Joohyun stopped and looked down at her hands in her lap. She was crying now and Wendy could tell.

‘It’s okay,’ Wendy said. ‘You don’t have to say anything.’

‘My ex-girlfriend, she…’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Joohyun said. She looked at Wendy and she wept. And all Wendy could do was sit there and cry herself and think: I wish I could do something. Wish I could take the pain away. Wish I could make it all right.

She let Joohyun cry. When Joohyun had composed herself enough to continue she said, ‘I didn’t think I’d ever love anyone again after that. Didn’t think I could. What was worse was that I felt like I couldn’t tell anybody. There’s a stigma around it, and I don’t just mean because it was a gay relationship. I mean because everybody only seems to believe it exists when it’s a man doing it to a woman, or when it’s so visible that you can’t really deny it. Otherwise people seem to think you’re making it up. Or that you’re embellishing. Or that you can just get up and walk out, because who’s stopping you? Nobody ever really knows what it’s like unless they’re in it themselves. The worst part about the mind is how it makes you constantly underestimate everything, and only when it’s too late do you realise that. It’s why I don’t let anyone hug me, or even touch me. I shy away from it. Even Yeri and you. Because I just can’t. I start freaking out. I wish I could, but it’s a long process, especially when your confidence is as non-existent as mine has always been.’

‘It’s okay.’

‘I’m sorry. I wish it were. I tried pushing you away because I was scared of what I was feeling and I didn’t know if I could go through with it. I still don’t. I wish I had the answer but I don’t.’

‘It’s okay,’ Wendy said again.

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too.’

Joohyun smiled at her. She looked so palely beautiful it was absurd. Almost seraphic in the pale and dying light of the eve. So much so that all Wendy could do was change the topic in a feeble attempt to stop her from crying. ‘I read through some of your poetry,’ she said. ‘Sorry if that sounds creepy and really nosy. I just couldn’t help myself after that one you read me a while back. I still have it in my head. I loved it.’

‘You read through them?’

‘Only the notepad you left out on your desk. And only a few of them. Sorry.’

‘Which ones?’

‘Just some of the latest ones. And that really short one you did. I really liked the sound of it. The one that went something like, “This love of mine, I’ll give to you.” I liked that a lot.’

‘I wrote that about you.’

‘Me?’

Joohyun nodded.

‘Oh.’

‘Safe to say I’ve had quite a lot of time to sit and write things,’ she said. ‘And mostly about you. That might sound quite sad.’

‘It’s pretty flattering, honestly. I should write a song about you.’

‘And put it on the album?’

‘I don’t think they’d let me,’ Wendy said, tone changing. ‘I wish I could. I don’t think they’d ever give me that sort of creative freedom. Maybe after the album’s out and I’m established. They won’t even let me pen an English song, not even as a bonus.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. Which I guess kind of makes sense in a way, but I told them I’d probably have a much better chance at a wider audience with a song in English. But whatever.’

‘Have you asked?’

‘Kind of. In a roundabout way.’

‘I think you should talk to them,’ Joohyun said. ‘Whoever is in charge of you.’

‘Sooyoung. She’s, like, younger than me. It’s kind of scary, really. She’s really professional, too. And you know what I’m like when it comes to talking to people.’

‘Yeah,’ Joohyun said with a soft smile. ‘I do. You were great at Lost Village, by the way. I didn’t get time to properly sit down and tell you just how good you were without one of us being drunk. But you were. My favourite performance of the weekend, easily.’

‘Thanks. Hey, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you.’

‘What?’

‘My last bar gig is next Saturday,’ Wendy said. ‘It might even be my last one ever, if this whole music contract business takes off. We’ll see. But I’m doing another performance at Shape. You remember it?’

‘Yeah. Next Saturday?’

Wendy nodded. ‘Seven PM. I just wanted to ask—’

‘Yeah,’ said Joohyun. ‘I’ll be there. Don’t worry.’

At that Wendy could only smile. It was a smile that Joohyun wanted to hold for a lifetime and more. ‘Seungwan,’ she said.

‘What?’

‘I love you.’

‘I love you too. Where do we go from here?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know how long it’ll take me to get over everything I’ve been through. I might not ever get over it, or I might already be over it and I haven’t realised it yet, because I’ve been surrounded by the wrong people. But I don’t want to involve you if you’re not ready for that. It’d be cruel.’

‘I am,’ Wendy said with a reassuring smile. ‘After everything you’ve helped me with – my anxiety, my performances, just being there for me – I feel like it’s the least I could do. I’m here for you. Whatever you need.’

‘I just need time,’ Joohyun said. ‘That’s all. And I think I’ll be alright, then.’

‘Okay. Take all the time you need.’

‘I will. But together this time.’

‘Yeah,’ said Wendy. ‘Of course.’