"'Thought I almost died in my dream again,

Fighting for my life, I couldn't breathe again,

I'm falling into you."

Author's Note: Best song on the album? Might just be! 2 more chapters to go I think :) Enjoy!

The day she does it, it’s raining outside. She comes home out of the rain and takes off her coat and hangs it on the peg on the back of her door to dry off and then she puts the heating on and goes into the bedroom and opens the top drawer beside her bed and puts the ruby-red dice in there. She makes sure they’re all alone, so that nothing interferes with them. With whatever power they hold. Then as if possessed by some higher order she takes them out and rolls them twice – double six both times – and puts them back in and closes the drawer. Never to be touched again. Thinking: This is how I take charge. How I make it my reality.

She notices more and more.

It is a gradual thing. It begins with the numberplates on cars, no longer back to front or gibberish. Then it’s the lights. The restaurants dim one by one. Things go out that should not go out – candles burn to their embers and are lost in the darkness. The glittering sheen of this world is beginning to fade. The cold sets in. The rain with it. They’re walking through the park when the thought first strikes Seulgi. Irene is quiet. They listen to the birds but there are no birds and the sky is tungsten grey and there in its swollen heart sits the rain yet to come. Seulgi is equally silent. She thinks, with a great deal of unease: What is the difference between this world and the other one? This is just as miserable. Only now I have Irene.

She glances at Irene again. Irene smiles back at her. The wind blows through her hair and blows it about her face and she brushes it away and Seulgi feels the overwhelming urge to hold hands with her and tell her how much she loves her but she doesn’t. She just walks. Occasionally they say something. Irene mentions her day at work, Seulgi nods along. She concocts for herself some story about her own work – about Yeri, or Sooyoung – some phantom tale of a thing that does not exist here. It hurts to lie. It hurts more to lie to Irene. But she knows in her heart of hearts it would hurt even worse to tell her the truth, because what of the truth? What would she make of it? And what could Seulgi tell her that would make sense to even herself? Things are changing, fading, receding. Time in the hourglass is slipping through. Where is the reset?

‘You remember that sweater you got me for Christmas?’ Irene asks.

Seulgi nods. She both does and doesn’t – Christmas did not come to her in a dream, and when was Christmas? It could be January, or July and equally cold. But she remembers it all the same, right there. Like a reflection in bad glass. Something apparent from underwater. Reach out and touch it. Pull away and it remains, but altered somehow – the shape forever shifting. She says, after quite a pause, ‘Yeah. Of course.’

‘I don’t know where it’s gone.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah. I was looking for it the other day and everything. It was really cute.’

‘You’ve lost it?’

‘Well, I’ve misplaced it. I think maybe I got it mixed up in my laundry or something, or it fell down the back of the machine. Or it’s hidden in my wardrobe and I haven’t looked all that hard for it. I don’t know. But yeah.’

‘I liked that sweater.’

‘Me too,’ Irene says with a pout.

‘Why’d you say this now?’

‘Dunno. It just came to me all of a sudden.’

Seulgi nods and hums. They walk on. Sometime later it begins to rain and they take shelter in a homely little café that serves slices of vanilla marzipan on old china plates. As the rain beats down they spend some time in silent harmony. Freedom from thought is a luxury rarely afforded to Seulgi. She glances at Irene, sat watching the windowed world while she cuts off a small piece of the marzipan cake and eats it with the grace of a dame. The thought that invades is uninviting – it queries: Does she think the same as I do? The exact same? Perhaps she knows it all, because I have designed her that way. Perhaps she only pretends not to because I don’t want her to. Subconsciously. Is that the truth?

Irene turns back to her. The absent wanderlust on her face turns to adoration, a slow and creeping smile to her lips, a glow to her skin. ‘You okay there?’ she asks, teasing an answer from Seulgi.

‘Yeah,’ Seulgi says.

‘Did you get lost?’

‘A little.’

‘In my eyes?’

‘Stop it.’

‘Was it my smile?’

‘Really now,’ Seulgi says.

Irene only giggles. She nudges her plate aside and takes her coffeecup and blows on it and drinks. The steam rises, fades. A cold and wet day. The café is devoid of other customers. Out there people continue on like pilgrims hounded out of some inordinate day by chance of universal misfortune. The rain lashes on. Seulgi’s hands are shaking though she doesn’t know it.

‘Crazy,’ Irene says.

‘What? Sorry, I was dreaming again.’

‘You tend to do that.’

‘Don’t I know it. What were you saying?’

‘I said I can’t believe it’s March already. It feels like yesterday it was Christmas.’

‘It’s April.’

Irene tilts her head a slight. It’s both amusement and intrigue. ‘What?’ she asks.

‘Even crazier, right? It’s April.’

‘Are you okay?’

‘What?’ Seulgi says.

‘It’s March,’ Irene says, stifling a laugh. She looks at Seulgi as if Seulgi has just stepped out of a circus show.

‘What do you mean?’

‘What do you mean what do I mean?’

‘It’s April, Irene.’

‘No, it isn’t. Are you sure you’re okay?’

Seulgi just stares at her. After a while she says, ‘What?’

‘What?’

‘What’s the date today?’

Irene is silent.

‘Irene, I’m serious.’

‘March seventeenth. Look, Seul—’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Am I sure of what? The date today? Yeah, I’m sure.’

‘March seventeenth.’

‘Seulgi.’

She doesn’t respond. The truth is neither damning nor shocking – if anything it pulls back another layer. Time here has never had any meaning to it. Weeks, months. What goes by, goes by. But the other world, with Seungwan and SBI Insurance and her parents and her illustration work and her blue bedsheets, is April. She knows it is April because she has a calendar on her desk at work that tells her it is April.

‘They’re not aligned,’ she mutters.

‘What?’

Seulgi doesn’t bother asking again. The fear of losing Irene is too real and too immediate. That she might suddenly disappear when confronted with any sort of question derived from Seulgi’s manic desire to uncover the secrets of her own mind. How deep does the deception go? Again and again. There are other worlds than this. She looks at Irene again, as if it might be the very last time. Then she does something she has never done in this world before. She pulls out her phone and actually looks it – pays it attention. Beyond the texts from Irene, the missed calls, the log history. Ignoring the wallpaper, a selfie of her and Irene, Irene kissing her on the cheek as she grins like an idiot into the camera. The bold white text reads 16:03. It says March 17th, 2018.

She has never made a habit of tapping on things until now. It’s something she’s learnt from Irene – and there is a lot more to that than Seulgi cares to admit. She sits staring into her calendar. The rain outside the distant windows looks like ice. Nothing coherent or sane comes to her. Only thoughts of Irene. She turns to Yeri and waits until Yeri is done on her headset and then she asks, as if afraid of the answer, ‘What date is it today?’

‘What?’

‘What’s the date?’

‘You’ve got a calendar right there, you know.’

‘Is it April the ninth?’

‘Yes it is. Why?’

‘Is it 2020?’

Yeri only shakes her head and laughs. It’s a laugh that Seulgi has learnt to savour over the past however long. She goes right back to work – set in her locomotion as she seems to occasionally be. Seulgi does the same. It’s almost midday when Yeri speaks to her again. She says, ‘It’s my two-year anniversary next week.’

‘Two-year anniversary of what?’

‘Working here.’

‘What? Really?’

Yeri leans back on her chair and stretches, eyes closed, as if trying to gain a modicum of momentary sleep. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Feels like only yesterday I joined. I was actually the first person that joined, you know? Yeah. Back then it was only Sooyoung and me and no one else. You wanna know something funny? I applied for this job and then I got the interview, and only then – over the phone, mind you – did Sooyoung tell me that it wasn’t even available yet. I guess that teaches me for not reading the fine print on the job application where it said “Job opens April.” But whatever.’

‘What do you mean?’

Yeri seems to not be paying attention.

‘What do you mean,’ Seulgi says again, trying not to sound forceful or desperate.

‘Well,’ Yeri says, ‘when I applied, this place wasn’t even open. Sooyoung told me over the phone it was still being renovated or something.’

‘What was?’

‘This place.’

‘This office?’

‘Yeah. Yeah, apparently the previous firm had closed down or something the year before and they’d refitted the whole thing – stripped it bare, put a bunch of new stuff in. You know how they do it with offices. So when I got the job they were still putting it together apparently. Then I rock up six weeks later in April and it’s super ing awkward. I mean, super awkward. Like, I’m pretty good with people – or I consider myself pretty good with people – but look at the size of this place. It fits, what? Forty people? Fifty? I don’t even know half the people that work here now. Back then it was just me – here – and Sooyoung over there in her office. And the decorators kept coming in for a while. But we had that plant over there. That’s been here since the beginning. Honestly, thinking back, maybe the only reason I got the job was because she was desperate a little. That’s why I guess she didn’t mind when I told her in the interview I was only applying because it paid the bills. Whoops.’

Seulgi nods. She’s sitting there, eyes on nothing at all.

‘Seulgi? Earth to Seulgi.’

‘I’m going to go grab something to eat,’ Seulgi says.

‘Sure.’

When she’s in the breakroom she puts one hand on the coffee machine as if to balance herself. The pieces begin to fit together. She tells herself that this must be the truth. What other truth is there out there? March 2018. SBI Insurance did not exist in her world of dreams because it did not exist anywhere else either. The building was under renovation – Yeri said as much. Seulgi thinks on the woman in the apartment. She said she’d lived there two years. Surely that would mark her as having moved in sometime in 2018. And that would be no coincidence – fate often has a habit of presenting itself too forcefully. It could be that the woman moved in March of 2018. It would date her the same as SBI, as that world. That perhaps it is no dream at all but a time capsule. Something lived in the past, to be lived again by Seulgi. For whatever reason. The plausibility of this is something Seulgi doesn’t consider – logic has long since been rid of. But it is convincing nonetheless. The alternative is that Seulgi is of such central arrogance and power to devise someone wholly different from her own desires, for her own desires. Irene likes yellow and not purple because Seulgi wants her to like yellow, and she lies to herself otherwise to make it more believable. To add weight to the fiction. To give it bearing. And if such is the case then it has worked tremendously. But not even Seulgi is that solipsistic. There must be something else.

She never reminds herself that the day she’d visited Irene’s apartment to find a different woman there, the curtains were purple, because there exists another possibility – that this is a dream within a dream. Was she not warned of this? It might not be a dream at all. Seulgi’s search for the truth has pulled her further away than ever.

There she stands, lost in some Cartesian self-dwelling, victim of her own misconstrued illfortune. It’s a while before Yeri catches her there. She says, ‘Seulgi?’ and nothing else.

‘Yeah?’

‘You good?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’ve been gone, like, half an hour.’

‘I’m just, you know.’

‘Getting out of working?’

‘Something like that. Yeri.’

‘What?’

‘What day is it today?’

‘What?’

‘What day.’

Yeri stares at her for a long time. As if trying to parse something from the increasingly strange act she has taken on. Eventually she says, ‘Thursday.’

‘I know.’

‘What?’

‘Nothing. I don’t think I’ll be coming in tomorrow.’

‘What? Why?’

‘I’ve got a headache. I think it’s getting worse.’

‘Well. You should probably talk to Sooyoung or something.’

‘Yeah. I will do.’

On her way out she grabs a cold coffee in a paper cup and drinks it before she gets to Sooyoung’s office. She knocks three times and waits. Sooyoung is there behind her desk. She looks up and locks eyes with Seulgi and smiles and waves for her to come in and she does.

‘Hey, Seulgi.’

‘Hey,’ says Seulgi back. She stands there, fiddling with her hands, unsure of how to proceed.

‘You okay?’

‘I’ve got a headache. I think it’s getting worse.’

‘Oh. You want some painkillers or something?’

‘Already taken some,’ she lies. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong. Stress, I think.’

‘Did you come to ask for a day off?’

‘What? I—’

‘Go on,’ Sooyoung says, patient smile on her face. ‘Don’t overwork yourself, yeah? Or overdo it in general.’

‘Are you sure?’

Sooyoung nods. ‘Slow day at the office anyway. Not a lot to do. And you've got sick days to take, so who am I to say otherwise? It's on your dime.’

‘Thanks, Sooyoung.’

‘Take the afternoon off, too.’

‘Thanks.’

Sooyoung only smiles and nods. ‘See you Monday,’ she says. ‘Bright and early.’

‘Yeah. Thanks again.’

‘Don’t mention it.’

She goes out without another word. Yeri is still in the breakroom and Seulgi grabs her bag and logs off and leaves in a hurry, going nowhere. It’s raining outside. She hails a cab and pays and opens her apartment door and for a while she sits in the livingroom listening to the rain outside for no reason at all. Her head is spinning – there was no lie there. The cardboard box of coloured pencils and illustration books below her desk seems to be calling to her again. For a long time she just sits there, alone in the cold, waiting for the darkness. By the time she sleeps it’s just gone nine PM and nobody has text her or talked to her and she is utterly alone. Alone again.

She waits for it to change but it does not.

The day with Irene passes free of consequence. Nothing more is altered in this otherworld, dream or real, past or whenever. It remains the same. There’s a dullness to things that Seulgi can no longer avoid or ignore. It is raining again. They’re sat side by side eating dinner on Irene’s couch when she realises it’s been raining all day.

‘Eat.’

‘Sorry,’ Seulgi says.

Irene grins at her and scrapes her fork across her plate.

‘Can I ask you a question?’

‘Sure.’

‘Do you ever feel like moving out of here?’

‘What?’

Seulgi shrugs – the nonchalance comes strikingly easy. She understands that nothing holds any intrinsic sensical value in it and logic has been summarily removed from the equation and so to come out with the truth – the truth as far as Seulgi can comprehend it – might be to lose Irene forever. To divide her back into some yet unknown origins. Is this the Irene of 2018? Is she about to move out of her apartment, leave her job, disappear? Seulgi sits. She sits and she thinks she should know this, because Irene is her creation. She has to be. What other reality makes sense? And yet nothing comes to her. Irene likes yellow and she hates mustard and she may or may want to leave this place but Seulgi does not know. She waits for an answer. Irene seems to weight it up. She tilts her head a slight and chews and swallows and then says, ‘Yeah.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. I dunno why you asked me that, or where it came from.’

‘Neither do I. Just curious, I guess.’

‘Ever since I moved in her I thought about moving out, really.’

Seulgi is quiet, patient, encouraging.

‘I dunno,’ Irene says sheepishly. ‘I guess it’s always been a bit of a dream of mine to just, y’know…fly the coop, so to speak.’

‘Fly the coop.’

‘To just leave everything behind and go at it in the world alone.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah,’ Irene says.

‘Why did you never tell me?’

‘Thought maybe you’d get weirded out by it. Or, like, paranoid or something. Paranoid that one day I’d just up and leave. I guess it’s always been this desire for wanderlust, you know? I think everyone gets it in a way, at times. It’s just I had it stronger for a while. I spent a lot of time thinking that one day I might just ditch this place and quit my job and just go solo for a while. Maybe travel the world. That’s what I’ve been saving for – that and emergencies. Rainy day funds. I mean, there was nothing for me here.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Family, I suppose. But they’re not even in Seoul. No real friends, as you probably know by now. I’m pretty lonely.’

‘You’ve got me,’ Seulgi says unprovoked.

Irene breaks into a soft and warm smile. ‘Yeah,’ she says quietly. ‘But I didn’t before, did I?’

‘So you don’t want to move anymore?’

‘I mean, sure. One day, I’d love to. But not right now. I’m content right now where I am. I think I am, at least. And that’s all I need – the thought. Why? Why’d you ask?’

‘Don’t know. Just curious.’

‘Where did it come from?’

‘Don’t know,’ Seulgi says again. For a moment however brief she begins to think that this is it, that the interrogation has begun – Irene has become self-aware. Her sentience has transformed. This will be where the fantasy breaks down. But then Irene smiles and takes another bite of her food and is done with it, and this might not be a fantasy at all. Seulgi studies her in silence. She is so beautiful that part of Seulgi thinks she can’t possibly be real, past or present. Soon Seulgi is almost crying.

‘I love you,’ she mutters.

‘I love you too.’

‘Irene.’

‘What?’

Silence. The rain beats on. Time is nothing but a game of waiting. ‘Nothing,’ Seulgi says, and says no more.

It’s that night, and it’s with an excuse that she’s got things to do at home, illustrations that need to be finished. Irene seems to accept it with no real opposition. Seulgi skulks about. She looks like someone up to no good and in a way she thinks she might just be. The rain stopped sometime earlier and it runs still from the shop awnings along the avenue like diamondwater and is lost again. She stuffs her hands into her pockets to fight against the cold. A great many thoughts come to her and none of them have answers.

What now? she asks.

She has come to the conclusion that she doesn’t know. Irene is real, this world is real – this she has decided. Is it true? There exists of course the possibility that the fever of her dreams runs so hot as to attempt to justify itself as real. And if so then it has been successful at every stage. Seulgi is no philosopher and dreams are no quantifiable thing either. The power of dreams lies in escapism. And Seulgi has been yearning for escape for as long as she can remember.

What about Irene? she asks.

The answer is obvious. Irene in the other word - her real world - may exist, but elsewhere. The easiest outcome would be to search for her. It would not be hard at all. She can’t have gone far. Seulgi knows this with a certainty that makes her heart murmur, because she knows she will never do it. If her timelines are true and she is correct then Irene would not know her – they would have never met. What then? Could they be altered somehow? Things remain in flux. If they collide, what becomes of this future and the other past? Does one Irene cease to be, one Seulgi? One everything. Is Irene stencilled into the other world in the present day? What of Yeri and SBI Insurance? There are worlds within worlds, within dreams. And there are things that exist outside of it all. 

Seulgi holds up her tumbler of whiskey and swills it around and drinks. It’s tart and strong and slightly sweet in and it burns and that’s a good thing. Alcohol here seems to hold the same properties. She glances up at the lights. At the bar behind her. The same dimness. Another thought comes to her: what of Seungwan, too? Seulgi pulls out her phone and tries to swipe the screen and cannot get the password pattern right. She sets it on the countertop and tries to thumb it in again and fails miserably. Seungwan might be in her phone. It occurs to her in her moment of insober clarity she has never even attempted to console this with any other version of events. Seungwan seems to not exist here, but nothing is ever quite as it seems. Nothing is to be trusted anymore. And if Seulgi has the capacity to ignore what day and year it is for so long, surely she could have also ignored Seungwan's calls, texts, contacts. She tries again to unlock her phone. It is history's most difficult task and she is by no means suited to accomplishing it. Seungwan could be right there, sequestered away in the logs of her read messages. The ease with which this eludes her is only momentarily frustrating. Then she orders another whiskey and finishes it in three mouthfuls and wipes and forgets it again.

By the time she leaves it’s just gone one in the morning and she can barely walk and her head is spinning. Three missed calls, six missed texts, all from Irene. What now? She walks in the cold and she walks under streetlights like a nomad and she is a vagrant in her own temporal landscape and truthfully it might not even be hers at all. Where have the dreams gone? Were they even dreams in the first place?

Do I wait? she asks to the night. Do I wait for something to happen? Must I go between worlds until they collide, or until I am forced to choose which to live in? How much longer must I endure? A day? A week? Five years?

Predictably, no answer comes. And the only answer Seulgi herself can form is perhaps the only one that means anything. It says:

Does it matter? Does any of it matter?

A woman walking down the street asks if she’s alright. Seulgi doesn’t hear her at all. She stumbles on by, pained and miserable and pitiful. She knows already that she will forget much of this night – the whiskey has seen to that. Which part of it she remembers, remains to be seen.