I've been spending the last eight months
Thinking all love ever does

Is break and burn and end
But on a Wednesday in a cafe
I watched it begin again

Dahyun looked all around her. She didn’t know how she got here, but she had suddenly found herself in a sea of blue. She tried to gather more about her environment, taking in the blue sky, the white clouds, and the bright, bright sun. There were brightly colored birds she couldn’t recognize flying overhead. 

Aside from the chirping of the birds and the whistling of the breeze, there was no other noise. The korean could tell that it should be a hot day, but she couldn’t feel the heat. Looking down at herself, she immediately noted that she was in the body of a young girl in a sundress, wearing blue sandals. It felt unusual, but she wasn’t frightened, simply accepting it as fact that she was now a young girl.

When she looked up again, she saw a familiar van to the side of the field. And standing next to it, with their arms around each other, were her parents. Both of them had smiles on their faces, watching her from afar.

She called and waved to them to come play with her, but they made no effort to get to her, remaining standing there next to the van.

Puzzled, but still unconcerned, Dahyun turned back to the field. The flowers were everywhere, gently swaying back and forth with the breeze. She could see each of them so clearly and she could smell them in the air, in her clothes, in her hair, in her skin. They made her so unexplainably happy, the happiness she had ever been, that she couldn’t help but stretch both of her arms out, as if to embrace all of them at once.

She then started spinning around, watching as the blue irises that extended as far as her eyes could see started to blur together until she eventually had to close her eyes to keep from becoming too dizzy. She felt so light and giddy and carefree that she thought she could float up into the air to join the birds. She heard a laugh – a high-pitched, childlike laugh, as full of sweetness and innocence as a laugh could be – coming from her lips. That spurred her to speed up her spinning. All of a sudden, she felt herself trip and fall, landing, without any pain, on her back in the bed of flowers.

Lying there on her back, out of breath and still giddy and dizzy, she opened her eyes and looked up at the sky, expecting to see blue. But it had suddenly turned to night and the sky was now filled with shimmering stars instead. And once in a while, a shooting star would streak across with a flash of brightness, leaving a magical trail of light that seemed to remain there, suspended in the middle of the night sky. It was unusual and mysterious and beautiful and she didn’t question it. She tried to look for her favorite stars, seeking out the well-known constellations, but the patterns in this sky were different, and she couldn’t find any of them.

After a while, she decided to sit up. When she looked around her, she saw the same field of irises, only now it was under the soft gleam of the moon and starlight instead of stark light of the sun. Now, in all the times she had thought about this field, she had never imagined how it would look at night, so what she saw now amazed her. Each individual flower was emitting a soft blue light, waxing and waning in intensity from dim to bright, bright to dim. Each flower was offset from its neighbors, so the entire field was filled with slowly pulsing, glowing luminescence all around her. She looked down and reached out to touch one of the flowers. It felt cool and soft against her fingertips. She desperately wanted to pick one up, but was worried it would then die and lose its light.

When she finally pulled her gaze from the flowers and looked up, she saw that her parents were nowhere to be seen. Instead, in the middle of the field, there was a canvas on an easel, with someone sitting in front of it, painting the flowers and shooting stars. On a stool beside the painter, instead of paint supplies, were a cup of coffee and chocolate pancakes. And though she could only see her back, she knew who it was instantly from the color of her hair that almost blended in with the flowers.

With the recognition came a swell of happiness inside her chest. She felt her heart start to beat faster.

“Sana!” she yelled out, as she started to make her way closer to her.

Sana turned and met her eyes. Dahyun saw a sad smile form on her face, but she didn’t say anything and didn’t move towards her. She stood there, waiting patiently for Dahyun to reach her.

And Dahyun tried. She really did. She took off on a sprint towards Sana, but the distance between them remained the same. It was as if the field of blue was growing wider and wider, in time with her running, to keep her from reaching her goal. She ran faster and faster, but the field grew and grew. All around her, the glow of the flowers became brighter and brighter and the rate of the pulsing matched her pounding heart. She knew she was going to run out of breath soon, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not reach Sana.

Then, without warning, she felt her foot hit something and down she went.

Dahyun suddenly awoke with a start, sitting upright in bed. She could feel sweat beading on her forehead and her entire body was shaking as her breaths came out in ragged huffs. There was a suffocating fogginess in the air. She anxiously looked around her, taking in the environment and slowly recognizing it as her bedroom. Realization finally dawned on her.

It was just another dream,

 she told herself, as she wrapped her arms around her body. 

Just another dream.

About Sana.

Now the japanese had appeared in many of her dreams in the month since they've met at the coffee shop, but this dream was different. It was particularly powerful and left the korean feeling like she had really just been running her heart out through that field. And she did not know why this one mixed the japanese in so clearly with her deep-rooted memory of the field. Her other dreams of her had mostly been of real moments of their past relationship together, replete, of course, with the fanciful, ephemeral quality that was characteristic of memories manipulated through the sleeping mind.

She pushed strands of grey damp hair from her forehead and glanced at the flip clock on her bedside dresser. She had more time before she needed to get up. The sky outside was just barely aglow with the light of dawn. But she knew she would not be able to go back to sleep again. So, with a heavy sigh, she pushed her legs out from under her heavy blanket and stood from the bed, pulling a box of her cigarettes on her nightstand, testing the strength in her legs before she started to move.

The atmosphere in the room was dense and heavy. She made her way to her bedroom window and pulled it open, she tap the box out of her hand, when she took a stick out, closed her eyes and put it back in the box, she threw it in the bed, tilting her head back when the fresh, crisp air hit her face and cooled her fevered skin. After a moment, she leaned her head on the side of the window and looked out into the streets of her neighborhood. The rest of the world was beginning to wake as well, and the sights and sounds and smells succeeded in pulling her completely away from the world of dreams.

Dahyun felt an unfamiliar heaviness that she could not identify and settle in her chest as she fully reentered the real world and she let out a deep breath to try to relieve it, but it was unsuccessful. Because that was not how one resolved disappointment.

She shook her head and pushed away from the window, moving swiftly to her closet to grab what she needed for a shower.

Stop it……

she chided herself.

Stop all of it.

Please.....

Dahyun welcomed the warm spray of water as it hit her face, washing from her the already fleeing remnants of the dream. She held still under the jets of water with her eyes closed, trying to keep her mind blank. And it worked for all of ten seconds.

She apparently did not have as much control of her mind as she previously thought, because despite her best efforts to think about nothing, and then about anything else, her mind went back to that day she finally showed up in the coffee shop, much as it had done many times this past month.

Dahyun replayed that scene in her mind, from making her slow, seemingly endless walk towards Sana, to seeing Sana’s body tense at the sound of her voice, to Sana’s eventually looking up and then, to finally, finally meeting her eyes. She recalled the words that she had forced herself to say, some of which had been practiced many times before and some of which were so spontaneous that it surprised even herself. Dahyun remembered all the small changes in her face in response to everything she said, which became more and more devastating. And then her mind, mercilessly, replayed the look of absolute dejection and surrender in Sana’s once bright eyes when she turned to walk away. And now that was going to be the last image she had of her.

The shower was not as refreshing as she had hoped.

Frustrated, Dahyun pulled back the curtains and grabbed her towel which she quickly wrapped around her torso. With her hair moved to one side, she reached for a smaller towel to dry her hair. As she did so, her tired eyes looked to the mirror and were immediately caught on the tattoo on her shoulder. Towel forgotten, she turned to more clearly see the tattoo in the mirror. It seemed clearer today than usual, a sharply demarcated brand on her otherwise unmarked skin. Dahyun traced her fingers lightly across the long-set ink and thought that somehow, it felt just as raw  today as the day she got the tattoo.

Dahyun nestled deeper into the pillows she had piled on the couch to create a comfortable lounge for reading. Her feet were cozy and warm inside her mismatched Gryffindor and Slytherin socks, tucked underneath her blanket. She had a steaming cup of coffee to the side, and a book of poetry opened on her lap, which she had opted for instead of a novel, as her mind was too disjointed to follow a long storyline right now. One of the reasons she enjoyed poetry was its ability to draw the reader deeply into the poem with just a few words, and that, along with the intense emotions and profound revelations it could invoke, made for a powerful reading experience. It was the most efficient, and oftentimes the most effective, form of writing. One that was exceedingly hard to master, as Dahyun knew from experience.

This particular poem she was reading was a favorite of hers, telling the story of a star that did not have his own place in the sky. He was always being shuffled about and pushed around by some of the other stars, and had to dash back and forth all over the night sky. What he did not realize was that the nightly journeys he made while searching for a place of his own were visible to the people of earth. And when he found out that he was beloved by everyone, far and wide, that people waited long hours just to catch a glimpse of one of his journeys, that they even made