Living In Solitude

A few strands of coarse hair are sticking out of her hoodie, and she slips them in, tucking them behind her ear. She goes through the different aisles, picking up two cup noodles in her hands. She weighs both options in her hands, considering and reconsidering the flavour, calories, and whatever else there is in a china-brand cup noodles. Tossing both into her basket by her feet, she taps her jeans pocket for the spare change, fiddling with crumpled and stained notes and finally pulling out a few to straighten out.

She ambles to the counter, worn-out tennis shoes leaving some dirt on the white tiling. The shop smells of soap, air freshener and a hint of plastic packaging. The plump lady at the counter has a dark blue collared shirt on, with the shop watermark etched dismally near the collar.

The lady regards her warily, deciding what to make of her dirtied hoodie with the hood pulled low down her face, to the faded, stonewashed jeans that looks like her last pair, and the worn tennis shoes with holes near the soles. But the lady should know better. This isn’t an affluent neighbourhood. The closest they’ve got to foreign channels in the satellite dish hung from the shutters. And even then, the channels are a black-and-white, striped mess on the screen, and she could barely even make out the words and faces at all.

The cashier lady takes the basket and sets it on the counter, taking out her items of purchase and typing in the prices and numbers. The lady falters at the cheap, low-grade watercolour paint tubes and then nods to herself, thinks ‘whatever’ and sets it away into the plastic bag. Jessica counts her notes once more and parts with them, turning away even before the receipt has been printed out.

Plastic bag slinging from her wrist, she shuffles up the stairs to her apartment, which is only a few minutes’ walk from the shop. The weather is slightly breezy today, with elderly people having simple talk at the nearby coffee shop and playing chess, drinking coffee and watching the sports channel in shorts and singlet.

Jessica doesn’t look at them, tired, arms sore and just wanting to go home after a long day at work.

She pushes through the door, towards the kitchen where she puts the plastic bag on the counter next to the sink, and fishes out her cup noodles. She’ll eat one now and save the other for dinner later. Jessica nearly forgets that her shoes are on as she’s boiling the water and curses at the trail of dirt following her footsteps. She removes them and aligns them at her door, and glances at the calendar hung to her right.

October. The year is passing by so fast. It feels like she’s on a bullet train headed to nowhere.

In the process of making her food, some hot water splatters on her wrist, and she hisses, recoiling back. She runs the reddened wrist under the cold tap water and sighs, pulling her hood back and letting the blonde, dry hair flow out.

It’s been so long. Dust has gathered up in the corners, smeared fingerprints faded, this was once a happy home that wasn’t always dark and depressing.

The tap’s been broken and leaking so many times before that Jessica doesn’t even bother when the tap starts spurting water.

While waiting for the noodles to cook, she moves around the small apartment, wondering if this is what she’ll be seeing for her entire life.

Like an old quote used to say, ‘If I had not seen the sun, then maybe I wouldn’t have minded the dark.’

Jessica wanders to the plastic bag again, and takes out the pack of watercolours. She retrieves her paintbrush and the blank side of a canvas sheet from torn down advertisements, using a plastic cover as a palette. She sets the canvas over her coffee table, and dips the paintbrush into a glass of water to soften the brush.

The watercolours are thick and clumping together, making it almost impossible to create soft , but Jessica tries, overlapping it if it turns out wrong. She’s done the outline and is now moving on to the harsher when she remembers the cup noodles.

Hurriedly leaving the brush in the cup of water, she rushes to the kitchen, her frown deepening when she forks out some noodles, bloated and over-cooked.

There had been a time when eating bloated noodles seemed like the best thing to do. There had been a time when the stove was used for once, at least.

There had been better days, but those have obviously passed, like September has turned into October and October will turn into November.

Jessica eats it anyway, slurps the bland soup and wipes at with the back of her hand, absently tossing it into the trash and returning back to her painting.

She likes painting beauty, though it is never captured enough in her coloured canvases. Only now can she fully paint the beauty of loneliness and longing perfectly, in the dark colours and angry, harsh of her paintbrush.

Jessica makes a flick of her wrist to create a severe jaw, but then softens and mulls it out, creating shadows to make it gentler, sweeter to kiss and cup.

The skin that Jessica had drawn to be dark now sports a lightness to it, because they’re remembered as smooth and light, to her lips and fingertips. The fingers are slender, the gaps perfectly spaced to create an illusion of grasping for something.

Jessica fills in the face slowly, painting it just as she remembers it, the evening dying solemnly. There are starbursts over fading colours on the cheeks, across the greyed cheekbones that were soft yet hard underneath torn, calloused fingertips.

A gentle dripping of water tells her that the tap is no longer leaking, but the soft tap on her shoulder that used to come after, along with the excited squeal of ‘It’s fixed!’ is no longer there.

Jessica feels the wind seeping from the shutters kiss at the bruises of her bones, her laughter brittle, the angle of her lips harsh. It feels like an ocean inside of her, restless, controlling, powerful.

But the delicate brushing of her wrist cannot have hidden all these, could it?

There’s no more calling for her name, just a loneliness that moans the echo of her name.

And when October turns into November, and then the next year comes, then what?

She draws in the eyes, a lovely shade of brown, with darkened irises and undiluted fear. But then she shades in the eyebrows and then it looks nothing more than a mild surprise, or simply disbelief.

Jessica adds some more tones to the face, until she’s satisfied.

It’s finally complete. Jessica thumbs the edges of the canvas sourly, looking for something to fill in or something to perfect.

She’s finally captured years of being alone, years of living without kisses and hugs, years of blank eyes with sympathy. But it’s a deceiving painting and it might just be a painting of a girl in dark colours for some, but she’s put years in those brushes and and only those like her would understand.

“Blue sky, please hold her,” she whispers a prayer like she’s always told to and dips her paintbrush in black, writing words at the bottom.

Hwang MiYoung, Living In Solitude

—ジュリエット