rain slaps the rooftops, hollow sounds echo through a lonely house (his heart, he’d like to think). it is a grey morning. lifeless, the rain a ghost. he looks out the window, the water pooling into dents of freshly weeded soil. if she comes back, he tells himself. incoherent thoughts like this. he takes a sip of his (her) expired herbal tea. it does not clear them.

and then he thinks: what if?

what if she does not come back?

five years, she tells him, first thing once they’re home. i’ve got a job on her for five years, if i want it. he throws the house keys in the tray next to the shoe rack. pauses in the middle of taking off his shoes.

and do you want the job? his eyes fixate on the holes where the laces should’ve been. she leans against him, breathes in – hospital smell and all. he already knows the answer.

so he says, five years is a long time, sojin. she lets the words vibrate against her skull.

they don’t sink in.

five to six. the train screams to a halt, slow and steady. the only thing that comes around these parts – old and sentimental. he needs that, he guesses. she did too, he’d like to think, her freshly weeded vegetable garden saturated with water – leaking through its wooden confines. he stops thinking after that.

empty train car, wheels chugging against steel rails, incessant hum of the engine urging him forward. his mind goes on autopilot – names of patients and their health problems sifting through his thoughts absentmindedly. he doesn’t notice he’s looking up at the ceiling until the train pulls into the stop before the hospital. toward the east, where saturn would be.

he nearly misses his stop trying to remember where he put her telescope.

sojin is galaxies – immovable, distant things that you just might see if you looked for them. her eyes reflect faraway stars and civilizations that they (he) could only dream of, her voice holds the numbers needed to get her there. she doesn’t necessarily need him, he realizes when she computes velocity equations for universes away late into the night. but he needs her, like the one star you find in a murky, polluted sky – a star that’s yours, but not really yours either. why want a girl who’s a supernova? jeesu used to joke. because, intae would say, pretending to understand him.

he never had a comeback to that.

messages come late, he’s learned. they used to come every other day, then once a week, then twice a month. three times a year. none at all. he wonders how long he’s been waiting. their answering machine collects dust next to the tray with the house keys. he can’t remember the last time he checked it.

he feels negligent. guilty. tired. what is he holding onto anymore? stares at the ceiling as the sky darkens – dark blue over gold, then black. nothing. he closes his eyes, a little tighter to remember the way her eyes crinkled when she smiled, the way she butchered i love you in five different languages to practice space communications.

he sleeps sleeplessly on the floor next to the answering machine that night.

is it hard waiting? she asked him once, two in the morning – his eyes bleary, hers universes away. he closed his eyes forcefully, once. twice. opened them again (they still hurt). he listened to her breathe instead.

do you want to keep waiting for me? and he remembered that she was not beside him, that despite the saying “love conquers all,” love could not span distances and galaxies and five years with inconsistent calls at two in the morning. why want a girl who’s a supernova? she only causes you to implode.

it’s been three and a half years, he whispers, receiver pressing into his jaw. he wonders if she heard him, a distant memory among her new civilizations and frontiers – a stargazer who thinks he’s hers.

i miss you. i really ing miss you, like she really means it.

the space distorts her words.

he has an affair six years in. but it cannot really be that, he thinks aloud when she’s beside him on the bed, when who you think is your other half is light years away. her head presses insistently against the void between his shoulder and neck, like she’s his – what he’s always wanted but from the wrong person. sojin-sized, he used to describe the space. he fits his arm around her shoulder and pretends that it belongs there.

the woman beside him is a basket case. beautiful, bright. empty. so: how does it begin? he tries to remember.

it starts with a name.

can you help me pick these? she scrunches her face up in pretend frustration, but laughs a second later. he rolls his eyes in mock defiance, bending down to work at the leaves. not my fault you decided to plant lettuce.

you wanted to eat healthy. she swipes a finger of dirt against his face and blocks him when he tries to return the favor. his arms are longer, emerging triumphantly to her fake crying. you know you love me, he taunts, pressing the palms of his dirty hands against her cheeks. she moves the bowl of leaves aside before trying to shake him off.

yeah, she loudly whispers, as if it is a secret. her hands press against his cheeks as well. i do.

fifteen to six. the train screams to a halt, slow and steady. the only thing that comes around these parts – old and sentimental. they liked that, he guesses. she’d like it now too, he’d like to assume, plant new vegetables as the seasons go by – the kinds that are grown in the ground. he should weed her garden again, is the absentminded thought.

the train car isn’t empty when he steps in. last seat before the end. the train lurches forward, peeks over the seats with his heart in his throat. it’s not her. he’s not surprised.

his mind goes on autopilot – her smile, the way her eyes crinkled at the edges when she did so. when she wasn’t reflecting galaxies in her irises – when she wasn’t a girl looking through a telescope, calculating physics equations at their dining table. when she wasn’t a navigator, a chief helmsman, an officer on a spaceship.

why want a girl who’s a supernova? but she wasn’t, he realizes behind closed eyes, facing the ceiling, engine humming and urging him forward – toward saturn, as she would say. she, her.

her.

she was (is) his.

and he hers.

you have one new message. message received at ten twenty-three PM.

hey, it’s me. i don’t know when you’ll get this, but we’re several galaxies away. we’re going around this planet and – we’re coming back, junho. we’re coming back, to earth. i don’t know how long it’ll take because we’re so far out but – i know it’s been more than seven years, will you wait for me just a little longer?

i miss you. so so much. love you, junho.

to the stars and back,

sojin.