“You’re dumping me? You’re dumping me. Fine. Fine; I don’t need you!”

Hak Yeon misses the era of landline phones; of phones that people can slam down with malice when something doesn’t go their way or when someone says something that just pisses them off. In Hak Yeon’s case, he really wanted a landline phone so that he could slam it down on the receiver in the middle of his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—and her cold-hearted, half-assed spiel about how she never wanted to break up with him and that he’s a really good person but she feels smothered and she can’t hold up two burdens at once. She touches a nerve. Burden? Is that what I am to you, then? Why even bother sticking around?! No, she didn’t mean it like that, she just meant—Oh, save it! If you didn’t mean it, the words wouldn’t have been in your mouth! She pauses and he pauses and everyone takes a deep breath. You said forever. Well, that’s a long time.

Hak Yeon places his iPhone down on the tiny coffee table he bought for his dorm’s living room. He doesn’t even like the thing; he picked it up from a yard sale at a retiring professor’s house because his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—wanted to “liven up the atmosphere.” Granted all he has in his room are posters of popular idols and actors plastered onto the walls, shelves filled to the brim with textbooks and leisure books purchased from the local thrift store, and a small desk currently littered with rough drafts of final term paper and project outlines. He and his roommate Won Shik didn’t mind, but apparently his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—had seen a problem with their decorating skills. She started to purchase colorful mugs with plastic straws that twisted and turned and plates with China blue flowers hand-painted on the edges. Won Shik and Hak Yeon only used the accursed straws and plates whenever the girl came over. Now that she won’t be a problem anymore, Hak Yeon doesn’t feel the least bit guilty on his way to the kitchen.

Hak Yeon grabs the plates that look like they belong in his grandmother’s yard sale. He grabs the cups and straws that look like they should be used at a cheap kid’s restaurant. He piles them into a plastic trash bag, not giving a flying if they break. In fact, the more shattering porcelain he hears, the better he feels. His girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—will be crushed upon finding her dishes callously broken and tossed away, and that’s what Hak Yeon wants. He throws on a heavy red Letterman jacket and heaves the trash bag over his shoulder, exiting his dorm room and stomping down the stairs towards the first floor. He lives on the third floor along with his roommate Won Shik and their mutual friends Jae Hwan and Taek Woon, so his raucous dish breaking and trash hauling is probably waking up people on the floors below. Any other day, Hak Yeon would care. But he just got dumped not even fifteen minutes ago; he needs self-gratification and he needs it now.

Hak Yeon decides that his girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—isn’t the most considerate person in the world. Choosing to dump him on a Saturday right before the first week of final examinations is a carefully calculated move of unprecedented cruelty. If stress doesn’t normally have a physical, palpable weight, it does now. Hak Yeon gnaws at his lower lip, rage and humiliation and betrayal battling against the cold, keeping him sweltering hot in only his Letterman jacket, a pair of red plaid pajama pants, and straw flip-flops his stepfather brought back from Jeju Island. He reaches the large green trash bin flanked on its sides and its rear by flimsy wooden planks and throws the heavy black door back concealing the abundance of trash that the dormitory building has accumulated over two weeks. Even the trash men are getting lazy; Hak Yeon thinks it’s a damn shame that everyone is getting too comfortable and complacent.

Hak Yeon hurls the bag into the trash bin and then shuts the door with unconcealed vehemence. Hard plastic rams against steel and the disharmonic sound rings dull through the quiet December morning. Hak Yeon expects to be cussed out later and maybe even reported to the RA of his dormitory building, but he doesn’t mind. The way his heart rends in half in his chest and the sudden onslaught of grief knocks his legs out from underneath him. He throws his right arm back; desperately feels for anything solid to support him. He falls back against the trash bin and slides down into a crouching position, allowing the tears to fall from his eyes. He doesn’t make any audible noises, or if he does, the howling wind drowns them out. He grabs at his brown curls and pulls at them until he feels like he’ll rip them out. His tears are hot against his tan skin.

Hak Yeon begins to think, knowing that entertaining himself for too long always backfires. He recollects, sorts out, makes sense of the pain that ades his heart and stomach. He goes back to two years ago, his third year of high school. The cold gives way to a glaring sun and a blistering heat, one that has the graduating class pleading for any bit of a breeze. The icy ground feels plush underneath him. He’s sitting in the chair in the graduation hall, not believing that he actually graduated. With the way his final examinations went, he had been prepared to stand against the back wall and watch his friends walk across the stage in a grandiose display of academic and social accomplishment. He had passed, though, and he had stood with his friends and his girlfriend of six months and walked across with them, shaking the hands of administrators and instructors and smiling for cameras that didn’t belong to either his mother or her new beau. Not that he had been expecting them to come. Hak Yeon looks from wall to wall, from chair to empty chair. The knot of apprehension that settled in his stomach during the ceremony slowly unfurls and blooms into a sense of pride. He smiles. The joy is short lived. Hak Yeon’s girlfriend sits by him; tells him that she’s going to Seoul National University. Of course Hak Yeon feels happy for her, but he feels that something more is coming. Then the words come out curt and cutting; final. “It’s over.” The auditorium is empty again.

Hak Yeon goes farther back, reopening old wounds. He exposes himself to the cold. He doesn’t pretend to enjoy the pain; in fact, he cries harder upon reflecting on his first year in high school where he met his sweetheart. Hak Yeon remembers still walking around with his book bag’s straps on both his shoulders, indubitably in love with a pale American girl with bouncy mocha curls. He remembers dreaming of a moonlit proposal, a flashy wedding with golden baubles hanging from the ceilings and marble columns of their marriage hall, sweet love-making underneath the palms of Hawaii, and at least six children. When that girl moved away, though, suddenly and without announcement, she ripped Hak Yeon’s dreams apart in the turbines of the airplane that carried her off.

Hak Yeon presses on. He returns to middle school, to where he sits with his beautiful best friend with waist length copper hair and dark eyes lined with brown kohl. He holds one of her hands in his and runs a polish tipped brush over her nails. The pale pink color matches well with her creamy complexion, he notices. The fiery orange glow of the retreating sun against the narrow horizon line makes the atmosphere seem romantic. Hak Yeon decides it’s the perfect time to make his move; to coyly ask, “Am I datable?” He swallows his indignation and embarrassment when she answers, quite bluntly, “You are, but I would never date you. You’re too much.”

Finally, Hak Yeon stumbles upon it. In the midst of the fragments of broken relationships, he finds what pains him the most. The memory is embedded in his heart as well as his mind and both ache as that fateful day plays against the back of his eyes like an old movie. He feels sand underneath his bare feet, snaking in between his toes. He plays with a red rubber kickball, trying to kick up as much sand and grit as he can. His young, nubile mother told him to stay near the jungle gym and not to move towards the street. He’s only four years old. She leaves at sunset and comes back to the empty playground well after dusk with a man trailing after her. Hak Yeon calls out to his mother; asks her to take him home. “I didn’t sign up for a kid,” the man says while turning on his heels to return to the shadows. “Don’t go,” Hak Yeon’s mother supplicates desperately. She jogs after the man; grabs at his arm and tries to pull him back. To no avail. Eventually young Hak Yeon returns home and is sequestered to his room by his mother. “I’m trying to make things better for us. Try not to be such a burden next time.”

Hak Yeon stops going back. His tears cease and his face feels cold. Snow has accumulated on his head, shoulders, and feet. Nobody has come out to check on him, because he’s just a burden, right? The day before, Friday afternoon, he sat on the left side of the lecture hall of his psychology classroom, and he listened to the instructor say anxious-ambivalent over and over, and word by word he outlined his life, his experiences. He loves passionately, he acts outlandishly, he performs as if he’s bleeding and sweating and sobbing at the same time. He does it to fight his mother, to fight his exes, to fight everyone that ever said he was a “burden.” He hates that word. He hates that human beings can sling that word around like it’s nothing. He hates that human beings can call someone that and feel justified; it’s disgusting…

Anxious-ambivalent people make relationships quickly and tear through them passionately, believing that they will only be rejected because they aren’t worth loving. Hak Yeon is sure that if someone made a split-second judgment about him, they would believe he was secure. They would look at his smile and the twinkle in his eyes and the exuberance that moves his joints and think, “Wow, he must really have it together.” And that’s what he wants them to think. If they detect a hint of anything burdensome, he’ll go to extreme lengths to conceal it. Nobody can see. Nobody.

Hak Yeon isn’t aware of someone kicking him until the tip of a steel toed boot drives itself into his thigh. He jumps and looks upwards at a drowsy looking Taek Woon. Hak Yeon envies the quiet brunette with snow spackling his onyx locks. He seems quiet, yet secure, like those babies that Ainsworth studied. He seems like he has parents—a mother, at least—that didn’t consider him a burden; a mistake. He seems like he’s had girlfriends who have loved him. He seems like he has friends who he’s not afraid of losing. He doesn’t need to pretend to smile. He doesn’t need to work twice as hard to please others. He doesn’t need to burden himself with containing his demons and Hak Yeon gets so jealous—

“You’re an idiot.” Taek Woon’s voice is soft and chilling just like the downy snowflakes falling onto his red cheeks. Hak Yeon swallows. “I heard you on the phone. She wasn’t good enough for you anyway. You’re not a burden.”

Hak Yeon looks up at Taek Woon; keeps his dark gaze. The tiny pink lips turn up lightly as Taek Woon extends his hand out to Hak Yeon. When Hak Yeon attempts to stand up himself, Taek Woon forcefully grabs the front of his jacket and yanks him up and onto his feet. After making sure his legs work despite their exposure to the cold, Hak Yeon falls into step beside Taek Woon as they walk back towards the dormitory building. Taek Woon complains about how loud Hak Yeon was on the phone. He then lapses into talking about their psychology final which is coming upon them quickly.

“Hey, Taek Woon. Am I...” Hak Yeon interjects hurriedly before Taek Woon can start speaking again, then pauses. He his chapped lips and tries again. “Am I a good person?”

“You’re one of the better people here.”

Hak Yeon stops and watches Taek Woon walk forward until he reaches the front stoop to the building. The younger turns and, with a straight face, waves Hak Yeon on. The snow makes Taek Woon’s pale skin look even whiter. His eyes are narrowed yet his gestures are fluid and radiating warmth. His lips, set in a straight line, have words playing at the back of the clenched teeth inside of his mouth. Fleetingly, Hak Yeon wonders what Taek Woon wants to say. But he dismisses it as he surges forward, bounding over small hills of powdery snow before finally leaping onto Taek Woon’s back.

Even as Taek Woon throws Hak Yeon to the ground and captures him in a not-too-playful headlock, Hak Yeon figures that if at least one person loves him despite his overbearing tendencies, then that’s enough for him.