Spring 2012

Another birthday.

Kim Jong Kook sighs as he closes his apartment door, leaning against it and rubbing his hand over his face.

Another birthday and nothing much has changed since the last one. Still single, still getting older. A night out with friends was a welcome distraction from the melancholy that always sets in at this time of year, but now he’s home alone with time to think.

He enters his bedroom and changes into loose gym shorts and a t-shirt for bed, but going to sleep isn’t appealing yet. He sits on his couch and flips on the television to cover up the still silence that seems extra heavy tonight.

Surfing aimlessly through the channels, he briefly, just briefly, allows his mind to wander back to the events of this night last year.

Much of that evening is lost in a haze of bad memory and alcohol. He doesn’t remember arriving at the fortune teller’s house, but he does remember the exact moment the drunkenness faded away into disbelief. Then the exact moment that disbelief turned to hope. Then the exact moment that hope came crashing down around him.

He doesn’t often let his thoughts drift back to that night, preferring to set it out of mind completely. Most days, it’s easy. If his thoughts head that way, he squashes them down by reminding himself that none of that was real, or fights them back with a quick surge of the bitter anger than filled him on his way out the door that night. But after a blind date leaves him cold or a promising new interest fades out of his life or another holiday passes with no one at his side, he does mentally go back there.

Realistically he knows, or at least he tells himself, that even if what happened that night had the slightest shred of truth to it, it’s not a life sentence of solitude. So what if there’s a perfect match soul mate out there that he’ll never meet? There are plenty of other women he will meet. Pretty women. Smart women. Women who would make good mothers. Who marries the perfect person, anyway? With only one match for everyone in the world, what are the chances that every happy couple is one of those perfect pairings? Slim to none, right? He runs through this line of reasoning so often he knows his own self-comforting thoughts by heart now.

But when yet another one of those smart, pretty, potential mother-type women fails to be someone he can spend the rest of his life with, the image of those two strings overlaying each other comes to mind unbidden. On the worst nights, the hardest nights, it’s all he can think about. What’s the point of trying when no one else out there will equal up to that glowing tangle?

He tries hard to avoid going down this road and for the most part, he’s successful. He’s got great friends and family. His career is going well. He’s busy. Fulfilled.

Tonight, though, thinking of another year gone by, he allows himself to sink back into the couch and sort through what he remembers. The glowing lines, the perfect match. And then… and then what?

He growls in frustration. It’s not that he wants to remember - what would be the point? But he can’t remember. There was a blue sky, he recalls. Or does he? He doesn’t know if he remembers seeing blue sky, or just remembers that Gary brought it up, but it’s a fact lodged in where gaping holes exis