Except You, Love

• 10 •

And all that I've known to be of love
And I am gentle
You ran off with it all
And I am desperate
And all that I dream
Where do you run, where do you run to?

( by Sufjan Stevens)

❁❁❁

Golden light and brilliant blue.

A breath-stealing look across the gymnasium floor, a stellar collision in the corridor.

A first kiss under the stars, a first time under the rain.

Ever since they met, Lisa has been in love with Chaeyoung.

Where her mother had loved her father with quiet, measured grace, and her father adored her mother with not-so-quiet and immeasurable ardour, Lisa is the product of both.

With grace and ardour, she has loved Chaeyoung. For sixteen years, Lisa's heart has been in constant expansion making room for her boundless, radiating warmth (a brilliance so hot that sometimes it burns).

She has been gentle and faithful. Patient and kind.

Confident and steadfast. Desperate and broken.

She has felt weightless and been left speechless.

But not once has her love wavered. Even after Chaeyoung's did, heartbreakingly and without cause, Lisa's love remains, tender and true.

❁❁❁

"Lisa, what happened?"

Lisa shakily lifted her arm to reveal the small velvet box clutched in her hand. She shook her head, with greater violence than the soft, almost inaudible 'no' that had precipitated the tearful trek leading her to stand heartbroken in front of her sister's apartment door. Hours since, the rejection still reverberated in her chest, a substitute for where her heart should be beating.

She was immediately drawn into a crushing embrace. Unable to find any words, Lisa could only sob into Jisoo's shirt, distraught and gasping in spurts of uneven air.

Jisoo rubbed a soothing hand up and down Lisa's back. "You're okay."

Lisa weakly mumbled an unintelligible reply into the now wet shoulder. She was far from okay.

—

Two months later, Jisoo was already waiting halfway down the same hallway, wordlessly taking the duffle bag while the other arm pulled Lisa in.

"She—" Lisa had to pause for the crack in her voice to finish its break, "she said no," and a tear to fall, "again."

Jisoo held on tighter.

"You're okay."

❁❁❁

Her heart is pounding.

It's screaming for her to turn around and go back to Chaeyoung.

But as her feet carry her out the door farther away from their apartment and faster than she has the wits to stop, it takes everything in Lisa not to break. For the third time.

Her cheeks are stained, her breaths short and vision blurred from witnessing the pain that rived across Chaeyoung's face when Lisa revealed she was leaving for London.

Driven by her own pain and the stifling, hot sensation she'd unexpectedly felt upon hearing the three words, and then magnified by the accusation that her actions of the past months amounted to a cruel, meaningless fuck, Lisa found herself running.