After Jennie's girlfriend,Jisoo, dies in an accident during their junior year, she reaches out to the recipients of the donated organs in hopes of picking up the fragments of her now-unrecognizable life. But whoever received Jisoo's heart has chosen...
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"Communicating with the transplant recipients may help donor families in their grief... Overall, donor families and recipients, as well as their relatives and friends, may benefit from exchanging thoughts and emotions about their experiences with donation... The gift of life... It may take months and even years before someone is ready to send and/or receive correspondence, or you may never hear from them."
— Life Alliance Donor Family Services Program.
Four hundred days.
I repeat the number in my head. Let it take over the hollow feeling as I grip the steering wheel. I can't let it go by like any other day without doing this. Four hundred deserves something, some sort of acknowledgment. Like 365, when I brought flowers to her mom but not her grave because I knew she would've wanted her to have them. Or like her birthday, when it passed. That was four months, three weeks, and one day after. Day 142.
I'd spent it alone, because I couldn't handle seeing her parents that day, and because a tiny, secret part of me actually believed that if I was alone, then maybe somehow there was still a chance she could come back, turn eighteen, and pick up where we'd left off. Be a senior with me, apply to the same colleges, go to our last Homecoming and prom, throw our caps into the sky at graduation, and kiss in the sunshine before they hit the ground.
When she hadn't come back, I'd wrapped myself in the sweatshirt that still held the faintest hint of her smell, or maybe it was my imagination. I pulled it tight around me, and I made a wish. I wished, so hard, that I didn't have to do any of those things without her. And my wish came true. The senior year became a fog. I didn't mail my college applications. Didn't go dress shopping. Forgot there was even a sky or sunlight to kiss under.
The days passed, one after another, measured out in an unbroken, never-ending rhythm. Seemingly infinite, but gone in the blink of an eye, like waves crashing on the shore, or the seasons passing. Or the beating of a heart.
Jisoo had an athlete's heart: strong, steady, ten beats slower than mine. Before, we'd lie there chest to chest, and I'd slow my breathing to match hers, try to trick my pulse into doing the same; but it never worked. Even after three years, my pulse sped up just being near her. But we found our own synchronicity together, her heart thumping out a slow, steady beat and mine filling in the spaces between. Four hundred days and too many heartbeats to count.
Four hundred days and too many places and moments where Jisoo no longer exists. And still no answer from one of the only places she does.
A horn blares from behind, yanking me from my thoughts and the nervous-sick feeling in my stomach. In the rearview mirror, I can see the driver cursing as he swerves around me, an angry hand raised in the air, lips spitting a question through his windshield: What the hell are you doing?
I asked myself the same thing when I got in the car. I'm not sure of what I'm doing, only that I have to do it because I have to see her for myself. Because of the way, it felt to see others.
