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I've got a lot of feeling for you. You're kind. We'll kiss, grow old, walk around. Light months will fly over us like snowy stars.
ANNA AKHMATOVA, THE ROAD IS BLACK
Moon Hye-Jin measures her life in years of love.
Their story starts at age fifteen. Girl meets boy. Boy meets girl. Two hearts collide and it feels like they've known each other their whole lives.
Sixteen is filled with soft looks and even softer confessions. Sweetheart smiles and butterflies in stomachs. Sixteen is holding hands in the park and kissing beneath the moonlight. She never thought she could feel this light, this luminous.
Things change at seventeen. The first heartbreak. This is where she loses him, the first time. When faced with a choice, she chases a dream that isn't her own over the boy who shines so bright that he puts the sun to shame. But even all the glory and gold that comes with standing out there on the ice with the crowd screaming her name can't make her feel the way he does. Nothing can.
Eighteen is when they find each other again. Like her halmeoni once said to her, "When you find a love like yours, build it a home and keep it close to your heart. Hold on to it and never let go."
I swear I'll never let go again. And she doesn't.
Now, fast forward.
Twenty is when they promise each other infinity and beyond. Twenty-one is when they say I do and til death do us part and I'll love you, always, when that sacred promise is set in stone with sweet words and matching silver rings. Home is no longer a place she goes to rest her head at night; it is the boy she fell in love with when she was sixteen. The boy with kind eyes and an even kinder smile and two arms that hold her close to him like she is the most precious thing in the universe. (And to him, she is.) Home is wherever he is. Her heart. Her light. Her joy. Her peace.
Her love.
Everything is perfect.
But fate has other plans for them.
Fast forward, one last time, to twenty-three. This is when she loses him, this time forever. There are no more rewinds, no more do-overs, no more second chances. Perhaps at another place in time, a better place, parallel to this one, they could be together for infinity. But their story ends the same way it started, with two hearts only now one has stopped beating. There are sirens in the distance. Blood on her hands. Tears in her eyes. His name etched into marble. A whisper.
