Icarus's Dream: Ha Sooyoung and the Strange Neighbour

Breaking

Several storeys below the ninth floor of Sooyoung's apartment room is a solitary window on the first floor. That window, tainted pale yellow from years of roadside emission, happens to belong to the only habitable room on floor one. It used to be one of the many indoor golf/gaming rooms crammed side-by-side with a single narrow hallway splitting the floor, but a few years ago, an accident occurred in that very room. An accident is a poor way of labelling it, as it involved five drunken recent high school graduates and a whole entourage of the local soccer team. Twelve people were sent to the hospital that night, and all five of the graduates woke up the next morning with their first hangover. Since then, the floor has been converted into a storage space, but one of the rooms, due to a technicality issue with one of the dividing walls, was left unscathed and so was converted into a meagre studio room - having just enough space to fit a small wooden table between the stove and the bed.

Sooyoung remembered that night with vivid clarity. October, 20th, 2017. It was the night that she broke up with her high school sweetheart.

"Don't you think... I think this is too abrupt?" Sooyoung muttered under her breath.

Sooyoung fiddled with her pint of beer yet lifted from the table. Her gaze was downcast, observing the tiny circular pockets of carbon appearing spontaneously from the bottom of the glass with no particular interest. Her gaze moved slightly upward, settling on a faded logo. The words Blue Moon overlay the faint turquois disk, which, to her embarrassment, she realized was, in fact, the blue moon. Everything seemed to embarrass her in that moment. With every passing second that she sat there, staring at her pint, she could feel a strange sense of shame and remorse mounting in her chest. Questions raced her mind, rising spontaneously in rapid succession. "Was I too needy?" "What made the bartender think it appropriate to pour a pint of Guinness into a glass clearly labelled BLUE MOON?" A moment passed without a word, then her eyes rested on the lines of water droplets on the cedar table, tracing the gradual movement of the glass from her left palm to her right. "Could it be about my new contract?" Sooyoung flicked her gaze up at Taegun, who was also occupied with the perspiration on his beer glass. His eyes were red, was it because of last night?

"Somehow I think we're not meant for each other," Taegun spoke. An answer Sooyoung's heard far too often in her past lives, from hours sobbing through soap operas, and from her past boyfriends. "I've just... I feel like I'm at a crossroads in my life and I'm coming to realize that we're not good for each other." Sooyoung's eyes did not flinch when he said those words. She knew exactly how he felt. Yet, despite that, despite knowing their lives would be vastly different for the better if they parted, Sooyoung was not able to loose herself from her desire to be with him. Taegun was her first love and she had not known anything of such since the year her parents divorced.

"Taegun." Sooyoung could barely hear herself, yet his name kept returning to the tip of her tongue. "Taegun-a." Knowing there was nothing more to be said, Taegun got up, put down a couple of bills next to the receipt and one next to Sooyoung's right hand. "Take the taxi home. Don't take the subway. I heard about a kidnapping the other day," Taegun said, before briskly walking away. "Taegun-a, Taegun-a..." his name trickled through her lips, fading with each faint step he took towards the exit.

[To Be Continued]