The Love You Want

1.

"If it is distant from your eyes, it also becomes distant from your mind and heart."
- Korean Proverb

Haneul was haunting the apartment. Of course he was, I thought. Of course he would fight the current of whatever happened after the body stops taking in oxygen, after the heart stops beating, after the electrodes and arteries and blood vessels and microbes cease their purpose. After one walks through the shadow of the valley of death. After his neurons stopped firing, and suddenly the mind that had been so beautiful became just a mass of dead brain tissue. After they took out his eyes and put them into a blind man's head, after they removed his liver and put it in the abdomen of a boy who was dying just hours earlier, after his kidneys are given to two women fighting dialysis, after they cut out his heart and placed it, unbeating and bloody, next to the flawed heart of a woman born with a hole in her own.

After they put what remained in the incinerator, and I had to lock the doors so we couldn't run to the body and jump into the flames with it. We would have kept the body, I think, if someone had given us the chance. Before Haneul died, the thought would have disgusted me: Achilles holding on to Patroclus, even though he was dead and his body was decaying, even though the hope was gone and his lover was nothing more than a spirit, there no more than the campfire smoke, scratching at the veil and begging to be set alight so he could go to the Underworld. But then Haneul died, and we all scrambled for pieces of him. We took pieces of his hair and wrapped them in linen before locking them in jewelry boxes, in fireproof safes, where nothing could ever touch them. We put a few black strands in lockets we wore around our throats, and never, ever, ever opened. We went through his closet and took pieces one by one, finding hoodies and jackets he hadn't put in the wash and pressing them against our faces. I took the throw blanket I had given him two Christmases ago and draped it over my bed. I, whose skin itched every seven days with a need to wash my bed linens, to make things clean, swore that no drop of water or soap would ever touch the blanket. It felt like a sin just to touch it, to disturb the tiny, microscopic particles of him that still remained on it. Doyun took the bed sheets from Haneul's bed and put them over his own. Lori drove over and wordlessly took the pillows and the quilt, sewn by my grandmother seven years ago. I ran the laundry on Thursdays, and Haneul had died on Tuesday. Over the course of a 24-hour period, the body loses almost a million skin cells, 300,00 to 400,000 every hour. Haneul had spent about 42 hours in his bed since I had washed them last. Mathematically speaking, that meant that almost a million and half tiny pieces of him were dispersed in those fabrics, there for us to crawl and scratch for.

An impossibly large number to imagine. But it wasn't enough, it was never enough.

The first few nights, Doyun slept on the bare mattress. I couldn't sleep anymore, so I would stand in the doorway and watch. I knew I should have been selfless and given him the throw blanket, but I couldn't find it within myself to do it. Haneul's parents had burned the body. They'd taken that choice away from us. His parents had decided that he was theirs to decide what should happen to him. They had chosen to divide the pieces and then burned the rest. They'd left only pieces that were impossible to see.

I couldn't risk giving Doyun my share of those pieces.

But he was cold, and he was cold in my home. Just my home, now, without Hanuel. So, he was my responsibility.

I searched for something that I could give him that wasn't a sacrifice. I went through my room, running a hand across the throw blanket (just one hand, my fingertips just brushing the fibers, I couldn't risk disturbing him too much). Finding nothing I was willing to give, I found myself in the living room.

The apartment was dark. I knew my way around well enough to see without lights, and I had no fear anymore, so I left it dark. I reached out for the couch, and ran my nails over it as I passed. He'd slept there a few times, usually when he was sick or hungover and didn't want to disturb me because I had to work in the morning. We had watched movies together on that couch, a Friday night tradition we accidentally created, thinking we'd have years -- decades -- of Friday nights. He had sat on that couch, crying. One night I yelled and screamed at him because I was scared and angry and breathing hurt.