always have been, always will be | jensoo

Don't Look Back Now

I kissed Kim Jisoo when I was 8 years old.

Of course, if you ask her - which I wouldn't, because good old Jichu has a tendency to deny lots of things, she'll tell you it was a dream.

To be perfectly honest, I'm not a hundred percent sure it wasn't. It was so long ago, almost fifteen years. A lifetime. And I was so young, kids have overactive imaginations, right?

I peer down at the photograph of her I didn't know I'd kept, cursing myself for stumbling upon it.

I shake the memory out of my head, throwing the picture I'd forgotten I had back into the bottom of the old box, throwing some used textbooks on top of it. Cleaning out my dorm room, my place of co-habitation for the past four years, was going to be enough of a task without getting caught up in the past.

I am a college graduate. I have a lot to be proud of, a lot ahead of me. Leaving home at eighteen and never looking back might have made me a lot lonelier, but it did also make me particularly driven. The inheritence helped, of course. But it's not about money.

"Who was that?"

Jiyeon, my roommate, my fellow partier, probably my closest friend of four years is peering at the bottom of my box.

"What?"

"Picture." She kicks the box lightly, cigarette dangling from her mouth.

"Some girl I knew once." I'm dismissive and grab the tobacco stick. "Don't smoke in here."

Jiyeon just smirks, knowing the argument I always use - 'We have to live here, I don't want it smelling like the inside of an ashtray!' - no longer applies. After we get this place gutted, taking our belongings with us, we'll never know it again.

"Screw that. I'm finishing the pack." A match sizzles in the air and she takes the cigarette away from me, lighting it up. I draw up my nose against the smell of sulfur and tobacco smoke mixing in the air, and toss some more clothes in my box.

"When'd you know her?" Puff.

"Huh?"

"Box girl." She taps the box again, with her foot.

"Quit it." I'm testy today. "A long time ago."

Jiyeon lies back on the bed. She's tall, pale, and has gray eyes. She's the only person I've met with gray eyes. Right now she has bed head, and I don't think she cares. I will be sharing an apartment with her for an indefinite amount of time after we get the hell out of here, her words.

"How long?"

"Don't smoke on my bed."

"Not your bed anymore." She replies quickly, smugly.

I groan out loud, hating being forced to recall details about my past and wanting her to know so, and say, "Forever ago."

She seems satisfied with my answer, knowing I'm very vague about where I come from. "Name?"

I don't want to say the name, knowing it will throw me back in time, forcing me to remember. I do it anways. "Jisoo."

"Jisoo."

She sticks her hand out, waiting for it to be shaken. I've never seen a girl my age do that, and I look back from the hand up to her face. She, this Jisoo, is smacking her gum loudly, squinting at me in the sun, and scratching at her ear with a funny grin.

She wears a baseball cap pulled over her messy brown hair.

She is what my Mom will later tell me is a 'tomboy'. I'd never heard this term before.