These Sainted Seouls | ongoing

interlude three: Chae Yi

She stood close to the window and let the wind swell against her reflection; they were passing through the gray city, but she was doing the sort of division in her head that people call nostalgia: cutting apart the girl she saw in the glass and making her into a younger, smaller version. Someone with the same soul, but considerably more innocent. A girl that biked through long turquoise grass fields with a boy from her school, who kissed mirrors and posters of Cantonese pop stars for practice, and who later kissed the boy through the screen of her bedroom window, all the lights drawn low so her grandmother wouldn't find out. It was her first kiss. Later that night, it was her first time becoming a woman, though she had once promised her grandmother to save her maidenhood until marriage.

Chae Yi leaned her head against the subway window and then put in her earbuds, turning the music up especially loud so she would stop thinking and stop remembering. That boy had been the first boy, but he was also the last boy; the last and first time she had ever been in love. Every time after that, it was just for the sex. It did not help that they tried to make love again, one week later: she put on a cheap, pretty dress that had once been her mother's and that her grandmother had hidden away; she dabbed bright red onto her lips and stole out into the waving, wet night; the boy met her under a looming oak tree that separated their properties. There were strong fireflies in the sky like stars. She remembered thinking they were falling into her, lighting her up, as the boy moved his careful lips over her nose and her collarbone.  But then they were falling into her--the night sky seemed to be bleeding apart and falling down to crush her.

"I can't--I can't," she'd shrieked, yanking herself away from the boy. "They're falling on me--"

He would not understand when she tried to explain. What was Second Seoul to him? It's the way I see things, she said--it's the way things seem to be falling apart, the universe breaking to bits around us, all the time.

It's an illusion, I swear. It's like--my grandmother says it's a second sight--I'm not crazy, I swear.

Now she stood frozen on the subway; she yanked her overlarge sweater tighter around her skinny arms, remembering the way the rising dawn lit up his back as he walked away from her.

It has been nine days since Hyun-ki came to her house and demanded the sort of answers she would not give him. He was lovely--just the way he looked on variety shows, or in his music videos. He had a way of biting his lip, of flushing under his eyes when he got angry. She knew all his quirks, simply from reading them in fan-forums (she had been that girl in high school): he would throw back his head when he laughed, as people are said to do in books; his favorite drink was a strong caramel macchiato, and he would take the lid off the cup before he drank it. It felt fictional to have him in her house like that, but also he did not seem like the Hyun-ki that she'd invented; he was rude--nasty, almost, and horribly dismissive of her. To him, she realized, she was just a means to an end: he wanted information, he wanted Saint Servera, and she was the best source for that knowledge.

But of course she wanted that knowledge, too; she was determined to return to the city; she had made it into a sort of destiny, because if anything could explain Second Seoul---what it really was and why she had it and what was wrong with her--- then it might be something inside the city. Also, why shouldn't she go back? She was used to taking the things she wanted.

"After all, it's not every day you find a magic city inside someone's head," she muttered. She thought of the boy, again; she had only told one other person that story. It was the man she'd met inside Saint Servera the first time she'd been there. She hadn't remembered it before, but ever since she met Hyun-ki she'd been having the worst nightmares. She'd wake up screaming, the cats yowling in the strange midnight-green of her room, and things that she'd once forgotten were suddenly dancing around her head like fey. The nightmares were mostly colors: strong red, metallic orange, and a dripping, sticky black. It was a man smiling at her out of the colors, and taking her hand, and leading her into a part of the city where the lamplights fluttered with batwings and the moon was hung in every shop-window. He took her to a cafe and bought her a hot cinnamon tea; he leaned his chin on his hands and smiled at her. She told him, in her little girl way, some of the grand things of her past: the way her grandmother was trying to rip the Second Seoul out of her head, the way she could make boys follow her and worship her, the first boy who'd abandoned her because of the sick things that were wrong with her.