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The thing about Yu Jimin is that Minjeong has never known a world without her.
This is not a metaphor. In a literal sense, it has become the geography of her life. Jimin's family on the fourth floor, Minjeong's family on the third in the same apartment complex in Mapo-gu since before either of them could read. They always rode the same elevator, heard each other through the ceiling and the floor—Jimin's mother's piano practice on Sunday mornings, and the particular creak of the fourth-floor hallway under feet Minjeong learned to recognize before she learned to ride a bike. They were brought to the same church before they had opinions about it, dressed in the same white lace on their baptism days in photographs their mothers keep side by side on the same kind of shelf.
Myeongdong Cathedral. The first time was when they were three years old. Minjeong does not remember this but her mother has described it enough times that the description has become a memory. The smell of incense, and the stones surrounding the church. Jimin sitting beside her in the pew and reaching over, without ceremony, and taking her hand.
She held your hand the whole mass, her mother says one day, reminiscing. She wouldn't let go.
Minjeong has thought about this more than is probably strictly healthy.
They grew up understanding that faith was the water they lived in, the medium through which everything else moved. The church calendar was their calendar. Lent was the long grey waiting before Easter exploded into white lilies. Christmas Eve mass was the year's most beautiful night, the cathedral lit from inside so that even from the street it looked like it was made of light. They served together as altar servers at twelve, white over navy, learning the choreography of the mass—when to ring the bells, when to bring the water and wine, when to hold the paten beneath the communion line, all those small crucial roles that keep the sacred from falling to the ground.
Jimin took it seriously with her whole self, without reservation. She read ahead in the training manual. Had practiced the movements in Minjeong's living room, narrating aloud—now the preparation of the gifts, now we bring the cruets—and Minjeong watched her and repeated her motions a beat behind, less because she needed to practice and more because watching Jimin do anything with that degree of total absorption was its own kind of instruction, its own kind of compelling.
Do you actually love it? Minjeong asked her once. They were eleven then, sitting on the rooftop of their building on a summer evening, the Seoul skyline going gold behind them, the faint sound of the evening Angelus from somewhere they couldn't see. Or do you do it because we're supposed to?
Jimin had looked at her with something that was almost offended. I love it, she said with certainty. Don't you feel it? When the mass is happening and you're inside it, don't you feel like something is holding you?
Minjeong had looked at the skyline and thought about this honestly. Sometimes, she said.
Jimin had nodded then, looking satisfied with her answer, like sometimes was enough. Like she trusted that the rest would come.
It did come. It just didn't come the way either of them expected.
The alarm goes off at six-fifteen and Minjeong lies still for eleven seconds.
She counts them, like always. Eleven seconds of existing before the world reassembles—the uniform on the back of the door, the small wooden cross above it her mother placed there when they moved in, the particular quality of January Seoul light through curtains that give everything a pale, thin-blooded look, like the cold has leached the color out of the morning and what's left is just the architecture of a day. She sits up. She is Kim Minjeong: sixteen, Catholic, student of Gyeseong Girls' High School in Seodaemun-gu, and none of the things she is in dreams.
Her hair—long, very black, the kind of black that has blue in it in certain lights—falls around her shoulders when she sits up, and she pushes it back and reaches for her uniform on autopilot. The blouse is white. The skirt falls two inches below the knee. She buttons the blouse from the bottom up, the way she always does, and stops one button short of the top because she always stops one button short of the top and has done so every morning for two years and will continue to do so because the tightness of a fully buttoned collar feels suffocating and she would rather take the lecture from Sister and the correction from Jimin than spend seven hours feeling like she is being held by the throat.
She eats standing up and burns the roof of her mouth. She does not learn from it.
On the bus she watches Seoul go by through the window. The city wakes up in layers; the vendors and the schoolchildren and the delivery trucks and the cold white breath of people walking fast, all of it happening in the same frame. She puts in one earbud, left side only, and plays nothing. Just a permission not to be spoken to.
Gyeseong Girls' High School is a forty-minute bus ride from her apartment and it’s a Catholic School in its bones. The building was established in 1963 by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart and it shows that establishment in every corridor with the cross above every classroom door, the small grotto of the Virgin Mary in the courtyard, the chapel at the center of the east wing whose carved doors are always slightly open, always leaking incense into the hallway. Minjeong just got used to it somehow.
The school day begins and ends with prayer. The calendar observes the liturgical seasons—purple banners in Lent, white in Easter, the particular anticipatory blue of Advent. The girls who attend here are not all devout but they are all, to some degree, shaped by it, just like anything is shaped by the water it grows up in.
Minjeong arrives at eight-o-seven, which is technically on time, which she considers a personal achievement.
She’s at her locker when she hears it, that specific alteration of the air in the corridor, how it shifts and reorganizes the way it always does when—
"Minjeong-ah."
Yu Jimin at seventeen is the kind of student a school like this produces at its best and most earnest: immaculate in uniform, first in her year, the girl Sister Hyun-ja references when she speaks about the integration of faith and academic life as though they are not in competition. She’s taller than Minjeong by enough inches to tower over her. Her hair is long and black like Minjeong's but thicker. Today, it is styled in its daily low knot, pinned at the nape of her neck with the same clips her mother arranges each morning, a ritual that has not changed since middle school.
Around her throat, on a fine silver chain is a rosary. Small silver beads, a crucifix that rests in the hollow of her collarbone. Minjeong has looked at it more times than she will ever quantify, mostly because it catches light in the chapel like a constant reminder. Of what? Minjeong isn’t so sure yet.
On Jimin’s right hand, on her third finger is a rosary ring, silver, which she touches without thinking. She finds the girl caressing it during exams. Mostly during mass. Or when she’s anxious. It acts like her anchor, Minjeong thinks.
She notices the girl carrying too many things, which is also a constant. She has her bag open, planner under one arm. Inside the cloth lunch bag embroidered with a small cross, are two portions of meal. It has always contained two portions. This has never been discussed.
She looks at Minjeong's collar first, before she looks at her face. This is also a constant.
"Minjeong-ah," she says, and sets her bag down, and her hands come up to Minjeong's collar, a gesture so habituated it has become its own kind of speech. She finds the undone button which she always finds immediately, and does it up, her fingers warm against the base of Minjeong's throat, straightening the fabric after with both thumbs pressed flat, smoothing it down.
She is close. Close enough that Minjeong can smell her—something clean and faintly fruity and floral, the specific warmth of her, and underneath it, always, the lingering ghost of the incense from the morning chapel visit she takes before school that Minjeong has never asked about and Jimin has never mentioned. She just arrives already having been somewhere sacred, carrying it with her, in her hair and her sleeves.
"Sister will say something," Jimin says. Still looking at the collar, brows slightly furrowed.
"Sister always says something," Minjeong says.
"She says something because of you." Jimin steps back. Looks at her face now—the brief appraisal of someone checking their work, which is also somehow the thing that makes the back of Minjeong's neck warm. Then she opens the cloth bag and produces the banana milk, and holds it out.
Minjeong takes it, holding it with both hands.
"You really don't have to—"
"I know," Jimin says, and picks her bag back up, and begins walking.
Minjeong follows as she always does. They move through the filling corridor toward the staircase and Jimin talks—telling Minjeong about something she read this morning in her devotional, a passage about the quality of attention, about how what we choose to pay attention to is itself a form of prayer, what you look at closely you are also loving, in some way, there is a theologian who argues this, I'll send you the passage—and Minjeong is listening. She can’t help but listen. And then, when they made it at the bottom of the staircase, Jimin's hand finds her waist.
The corridor narrows slightly at the foot of the stairs and Jimin steers them both through the crowd with one hand, her palm resting at the curve of Minjeong's waist, fingers barely there, guiding. She does not think about it. Minjeong knows this because if she thought about it, she would stop. And she never stops.
Minjeong shrinks, slightly, into the touch. An involuntary thing like a plant leaning toward warmth.
She has prayed about this. She has knelt in the school chapel and in the Mapo parish church and once, desperately, in the bathroom of the apartment building between floors three and four, and she has asked God to take it away—not the friendship, never the friendship, just the unbearable surplus of it, just this extra thing she carries that was never asked for and cannot be returned. She has asked politely and then she has asked without politeness and then she has stopped asking and started bargaining and then she has simply knelt in silence and let the silence be the prayer, and every time she rises from the silence the feeling is still there, unchanged, patient as the stone face of Christ in the chapel, as though it has been waiting for her to finish and will still be waiting when she's done.
What you look at closely you are also loving, Jimin is saying, beside her on the staircase.
Minjeong looks straight ahead and says, carefully, "That's a dangerous argument."
Jimin glances at her. "Why?"
Because I have looked at you closely every day for as long as I can remember, and I don't know how to stop, Minjeong thinks, but she does not say it. She settles with, "Theologically," Minjeong says. "It makes every act of attention devotional. That's a lot of accidental worship."
Jimin laughs, that sudden laugh where she always covers her mouth with her hand, and says, "Maybe that's the point," and her hand at Minjeong's waist shifts slightly with the movement of her laughing, just the small adjustment of it, and Minjeong absorbs this just fine, like a person learning to contain her own weather.
Maybe that's the point, she thinks, climbing the last stair.
Yeah, she thinks. I know.
During lunch, they have a routine that has occurred every school day for two years.
They eat on the bench near the east wing garden when the weather allows, which in January it barely does, but they go anyway. Minjeong does because Jimin goes. Jimin does because the stone in the garden is where she thinks best, she has said this once and Minjeong has not forgotten it. They have sat close since the pews at Myeongdong Cathedral before they could read, since every in-between space that has required them to navigate proximity. The cold comes up through the stone. Jimin opens the cloth lunch bag and distributes its contents.
Today it is triangle kimbap and two small mandarins and a separate container of leftover miyeok-guk that is still warm from the insulated pouch Jimin transferred it into at six in the morning. There is a folded note under the mandarin that Minjeong doesn't open in front of her. She never opens them in front of her because they are too much so she tucks it into her blazer pocket for later.
"You made food this morning?" Minjeong says, meaning the soup.
"My mom did. I told her you've been looking thin." Jimin says this with a matter-of-factness.
Minjeong can’t disagree because it’s true, so she just wraps both hands around the warm container and does not say anything for a moment. The cold is serious now, the January garden stripped back, the stone saint standing in it with her hands still lifted toward the thing she heard and Minjeong has always found this somehow comforting. A proof that beautiful things are always still arriving.
"Your mom didn't have to—"
"She wanted to." Jimin peels her mandarin with focused attention. "She worries about you when your mother's on late shifts."
And this—this is the thing. Not just Jimin. Jimin's mother. The whole bedrock of care that has grown up around Minjeong without her asking for it, the fourth floor extending itself down to the third floor, the soup and the packed lunches and the banana milk and the note she hasn't opened yet but knows will say something small and practical that will sit in her chest like a coal all afternoon. She is not an orphan. Far from it. Nor is she bereft. She just has Jimin, and Jimin's mother, and a warmth that comes from the floor above and she has never been able to look at it directly because looking at it directly means acknowledging what she has done with it, where it has gone in her, what kind of soil it found.
It is a dangerous territory to think about.
"Tell her I said thank you," Minjeong says, into the container of miyeok-guk.
"Tell her yourself," Jimin says. "She said to come for dinner Friday if you're not busy." She pauses. "She's making galbitang."
Minjeong looks at her.
Jimin is eating her kimbap and looking at the stone saint and the corner of her mouth is doing the thing it does when she’s trying not to look pleased with herself, which means only one thing. She told her mother to make galbitang, and planned all this. This was arranged in advance, and Minjeong is not supposed to know that, or at least she is not supposed to say it.
"Okay," Minjeong says.
"Okay," Jimin says, and eats her kimbap.
The cold moves through the garden and the winter light is the color of diluted gold and Minjeong watches the steam rise from her soup container and lets the silence be.
Three weeks later, February came. The cold is still biting, wrapping its chilly arms around one’s shoulder when Jimin says his name.
They're in the canteen this time, the garden too cold even for them, sitting across from each other at the corner table they have claimed by habit, the one nearest the window that looks out on the school's side street, where you can watch the bakery truck make its delivery in the morning and the neighbourhood harabeoji walk his dog at noon. Minjeong’s failing to do her physics worksheet while Jimin has finished hers and is now doing something in her journal that she angles slightly away, a private practice that Minjeong has learned not to ask about, the same way she has learned not to ask about the morning chapel visits, the things Jimin keeps in the parts of herself she tends alone.
"Can I ask you something?" Jimin says, not looking up from her journal.
"You're going to whether I say yes or not," Minjeong says.
Jimin's mouth does the thing. She closes the journal. Folds her hands on top of it, an unconscious gesture. "I joined the retreat planning committee," she says. "For the junior spiritual retreat in March. Lee Jaewook is the representative from the boys' school co-organizing it."
Then, Minjeong finds herself writing something on her physics worksheet that is not at all, an answer to any questions presented in the paper.
"He's very—" Jimin stops, touching the rosary ring on her third finger. "He led the opening prayer at the first meeting," she says. "He has a kind of—I don't know. A seriousness about his faith that is—" She stops again.
"That is," Minjeong says, very neutral.
Jimin looks at her. There is something in her expression that is searching, that is almost asking permission, or asking for something Minjeong cannot provide and they both know she cannot provide and neither of them names. "He asked if I'd want to work on the liturgy planning together," she says, finally. "Just the two of us, probably, after school on Thursdays."
"Lee Jaewook," Minjeong says.
"Lee Jaewook," Jimin confirms. She’s watching Minjeong's face, her dark eyes searching.
Minjeong's pen remains very still on the worksheet. Under the table her free hand is pressed flat against her thigh, putting pressure. A habit she’s learnt to give herself something to push against so that the pressure inside her has somewhere to go. She thinks about Lee Jaewook, who she does not know, who has a face she has not seen, who has a seriousness about his faith, who prayed in a voice Jimin has apparently already catalogued. She thinks about Thursday evenings. She thinks about the retreat in March and all the Thursdays between now and March and how easily the world arranges itself around the things it permits.
"That sounds good," she says in a clean and smooth voice. She has always been good at clean voices, at presenting the surface of a thing while the interior does what it has to do unobserved. "You're good at liturgy planning."
"I don't know if anything will—it's just working on the retreat," Jimin says.
"I know," Minjeong says. "It sounds good, unnie."
Jimin looks at her for a moment longer than necessary. The light through the canteen window sits between them on the table, and in it Minjeong can see the small crease between Jimin's brows.
Then she opens her journal again. "Eat your kimbap," she says. "You've barely touched it."
Minjeong eats her kimbap.
She does not read the note from her pocket until she is in the bathroom at the end of the day, alone, the corridor empty, the sound of late-leaving students distant. It says, you always look cold and you’re getting thinner. I packed extra. don't skip breakfast tomorrow, Minjeong-ah. Jimin's small neat handwriting. The descending loop of her 아.
Minjeong folds it back up along its original crease. Puts it in the pocket of her blazer with the others. There are four now, she has not thrown any of them away. She then looks at herself in the mirror above the sink. Her collar is buttoned correctly. She buttoned it herself, at her locker, before Jimin could. A preemptive act. Against what, she isn't sure.
Against wanting—the gears starts to turn in her mind, but then doesn't let herself finish the thought, and instead turns the tap on cold and holds her wrists under it until the heat in her chest resembles something manageable.
Above her, in the indifferent fluorescent light of the school bathroom, God observes. He always observes. He has been observing since a pew at Myeongdong Cathedral, since a three-year-old hand that reached over and held on and would not let go, since every morning of every year between then and now, and He keeps all of it with patience that has nowhere else to be, that will still be here when she is ready to look at what she's holding.
She is not ready.
She turns off the tap.
She goes home.
Wednesday is mass day.
The whole of Gyeseong processes to the chapel at one-fifteen, section by section, white uniforms filing into the old wooden pews with the shuffling particular reverence of girls who have been doing this long enough that the reverence is now structural, held in the body without being thought about. The chapel was built in 1970 and it smells like it has been burning candles for fifty years. The ceiling is high and vaulted, the wood dark and honest, the windows narrow and fitted with deep amber and blue glass so that on clear afternoons the light through them is slow and thick and the color of something you pray by. At the front: the altar, white-draped. Above it: the crucifix, carved dark wood, the figure on it cast in the specific Korean traditional rendering that one of Minjeong's teachers once pointed out—less anguished than the European style, more sorrowful, more patient, as though suffering is not a crisis but a condition being borne with full knowledge of what comes after.
Minjeong has looked at that face for two years. She recognizes it.
Jimin takes the third pew from the front, left side. She explained this once, in first year, pressing two fingers to her sternum: closer to the altar, you feel it more here. Minjeong had said she understood though she had not entirely understood. She only followed her into the pew and has been following her there every Wednesday since, because she follows Jimin the way water follows the path carved for it as the shape of the ground makes following the only available direction.
They sit. The organ begins, filling the ceiling and coming back down changed. The chapel fills around them. Minjeong settles her hands in her lap and looks at the altar and does not look at Jimin, which is itself a discipline, which takes the same quality of effort that prayer used to take before prayer became less about God and more about negotiating with the specific category of feeling that comes up every Wednesday, every mass, every third pew from the front.
Jimin has already gone still.
This is the thing Minjeong knows and cannot explain to anyone. Jimin's stillness in the chapel is different from all her other stillnesses. She is still in classrooms, in the canteen when she is working. Even on the garden bench in the cold. But in the chapel, it is quite different. She stills like a candle that has found the room it was made to burn in. Her hands are loose in her lap. Her chin level. The rosary beads at her throat catching the light in small slow intervals as she breathes.
Minjeong knows this by peripheral vision because looking at it directly is not something she can do for long.
She tries to look at the altar instead. At the patient face.
You’ve seen it, she thinks. Statement. The beginning, always, of a conversation she starts and cannot finish.
Father Cho arrives from the sacristy and the congregation rises. The ordinary mathematics of bodies in a pew: they stand and the space between them becomes less space, shoulder to shoulder, Jimin's arm against Minjeong's arm, Jimin's warmth arriving through white uniform fabric in the specific way it always arrives, and Minjeong accepts it with the stillness she has learned to keep.
She does not move away.
And Jimin does not either.
They stand like this for the entirety of the opening rites, side by side, and the organ plays, and the incense drifts from somewhere near the altar, and Minjeong keeps her eyes forward and her hands folded and says the responses she has known since before she was old enough to know why they were said, and she means them, she does mean them, she has never been hollow in this chapel—she comes here and something in her genuinely reaches, she just has not been certain for some time now what it is reaching for, and the uncertainty has become so familiar that she has stopped expecting to resolve it and started simply living inside it, the way you live inside a weather that is not going to change.
Father Cho's homily is about the body. About the incarnation—the specific theological scandal of it, God choosing to enter the world in a body, in skin and breath and the daily indignities and glories of physical existence, not as a concession but as the whole point, as the primary act of saying: this matters, the physical world matters, what you do in and with your body matters, it is not incidental to the soul but its partner. He is quoting Teilhard de Chardin: we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.
Beside Minjeong, Jimin makes a sound almost below hearing. A small compressed exhale.
Minjeong's eyes move sideways without her permission.
Jimin's jaw is set like that means she is receiving something. Like a vision becoming clear to her or finishing its process of becoming clear, and her face in this moment is the most itself it ever is—undressed of the personas she had embodied. She is just Jimin, here, just a person being reached into by something larger than her, letting her body accept it. The rosary ring catches light on her finger while the silver crucifix at her throat holds still against her breath.
Minjeong looks away.
She looks at the carved face on the cross, the patient sorrowful eyes, and she thinks: I know. I know You see it. I know what the accounting of this looks like. I have tried to pray it away and it does not go away, and I have stopped trying to pray it away because the praying felt like lying, and You see that too, and I am asking You, not for permission, not for an answer—just—I am asking You to be the God who sees the whole thing and not only the worst reading of it.
The incense shifts. The light on the altar moves, the winter sun going slightly behind the clouds and returning.
Spiritual beings having a human experience, Father Cho says.
Minjeong thinks about Jimin's hand at her waist. The warm weight of it because the body knows things.
Yeah, she thinks. I know something about that.
Then, the Sign of Peace.
The chapel moves. Bodies turning to each other, the small holy commerce of it, hands taken and released, small bows, the exchange of something that is almost touch without quite being touch, almost intimacy without quite being intimate, which is to say it is exactly the kind of thing Minjeong should probably not be doing in close proximity to Yu Jimin but which is mandated by the liturgy and therefore unavoidable and therefore, she has decided, not her fault.
She turns to the girl behind her first. Exchanges it. Turns back.
Jimin is already turned toward her.
She doesn't take Minjeong's hand. She takes both of them, the way she has done since their first mass in this pew, both hands held between both of hers, and the warmth of it is always more than the temperature of two hands.
"Peace be with you, Minjeong-ah," she says, in a low, raspy voice. Below the ambient sound of the chapel, in the register of something that is meant for one person only.
She is looking at Minjeong's face. All of it. The full, undivided weight of Jimin's attention, which is not like the weight of anyone else's—it has a quality of recognition in it, of I see you specifically, not just the outline of you nor the version of you that exists in relation to others, but the specific you that lives behind the performance of yourself. A you, beyond any facade she would have ever put on.
The light is moving across her right cheek. The silver rosary is resting in the hollow of her collarbone and it is very still because Jimin is very still. Her lips are parted slightly and she is close—they are always close in this pew, it is a narrow pew—and she is looking at Minjeong similar to how you look at things you are afraid of looking at directly but cannot stop, and Minjeong—
And with your spirit, Minjeong says, and her voice does not waver, she will not let it, she has not let it waver in two years and she will not let it now.
Jimin's hands hold hers—one breath, two—and then the small certain press of them, and then the release.
Minjeong counts.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
She breathes.
Agnus Dei, the congregation says, qui tollis peccata mundi. Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world.
Miserere nobis. Have mercy on us.
The thought comes in the silence before the final blessing, already present and already true and patient enough to wait for her to notice.
I love her.
Not the first time she has thought it. The first time she has not immediately covered it with something else, has not reached immediately for the alternative vocabulary, has not turned it into something smaller and more manageable before it has a chance to be what it is. She lets it sit in her chest in its own shape, large and precise and without a permitted name, and she lets it be true for exactly the length of the Agnus Dei, and then she goes forward for communion with her hands folded and her face arranged and the thing carried carefully somewhere below her sternum, where she has always kept the things she has nowhere else to put.
She kneels.
She tries to pray.
I know You see it, she thinks again, and then she thinks of the times they’ve spent together, just the two of them, laughing without regard in the world, countless summers in that apartment rooftop. And then she goes back to her three-year-old self, reaching out across a pew, holding on and would not let go, and sometimes, she had said, sometimes I feel like something is holding me, and Jimin had said yes, that's it, that's exactly it, and Minjeong had not told her, then or since, that the holding she meant was not always the same holding Jimin meant, that the hands in question had not always belonged to God.
She has not told her.
She is not going to tell her.
And above her, in the amber and the incense and the old vaulted dark, the patient face on the cross holds everything in its gaze—the three-year-old hands, the smiles, the lingering touches, the rosary ring, the buttoned collar, the note in the blazer pocket, Lee Jaewook's name landing in a canteen in February and the quiet small sound of something absorbing a blow, perhaps her heart beating a pounding rhythm on her chest—and says nothing, and keeps it all, and keeps it all, like how He has always kept it. He will keep it long after the chapel is empty and the candles are blown out, and the two girls are gone home to their floors, third and fourth, the building between them less than a ceiling's breadth.
He keeps it.
He has always kept it.
The thing about Jimin is that she watches Minjeong too.
Minjeong doesn't know this. Or, she suspects it, similar to how you suspect things you cannot afford to confirm, or how the periphery of vision catches things you do not turn to verify because verification would require doing something about what you've seen. She suspects it like you suspect weather. By the feeling of it on your skin before you look at the sky.
But she does not look at the sky.
Here is what she does not see: Jimin, in the canteen, putting the cap back on her pen and then not reaching for the next thing she should reach for, just… still, for three seconds, watching Minjeong read. She watched as she slightly hunched over the book, with one leg tucked under her on the canteen bench in defiance of seating norms, hair falling forward and getting in the way and being pushed back impatiently and falling forward again. Jimin watches this and does not look away until Minjeong looks up, and by the time Minjeong looks up Jimin is writing again, pen to page, the smooth resumption of someone who was never looking at anything.
Here is what she does not see: Jimin in the chapel corridor after Wednesday mass, walking behind her. Minjeong's hair is loose today. She took out the elastic after the sign of peace because it was giving her a headache, and she let it down unconsciously. She does not know that Jimin has stopped speaking mid-sentence and is watching how her hair falls, long and very black, down her back, and has said nothing for five seconds that she will later fill with something about the homily.
Here is what she does not see: Jimin, on a Thursday in late February, sitting across from Lee Jaewook in the parish meeting room at the church in Seodaemun-gu, going over the retreat liturgy program, his handwriting neat on the spreadsheet between them. He is sincere, careful, and serious about his faith in ways Jimin recognizes and respects, but still, she’s thinking about Minjeong. Not as a comparison. Not as an either-or. Just… Minjeong being there, in the middle of everything, like how she is always in the middle of everything. Like she has been since she can remember. Even before Jimin had the words middle of everything to put to it.
Lee Jaewook says something. Jimin responds. She is present; she is not rude; she’s genuinely here. She touches the rosary ring on her finger.
She is thinking about Minjeong.
She does not examine why.
What Minjeong does see:
Jimin, on a Wednesday in March, in the third pew from the front, reaching over during the Prayer of the Faithful and adjusting Minjeong's collar. It is done up correctly today, but because the corner of it had folded under itself, a small wrong thing, jimin's hand has found it immediately and corrected it with two fingers before Minjeong has registered the motion and withdrawn before the response is even over. The touch lasting perhaps two seconds. Minjeong sitting very still for the rest of the prayer and being unable to tell, afterward, what the intentions were for.
Jimin, in the school garden in the first week of spring, sitting beside Minjeong on the bench with the lunch between them, leaning forward to brush something off Minjeong's sleeve. A petal, wind-carried from the first cautious blossoms on the tree at the garden wall. Her hand paused there a moment longer than the removal of a petal requires, resting on Minjeong's forearm, and then withdrawing. Jimin looking at the stone saint. Minjeong looking at Jimin looking at the stone saint.
Jimin, on a Friday afternoon, walking with Minjeong through the Seodaemun-gu streets toward the bus stop, their arms linked. They have always linked arms on the walk home since they were old enough to walk home alone, and the evening coming in cold and early like March evenings do, and Jimin pulling them both to a stop outside the tteokbokki cart on the corner and buying two portions without consulting Minjeong about whether she wants any, because Jimin knows she wants some. Jimin knows what Minjeong wants in the same manner she knows the order of her own devotionals, and handing her the stick container with both hands and looking at her with a look that is—well. Something. A look Minjeong has been collecting without intending to, filing carefully in the place she keeps things she does not yet know what to do with, the look that is full and deliberate and that Jimin never holds for more than a moment before she turns it to the street or the sky or the tteokbokki in her own hand.
That look.
That specific, particular look.
Minjeong thinks about it on the bus home. She thinks about it in the elevator, pressing three, watching the numbers change. She thinks about it through the thin ceiling of her apartment in the hour before sleep, and she does not finish the thought. She has learned, by now, that finishing it does not help. The thought is the same every time she finishes it. The ceiling is the same. The floor above it is the same.
She takes the note from her pocket, folding it back along its original crease before putting it with the others.
She does not sleep for a long time.
It’s the last week of March and the retreat is over and Lee Jaewook has texted Jimin twice since. Minjeong knows this because Jimin mentioned it and she watched Minjeong's face then as she spoke. And Minjeong has said all the right things about it. That's good, and he seems like a good person, and you should see where it goes. It’s true and she means it and because there’s just this particular violence in loving someone that involves wanting the actual good of them even when the actual good of them is a thing you cannot give.
They’re on the rooftop of their apartment building in Mapo-gu. This has been a place of theirs since they were children; they came up here to watch the Chuseok moon when they were nine, to lie on the concrete in summer and count the few stars the Seoul light allowed, to sit through the minor crises of adolescence—a failing grade, a falling out, the ordinary small catastrophes of growing up—with the city spread below them as proof that the world was large enough to contain whatever had happened. The rooftop does not fix things. It just makes them proportional.
Tonight Jimin has brought a thermos of yujacha—the smell of it rises in the cold, citrus and honey, the specific comfort of something Jimin's mother makes when the weather turns. She pours it into the thermos cap and hands it to Minjeong without asking, and Minjeong takes it and the warmth of the ceramic against her palms is—there are not words for this either. For the specific feeling of being continuously, reliably, materially cared for by the person whose care you have complicated beyond the ability to receive simply. There is gratitude in it and there is grief in it and there are the four notes in the pocket of Minjeong's blazer inside the apartment downstairs, five now—she has kept them all—and there is everything she has prayed away and everything that did not go away, and here they are.
"Are you cold?" Jimin says.
"No."
"You're always cold. You never wear enough—"
"I'm not cold, unnie."
Jimin looks at her. The city is behind her and below her, the Seoul nightscape, a million lights refusing the dark, and in it Jimin's face has the particular quality it has in the chapel—lit from outside, present to what is in front of her. Her hair is loose tonight, which is unusual. Minjeong had not remarked on it since they came up. Long and black and moving slightly in the rooftop wind.
"Something's wrong," Jimin says.
"Nothing's wrong."
"Minjeong-ah." Her voice, saying her name like that two syllables, the ah at the end like a small reaching, like the hand across the pew, like the note that says eat all of it—does the thing it always does, which is to find the place in Minjeong that is softest and press against it gently, just to confirm it is still there.
It is still there.
"I'm fine," she says, into the yujacha.
Jimin is quiet for a moment. Then she does the thing she sometimes does when words have run out or been declined—she reaches over and tucks a piece of Minjeong's hair back from her face, the fine strand that the wind has moved, her fingers passing over Minjeong's temple and jaw. She does it and withdraws. Wraps both hands around her thermos.
Then looks at the city.
"I've been thinking," she says, "about what it means to love something that—" She stops. Starts again, differently. "About whether love always has to look one particular way. Whether God minds the shape of it."
Minjeong is very still.
"Father Cho said something in November," Jimin continues, carefully, each word chosen, her voice low and level and giving nothing away in its surface. "About the two great commandments. Love God, love your neighbor. And how every other commandment is inside those two. How everything else is in service of those." She pauses. Touches the rosary ring. "I keep thinking about the sequence. Love God first. And then love your neighbor. And how maybe the second one is—how maybe it's supposed to be harder. Because your neighbor is in front of you. And what you feel for your neighbor is—" she stops "—it's in the body. It's a human thing. And the human things are the ones that cost the most."
Minjeong doesn't speak.
The wind moves through the rooftop and between them and the city holds its noise at the distance it always holds.
"I think," Jimin says, quieter now, "that God knows what it costs. I think He counts the cost." A long pause. "I think He sees all of it."
Minjeong looks at her.
Jimin is looking at the city, at the million lights that refuse the dark, at something Minjeong cannot see, or at the inside of herself, which has always been the most honest thing about Jimin—that she contains more than she shows, that what she shows is already more than most people give, and that somewhere below the surface of everything she has said tonight and every night before it there is the full truth of her, which she has tended like a private garden, which she has grown carefully in the part of herself she does not yet have permission to open.
You know, Minjeong thinks. You've known this whole time. You saw me from the third floor and the fourth floor and you have been seeing me in that specific way and you have called it every name but its right name and I love you like the mass loves the same altar every Wednesday, or how the candle loves the space it has been burning in for fifty years, or the same way the stone saint loves the thing she heard, with her hands still lifted, still receiving, even in January, even in the cold.
She says nothing. She drinks the yujacha. The warmth of it moves through her like something she has been given without deserving, just as all warmth from Jimin moves through her.
Then she says, "I think He does too. Count the cost."
Jimin turns to look at her then, doing a full turn and for a moment—just this moment, just these few seconds on a March rooftop in Mapo-gu with the city below them refusing the dark—she does not arrange her face. She does not reach for the careful name, the permitted word, the theology she has built around the perimeter of the thing she will not enter. She just looks at Minjeong, and Minjeong looks back, and the space between them is the full width of everything they have not said, and it is not comfortable, and it is not small, yet it is theirs.
And this is the thing that undoes her.
Minjeong feels herself lean forward.
She leans forward the smallest amount—barely, less than an inch—and she’s looking at Jimin’s mouth and Jimin knows she’s looking too.
But the other girl goes very still.
One second.
Two.
Then Jimin exhales, lifting her hand and pressing it gently to Minjeong’s jaw. She’s not leaning in though, but was merely holding Minjeong that way. Her thumb resting at the corner of Minjeong’s cheekbone, her eyes on Minjeong’s face with the most painful expression Minjeong has ever been looked at with, because it is full, entirely full yet it still meant, I can’t.
Not I don’t.
I can’t.
She holds Minjeong’s face for a moment that has no real duration before lowering her hands slowly, and looks at the city.
The silence after this has been somewhere it cannot name and come back.
Then Jimin says, softly, “Minjeong-ah.”
Just that. Her name. In the manner of her always saying it—the suffix lingering perhaps a tad bit longer than they used to. That is just itself, bare and so vulnerable for one second, before Jimin lets it go.
She pours more yujacha into the cap, then hands it to Minjeong. Her fingers are warm from the thermos and when they brush Minjeong's she does not move them away immediately.
She doesn't move them away at all.
They sit like that—not holding, not quite, just two hands in contact around a thermos cap, the warmth going between them identical to how warmth goes, without direction, without needing to know what it means—until the yujacha goes cold, which takes a long time in March, long enough that the city below them has settled into its late-night register, the loud parts quiet, just the lights now and the sound of a place that goes on living.
And Minjeong doesn’t think anything for a long time.
The warmth is the only thing that is true right now, and she lets it be the only thing. Lets it be enough, because it is what she has been given and it is what there is.
Later in the elevator, pressing three, watching the numbers, the sentence comes. The one she has been circling without knowing its final shape, arriving as the simplest, most tired thing.
God made the water before He made either of us, and we have always been swimming in the same direction.
I knew, even then that we cannot be and that I would always end up here.
And it would still be warm.
Above them and above the city and above the lit cathedrals and the grotto Madonnas and the chapels, the ever-watching silence that has been watching since a pew at Myeongdong Cathedral, keeps its inventory of all of it. The warmth between two hands. The names and words not spoken. The cost of the silence and the love inside it. Every eleven seconds of every morning including every Wednesday of every year. Every note folded into a blazer pocket. Every prayer that was prayed away and rose back up unchanged.
He says nothing.
He has never said anything.
He just keeps it—
and keeps it—
and keeps it.
The elevator reaches the third floor.
Minjeong steps out.
Above her, someone else's door closes.
fin.