But there’s nothing. It doesn't even occur to her to check the messages for a while. She sees the "i miss you" texts from her ex, a text about borrowing some shoes from her sister amid unsolicited advice from her brother Brooklyn, and cute pics of her niece from her brother Danny. And it’s a total accident and total boredom that she goes all the way down in her text folder. Granted she’s had this dusty phone since 2011 and some weird number comes up. Not the first one she sees in her folder because spam texts are a thing but this one is in Korean and she’s confused at the preview lines. She has Korean friends but they never texted her in Korean not even by mistake. But it’s just messages and messages paragraphs and simple lines that date back for what feels like forever. There are so many texts Juno gets tired trying to scroll up to see the beginning of them. And all this time she’s staring at these words that she can't read and it’s out of frustration but she feels her eyes get wet with tears the harder she tries to understand, grappling with what she feels she does but doesn’t understand and its a feeling like an itch in the throat and it bothers her for days, weeks, months.

When she dreams about the island again with it’s violent waves and the grit of heat in her throat become the screams of her night terrors--"reading" the text messages becomes her crutch. She stares at her phone in the dark until she falls asleep, dreamless. Juno enters the texts in Google translate but the words are jumbled each and every time. The syntax and structure are botched when translated into English. She hates it and hates that she needs it.

Her friend Kirsten is the one to decode the messages. Junot gets by the side eyeing questions explaining it was a wrong number that texted her nothing more. They sit in the quad with the sun setting in their apartment complex sharing a to go box from Nandos, with seasoned salt still on their fingers.

"Girl..."

"What?"

"Girl."

They look at each other with swollen smiley cheeks, they laugh and laugh and laugh till they don't.

Kirsten says: “I can barely read this because I mean this is real, REAL ass Korean but, its something romantic. I like this one part  though, It says; "

You’re special to me. And I know that’s hard to hear after everything we’ve been through but believe me I trust you, completely. You are sunshine in my dark, dark fucking life."

The rest was getting hard to read for Kirsten. Korean-American or not formal language makes you feel like an illiterate bitch sometimes. She gave Junot something to laugh about though...

"He keeps making a Star Wars reference though. I don’t know why."

"Which character?"

"Obi Won Kenobi."

A couple weeks pass. The old phone is next to her night stand begging to be charged as it sits at 2%. Another night where she can't sleep she holds it to her face, turning to her side, pillow between her thighs white light escaping between her hands.  

It's dumb and weird? But after a long winded debate in her mind fully knowing her phone is deactivated that this phone is merely a technological fossil she presses on the narrow text box and writes; Hi.

Send.

The phone lands on its face back on the night stand.

It vibrates.

Connection Lost. This phone is no longer in service please connect with your Wireless Network or....

Junot puts the phone away in the drawer of her nightstand, she puts away her faulty naive hope that has been emitting from her body like a disease. If she’s looking for answers that could make sense of the past five years, the years of nothingness the years where her mind cannot fathom to find in her memories--it wouldn’t be on this phone.

It’s quite in her room, she almost falls asleep.

The phone vibrates again.