emotions, at times, felt like a language completely full of loan words that no matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t decipher. the words were familiar, or ones understood on their own, yet when put together, were gibberish. put through a translator, what came out was anger, near every time. not right, but not entirely wrong.
hard to come by, too, emotions were for andy. despite the frequency of their anger, andy’s usual emotional state was nothing, a numbness that required being beaten into in order to change into any state that wasn’t anger. there was a distinct difference between the anger that resided a singular skin layers’s depth down, ready to pop out at minor annoyances, and the anger that layered on top of layers as hwan had spoken. complex, undecipherable, a language of loan words.
they’d taken to pacing, walking back and forth in this too fucking tiny space. why the fuck was this table so massive? they’d banged their feet into the stupidly massive legs multiple times already, yet couldn’t be fucked to give a single shit. barely registered. andy wasn’t sure they’d register much in this state. maybe if they broke a rib.
why them? why them? andy looked down as they forced themselves to take a breath, one that came out in a punch of air. they were shaking, the entirety of their arms at least. a stop, said shaking hands rose, heels of them pressed over andy’s aching forehead. they wanted to pummel that bitch, the fucking nasty whore that thought fucking around with their relationship was fine. a hand swung out, knocked a chair backwards. it didn’t fall completely, caught by the walls that housed it, which was only all the more aggravating. they tried again, pushed sideways, as it got caught on other chair legs. a third time, it fell with a final thud. andy kicked underneath the seat, and in a whoosh of air turned back to hwan. their hands slammed upon the wood of the table, chill not cold enough to counteract the heat emanating off of them. fingers scraped back, bent with a strain. reddened, it should hurt, too. should.
andy’s voice bellowed despite the small space between them, “if you don’t know why you’d do something, don’t do it in the fucking first place! i don’t care how fucking sorry you are! you think that fixes it? i’ll go yeah, thanks babe, let’s do this again next week!”
joohwan was no stranger to trauma. much like everybody else, she carried her own around, buried deep, unwilling to stare at it straight unless her therapist forced her to do so. joohwan didn’t like it, the process of reliving whatever had caused her to be like this, even if she was able to acknowledge why it was necessary, why she had to go through it. for some unfathomable reason, joohwan still clung to the ideal of becoming better. a better person, a better sister, a better dancer and performer, a better grandkid, a better— a better girlfriend. and there was no way for her to do that if she refused to work around the good and the bad that had both shaped her to the person she had become.
already, she felt her trauma making itself known, felt the racing of her heart, her breathing that increased the more and more andy paced. she knew what was going to happen from here — joohwan didn’t recall the last time she saw andy this angry, at least not in a situation where she wasn’t angry as well. usually they fed off each other, their emotions matching, the volume of their voices matching. it happened more often when they were younger, when neither of them had the softened edges they do nowadays, for each other at least, when the only thing both of them knew how to do when faced with feelings too strong to handle was to lash out. she knew what would come next. and as much as joohwan knew it was her fault, she couldn’t help but being terrified of it.
not of andy, no. she flinched, as they threw the chair down, as they kicked and slammed their hands on the table, but hwan knew better than to assume andy would ever hurt her. no, andy’s anger was a familiar beast, one hwan didn’t dare believe would ever bare its sharp claws at her. she was terrified because she knew andy was going to leave. she knew, deep down, that there was no scenario in which andy did not leave. no matter what she said, no matter what excuses she gave, joohwan knew.
her automatic reaction was to want to keep her gaze down, to evade their eyes, but she thought they deserved better than that. so hwan held their glare, even as the fury contained within sent a shiver down her spine. “i don’t— i don’t expect an apology to fix it,” she whispered, clutching her hands in her lap, teeth worrying at her bottom lip. “it doesn’t mean i’m not sorry. i can’t change what happened but it doesn’t mean i cannot regret it. you deserve better, but what i can give you is an apology. even though i don’t expect you to take it.”
“but i don’t—,” she cut herself off, faltering, staring down at the table. god, she loved that table so much, she didn’t want to sell it. “i don’t know what else to do.”