01.31.17
a whole year ago, we were tentatively, reluctantly, fearfully entering a relationship we hadn’t expected, haunted by our past experiences and worried about our future ones. still, despite how fast things were moving, there was something safe and warm about leaning on you. it wasn’t a fleeting kind of safety and warmth that dissipated into nothing in the span of just a few months. you became my everything.
you are my everything.
even a year later.
but hey, guess what? we’re old now. we’re one of the old couples we’ve always admired throughout our relationship. we made it to one year. #survivedoneyear #imaSURVIVOR ( i remember you telling me to make that my status after our first month. oops, but here it is in letter form eleven months later. )
in a episode of grey’s anatomy, the cameraman is filming mark at a wedding ( you know whose; they’re the only couple i actively supported— aside from mark and his girl ) and he tells the couple that he’d once been to a wedding where they had each couple get up and slow dance on the dance floor. after some time, they’d ask everyone who’d been together for less than a year to sit, then two years, then five, then ten— all the way until sixty, where just one couple was left. he said they’d be that couple.
i say we’ll be that couple.
….so i guess you’re stuck with me for 59 more years. i wonder what you’ll look like when you’re 84– you’ll be a real grandma then, pfft.
i’ll be waiting on that ring, lee sunmi. hehe.
you are my once in a lifetime. my only one.
i love you.
The recent days have begun to blend into one long endless line of negotiations, technical terms, theoretical discussions and uncertainties—tiring at best, and numbing at worst. Sunmi finds herself grasping for rest, but only catching it in fleeting moments—when she wakes up restlessly to glimpse Tiffany beside her, or on a rare lazy morning when they curl up together with mugs of soup. The rest is so difficult that she finds herself almost relieved when she has to fly off to Paris for her magazine shoot.
The day after she arrives home in Seoul, she wakes up disoriented, having no recollection of falling asleep in the first place. She blinks. The bedroom curtains filter through sunlight that would otherwise be blindingly bright—it must be close to midday. Tiffany’s absence confirms her suspicions about how late it must be. Something—she doesn’t know what—feels off. Sunmi blinks up at the ceiling slowly, her hand smoothing over the soft ridges and wrinkles of the sheets beside her—until it hits something that feels a whole lot like paper. She rolls over in momentary confusion and then it dawns on her: the thirty-first—their one year anniversary. And she lets out the loudest, longest, most disappointed groan she’s ever heard from herself as the haze of last night’s thoughts comes flooding back to her. Somewhere between stumbling through the apartment door and stumbling into the shower, she’d reminded herself to stay up til midnight—but clearly she’d failed, and Tiffany most likely hadn’t the heart to wake her from a rare night of deep sleep.
