the boys are usually friends’ friends but sometimes just beautiful strangers. you’re not sure because you are always plunged into the middle of their total infatuation with you. often, you meet with them in hip new downtown restaurants with purple lights swaying over your food; other times, it’s at cafés and they notice how beautifully the sunlight tints you in the window seat. of course you can’t ascribe faces to them, though. each scenario falls into the same little room with a blaring screen, and you can’t tell if it’s just you and a boy or a party of seventeen because when you try to count the bodies here, they all collapse into one lovable chunk of a mirage. when these boys profess their destined love for you, you laugh for seven minutes.
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in the real life you are waiting for the summer, as if it has ever loved you. before there even is a packing list, before you can unpack how cruel the season has consistently been, you decide that this summer, you simply must be loved. by cities and by their buses and their people and their suns and everything, really, everything that cannot matter enough to tumble into the fall semester. it will be okay to be loved so much that it doesn’t matter this year. the rising heat will not be able to hurt you, not when you are seeking it out.
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the disco ball stalls when you walk into the karaoke booth. it then blinks, and yet again as if desperately warding off dizziness. you don’t know why you trust the night filling this room, but this is a recurring sleep-thought — which is not a dream because it takes place in the process of falling asleep — and not a forum of discussion, so you never discuss politics with these faceless boys who are willing to tuck your chin back up whenever it falls. maybe you are in a long process of carving out all the parts of you that knows disappointment. what will be left of you when you are done? how old will you be? it doesn’t matter. the best part of all this is that you can always grab the mic, scream or whisper i’m eighteen and i want to murder the concept of love!, watch the sound echo until it hides under the seats or makes you cry, and still nobody will tell you to shut the fuck up.
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while the summer is still a mirage, rehearsal is key. say it in the mirror and observe the mechanics of your jaw: i think i’m just shit at dating and should never do it again, sorry. sometimes you wonder what the hell you’re doing as you roll this sentence across your mouth again, again as if you don’t break every rule you set for yourself. stop cursing. stop making uncomfortable self-deprecating jokes. drink more water. pay more attention to everybody else’s lives. buy birthday presents early. eat less processed flour and sugar. if the occasion arises, you will simply come up with new rules: stop wondering if you’ll be dumped tomorrow. stop drowning in misery every time you remember he’s not talking to you right now. climb out. get out if you are not happy. communicate without feeling like a burden. don’t let joy so aggressively override your constants. and stop being so clingy.
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you, collapsed across the sticky faux leather seats like a tossed winter jacket, suddenly stand up and snatch the karaoke remote control. the happy girl in the speakers announces, ninety eight! you should be a singer! for the previous person who sang a love ballad. a boy hands you a mic and asks if he can sing the next song with you, but you’ve already reserved on the karaoke machine a medley of breakup songs across all the genres you can remember. why do you want to be so cruel? you want to know, too, you really do, but these songs are all that you know by heart. i want to take more and give less, you say, i want to know more and hug less.* you sing the only things that make sense to you all without missing a single beat and get a eighty-five on each one of them.
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there was a summer you were convinced of bloodshed and decided you must sew back your world but pricked your finger in the process, fulfilling your gory prophecy. no, there was no blood. you didn’t even cry that year. this is all just to say you fucked up. you wasted the spring in anticipation for yet another summer of unloving, as in the revoking of love. perhaps you misloved, as in wrongly loved, when you decided to climb into a passing cloud to avoid the summer, not knowing you would still have to rain down to earth. you knew you fucked up. by mid-july you were parachuted back in front of the boy, boy with a face you memorized and hands that knew where to unearth you from mud, and you wanted to mend everything. pretend it had been so sunny out all summer, all year. dry you both off by sheer willpower. but you were already a mere product of a storm. when he dumped you the only thing you could think was shit, i should have said it first.
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until you fall asleep, the rulebook is yours. when a boy mutters something about perfection while burying into your shoulder and you tread your fingers along his scalp, holding your breath out of habit, you think of this: the master document that everybody has read except for you. outlines on how often teenagers have dates and where and for how long, what the acceptable displays of affection are and when it’s okay to triple text demanding some, etc. & co.. you’re going to find the page of the rulebook that says you can’t say you sort of want to get married just to know that somebody likes you enough to want to get married and/or have the security of a forever, and rip it out. that’s not how marriage works and people get divorced, you’re told, and you’re aware, but who cares? this is your world and you are loved and you will live here forever. here, where every word rings, and people keep kissing in the 90s music video playing abright on the karaoke machine’s screen, and the disco ball insists on happiness, you don’t have to worry about doing shit right because everything you do is right. if only you would fall a little more asleep, just enough to ward off the real world and its reminders that you won’t find the damn book.
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you don’t wonder anymore what could have happened if the past spring had been nicer to you. whether — if that summer you had already forgotten the last one, or the one before — you would have let the clouds pass lightly, or the rain be a simple delight. if you could have just sat there and tolerated being loved. you finally wonder if you are growing out of childhood, because you might no longer believe that there are people that you would have loved forever if you had the permission to. this summer you think you will scream if anybody tries to matter to you.
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sometimes they bleed into your dreams and you lose control. they sprout hands with autonomy and then it is all broken, their safe charming allure all washed away by something so simple as the tangibility of a man. it’s worse, though, when they ask you questions. they ask hard questions like how are you and what are you studying while your poor little brain gets ready to furiously compute the flutters in each of your answers. you know sometimes you curse too much or trip across your words and plunge them into other people’s drinks or unflatteringly declare you are sadder than you really are or forget to say sorry and/or congratulations and you know that sometimes everything is wrong, except you won't realize until you’ve said it all. you’re a firm believer in only keeping those who love you as a whole, but you’re not even sure how far your self extends. you’d rather be asked why you didn’t cry after your last breakup or how you chewed the same thoughts over and over again without being able to spit them out until they ground themselves into your jaw. this is a dream, though, with its own agenda, and it won’t move forth till you answer. you can’t, though. so the karaoke folds out into an unending interrogation room; you’re stuck in a cruel loop. how are you? how are you? how are you?
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you’re not sure how this story ends because you always fall all the way asleep and can’t remember beyond vignettes. maybe the enamored boys talk about their feelings and anxieties and become real people who share and work hard to love you, but it’s more likely that you always forget to draft their personalities beyond ‘cool’ or ‘perfect’ or ‘every good part of everybody’ so they do nothing but love you and love you and love you. you’re not sure what the best case scenario is. maybe you just have to leave the damn karaoke. that’ll release you from faceless boy purgatory. get up. it is still winter and summer is so far away, the typhoon season’s grasp on you so faint. go grab a taxi. say hi to the dozing street cat on the way out. you will count all the ways you were loved when you cross the bridge, watching the sky shiver open over the river. hoping that maybe next time, then, you really won’t fuck up.
* Lyrics from “Nabi” by BIBI.
Youngseo Lee is eighteen, taking a gap year, and just vibing. She is newly based in Virginia, though she is from Seoul and Arizona. A 2020 National YoungArts Finalist in Creative Nonfiction and cat lady with no cats of her own, she is the founding editor-in-chief of Pollux Journal, a literary magazine dedicated to multilinguality. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Entropy, Gone Lawn, Peach Mag, and more that you can find on youngseolee.carrd.co. Twitter: @youthsaint_.
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