I met ___ when the air smelled like water and the sun fell onto the pavement in fat, white–hot rounds in between old ginkgos. There was cigarette smoke and car exhaust in the air, a flower wrapped in plastic in my hand, and cicadas yelling to get laid. Humidity. My hair stuck to the back of my neck and his to his forehead as we waited for the train. He told me—jokingly—that one day he would try to win me over in the wintertime. “It’s when people are the loneliest,” he said. Easier to fall in love, he meant.
“I don’t really get lonely in the winter,” I replied.
“You’ll see,” he told me. “The air smells different.” That was summer.
It’s snowing outside, my first snow in six years. It’s too lean for January snow. Not the kind that sticks, fat and cold, onto ledges and roofs, the hair of a beautiful boy you met in the summertime. I think back to that summer and think of how impermanent everything felt; the both of us, bumping into each other, as the two trains we were, hurtling in opposite directions—me abroad, him to stay—knowing we would turn away, rattling in our tracks and passing and curving away in balmy summer winds. Rattle, rattle.
Love changes; it does not stay. I know this. You are a name, then a face, then an introduction; then an I–thought–of–you–today and an I’ll–take–you–there–someday; and then back to a face, a name, an occasional like on my story. You become the boy who dumped me when I was 16 in true high school fashion—a much–too–green “I love you,” which I didn’t know how to respond to, and then the breakup text, which I didn’t know how to respond to, either—and the girl I wanted so desperately to stay as my best friend at 15 knowing we were becoming two different people.
I know this too; somewhere across the Seoul skyline, there is the Namsan Tower, a pointy little thing stuck between shrubby mountains. Around the tower, there is a big boardwalk, and the walls are laden with locks of every shape and color. Love locks, the kind you go to fasten with your boyfriend, giggling, hoping that you’ll last forever. The walls are dripping with them. Caving in under their weight. I read yesterday there were at least 82 tons’ worth of locks in there, and I also read someone comes to remove them all every few years to stop the walls from falling apart. Then somebody else comes in with their boyfriend and does it all over again. I haven’t gone. I bet the locks talk to each other in the wind, giggling at our childish attempts at permanence. Rattle, rattle.
Winter again. I tell my friends I am writing an essay about love. “It’s about how love is impermanent,” I say. They give me a look. “So you think people can’t love somebody else forever?” I pause. Of course, I think there’s love that lasts. I just think it can’t stay the same forever, you see, because the way you loved somebody in high school cannot be the same as the way you love them at 72. The way you think you love somebody at 16 just because the boy you liked said it to you and you think you’re supposed to reciprocate isn’t the way you love now. “And that’s okay,” I say. Changing isn’t a bad thing.
Sometimes I think I can see it, the pieces that stay, staining your fingertips. Something like the ends of my hair staying a touch lighter than my roots because I bleached it three years ago, heartbroken, on a whim; something like eating dinner with old friends, lightheaded from soju and the thought that we are no longer seven years old and whacking at Wii controllers with sticky hands; something like someone else’s sweater that makes me a little guilty when I see it folded away back home. I wish it wasn’t in bits and pieces. I wish that what’s permanent isn’t what’s left behind.
If love is swept up in a perpetual renaissance, changing and dying and reappearing again, I want and seethe and plot with all the petulance and grace of an only child, a love lock. Miss you. Or not. I don’t know. I wish we never changed. I don’t know.
I stayed in contact with ___ throughout fall and winter. Staying. We are good friends, really. He sends me pictures of autumn leaves, random screenshots, and stupid jokes we like. We listen to music together sometimes. He tells me about girls. I advise. I tell him about guys. He advises.
Snowing now. I think about sending ___ a picture but then I decide against it. It falls onto my shoulders, my nose, the crown of my hair. This snow won’t stick. It smells like water. It smells different. I tread lightly.
