A while back I stopped at my dad’s place to pick up some of my winter clothes, but he changed the lock, so I couldn’t get in. I kicked and shook the door, but it didn’t budge. A boy, the son of the renters next door, said hello. He kicked the soccer ball over, so we passed the ball back and forth for a little bit, but I eventually turned around to leave, feeling defeated, my hands in my pockets. The boy must have wanted to continue; he stood in front of me to keep me from leaving. I looked at the soccer ball and its crooked shadow. I ruffled the boy’s hair and forced a smile.

I walk into the alley and a scooter almost hits me. Bitch! The man on the scooter spits on the ground, and starts the engine again. With a metal delivery case on the back, he speeds away like he’s racing someone. I doubt his shitty scooter can keep up with the speed of his yearning.

When I get into the apartment, Jimin Sunbe is eating sweet and sour pork as though she’s been starved, her face half-buried in the bowl.

“It’s so unlike you to order this expensive dish!” I sit next to Jimin and split the wooden chopsticks, and she runs to the sink and vomits.

“Yeoul, don’t you smell mugwort incense from this? It’s foul.”

“I haven’t started eating yet, so I don’t know.”

“I ordered it because I was craving it, but now I can’t eat it.”

I finish the sweet and sour pork, and watch Jimin lying on her side. Her eyes are swollen, and her skin looks rough under the bright light. “Sunbe, come sit over here. I wanna draw you.” Jimin smiles. Even when I showed off my paycheck, or got into a handstand and circled the room with my belly button showing, she didn’t smile. Even when I told her I finally finished Thus Spoke Zarathustra like she asked me to, and even when I told her I liked her poems she didn’t smile, but here she is, smiling slightly. It’s been a long time since I saw her pretty pink gums. On the back of the page ripped from the calendar, the last month of the year, I draw her. The face that aches, the lovely face slowly building on the white space. The pencil keeps slipping off the slippery paper. I feel like I am ruining her beautiful smile with my terrible drawing. Should I stop here and leave it unfinished?

“I went to the café the other day.” The smile disappears and her face is filled with grief. She always looks so serious. It scares off some of the underclassmen from approaching her, but she doesn’t know that.

“Oh yeah? When was that? Why didn’t you come in to say hi?”