As I hauled that radon-spewing mattress out on my own, I thought back to the time Gyu-ho and I had sushi together on it. Something good must’ve happened that day. Sushi was celebration takeout.

One time, while sitting on the bed eating his sushi, Gyu-ho (always clumsy) flipped over his plate by accident, and I quickly wiped it with my sleeve. A brief moment, but a stain remained on the mattress.

By the time I realized my back wasn’t sound enough for me to haul out a super-single mattress on my own, it was too late; I felt jolts of electricity all the way to the ends of my toes as I just barely made it to the complex’s recycling area. When I got back to the room, there was a report on the news saying the company responsible for the carcinogenic mattresses was offering to pick them up and dispose of them for free. The pain in my back throbbed, stubborn and persistent. It was too late to put things back the way they’d been.

◊

The second thing I did after breaking up with Gyu-ho was quit my job.

I had been reassigned to the administrative support team around the time Gyu-ho left. “Administrative support” was a fancy term for procuring toilet paper, mops, highlighters, and other office junk to distribute within the company. A job any elementary school student with decent math skills could do, and it was the perfect work for a person like me, who had no special skills or ambition. The company was satisfied, and I should’ve been satisfied too, but every day I was caught up in an inexplicable, silent rage, and every morning I begged the gods that I would not ruin yet another day being mired in vicious resentment. In the new office, I gradually turned into a hairy Sasquatch that made no effort whatsoever to be sociable, and just slouched around, hoping no one noticed me. I had said the same thing to myself in the last company I’d worked for, but I kept my mind intact by vowing over and over that this was the last time I would take on a corporate job. Soon, my thirty-two-inch waist ballooned to thirty-six inches, I got promoted to middle manager, and I reached the point where I had to shop at specialized online stores for big and tall men. My body and heart grew heavier by the day.