Jaehee called me a few times after, but I didn’t pick up. I sent K3 a message saying I needed to think about our relationship more. He replied that he couldn’t comprehend why I was always running away from him, that it was truly over between us, but every morning as the sun rose he’d drunkenly text me lines about love (plagiarized from somewhere, no doubt), misspellings and all. Jaehee on occasion sent messages saying she understood how I felt, but I had no idea what she was claiming to understand. My thoughts grew more and more poisonous in my brain, but those thoughts themselves also felt absurd to me, so I lay grinning in my childhood bed in the dark.

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While living in my parents’ apartment, I wrote short stories. It was there that I became a writer.

Me, Jaehee, the men we met, the stories about our relationship, I mixed everything together willy-nilly, churning out my stories. I hadn’t written them to show anyone. It just so happened that I was having trouble falling asleep and needed something to do, and now that I had no one to talk to all night, the thing I wanted more than anything else was to ramble on about nothing to someone. When I wrote short stories about slutty gays and lost dogs, I didn’t exactly feel any satisfaction or sense of achievement. It’s just that the stories I wrote and the nights I spent talking to Jaehee felt similar. I submitted a couple of the stories to a writing contest without thinking too much about what I was doing. I ended up winning.

I called Jaehee to tell her the news. Three months had passed since I’d last talked to her. Jaehee said hi as if I’d called her just three hours before, and as soon as she heard I’d won, she burst into tears. How very you, I thought, as I let her cry for about three minutes then read her the judges’ comments. An elder novelist talked about how worried he was that my work veered into “tabloid territory.” When Jaehee heard that line, she couldn’t stop laughing. I used part of the prize money to buy Jaehee a Chanel lambskin bag.

I was notified of K3’s death around that time. Car accident. The K3 he’d loved so much ended up becoming his coffin. Only when I heard the news did I realize I’d imagined a long stretch of time ahead where we were an us. This was the last line he sent me:

If obsession isn’t love, I have never loved.

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