As soon as I got home, I threw off my suit jacket. I stripped completely naked and lay down on the bed. That was something I could never do when Jaehee and I lived together. How nice and cool it was to live alone. The sun hadn’t even set, but lying there like that made me feel like I’d drunk a lot and was greeting the dawn naked. Since I had the place to myself, I thought of inviting a guy over, but I couldn’t be bothered in the end. With the sunlight shimmering outside the window, out of habit I flicked through my text messages. Tedious notifications of credit card transactions, spam texts, Jaehee begging me to forgive her. Then, the last text that K3 had sent me.

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

I dropped my phone. For a moment I thought I might shower, but then I craved something cold. Inside the freezer was an almost empty bag of blueberries and a pack of Marlboro Reds with the cellophane still intact. I stared for a long time at the photo of a man’s rotten lung on the packet. This man . . . was he dead now? I took out a bowl from the cabinet and flipped the blueberry bag over it. All that came out of it were tiny shards of purple ice.

That’s when I realized that my time with Jaehee, which I thought would last forever, was over.

She had always stocked the fridge with blueberries. Remembered the names and faces of every man I’d slept with, been the external backup drive of my love life. Smoking every­where, meeting the most unsuitable men.

Jaehee, who had taught me that every season is its own beautiful moment—that Jaehee didn’t live here anymore.

PART TWO

PART TWO

A Bite of Rockfish, Taste the Universe

1.

I spent all night writing and overslept the next morning, so I only had time to splash my face with water and grab my work bag before heading out of the door. Umma would probably be reading her Bible, trying to suppress her irritation at having woken up in a hospital room yet again. I would see her in a few hours. We’d settled into a routine in which she and I had lunch together before taking a walk in Olympic Park.

On my way down the steps I glanced at my letterbox out of habit and saw a manila folder stuffed into the opening. I took it out, feeling the thickness between my fingers. There was no return address. What the hell? I ripped it open. A ream of yellowed paper was inside.

The writing I had more or less thrown in his face five years before: my diary.