—I should be the one crying.

There I was, staring at Gyu-ho as he cried. He was really ugly when he cried. Ugly but cute. Cute but pitiful. Funny that I was thinking he was the one who was pitiful. Gyu-ho swallowed his sobs as he spoke.

—You know, I like cats a lot. But I can’t adopt one. I have allergies.

—Why are you talking about this?

—You look like a fat and mean cat. I’m going to call you Fatty Catty from now on.

Like “Kylie,” kind of a weird nickname. But I still liked it.

◊

After a long time had gone by, on a night when we were lying in bed together, I asked Gyu-ho a question. Why, despite Kylie, did he decide to go out with me?

—Because, whatever it was or wasn’t, you were you.

Because, whatever it was or wasn’t—not because of it or despite it—I was me. I liked what he said so much I kept savoring it under my breath.

—Whatever it was or wasn’t.

◊

When I announced that Gyu-ho and I were exclusive, the ones most overjoyed about it were the T-aras.

—Wow!

—Congratulations.

—Does this mean we enter the club for free?

—And do we get free drinks?

Can you believe those bitches?

2.

The first person between the two of us to get a proper job was Gyu-ho. Once he finished his clinical training, he immediately got several job offers at plastic surgery franchises and even at a urologist’s clinic specializing in penis enlargement in the fancy Sinsa-dong neighborhood. A feat, considering how difficult it was to find work these days. Gyu-ho did have a reputation for being hardworking and resilient, but he was a little bit of a dunce in terms of planning out his life or making important decisions. Following my advice, he took the penis enlargement clinic job. And I turned out to be correct because he found out the work was easy and the pay high compared to the jobs taken by other people in his nursing school cohort.

The whole time we were together, Gyu-ho would ask me:

—Fatty Catty, what doing? Playing?

I surmised it was some form of Jeju dialect, cutting off the conjugations, which made me sigh and present him with the options most appropriate to his and our circumstances, like I was a mother bird digesting his food for him. I wasn’t great at the daily stuff like cleaning the apartment or recycling, but I was pretty good at thinking through the big decisions. Of course, a monk can’t shave his own head, as the saying goes, and my own pathfinding in life was a mess, getting rejected from a hundred companies I’d applied to and feeling like the whole world had turned its back on me. But all the same, I didn’t really feel disappointed, let alone despairing, having experienced the universal truth that even if I’d managed to beat the odds and land somewhere, my life wouldn’t improve that much anyway. And it went the same for relationships as well, giving me no swelling of the heart or great expectations when it came to our future together. And maybe that was the secret to our longevity.