Not long after he moved in, Gyu-ho quit bartending. He said he was feeling too tired to keep doing it, but I had a feeling it was because he no longer felt the need to work so hard for a rental deposit anymore. On his last night at work, the club owner gave him two bottles of Moët & Chandon. Gyu-ho’s friends and mine gathered at a table to drink it up and celebrate.

3.

Once we started living together, we began to argue often. Not over anything big—just the usual stuff that comes from differences in lifestyles.

I considered drying laundry a life-or-death situation, which meant not only did I shake each piece of laundry several times before hanging it on the drying rack to prevent wrinkles, I also maintained a bit of space between each item, opened all the windows of the house, and even had a fan blowing on the clothes. As for Gyu-ho, he would randomly—I truly felt that “randomly” was the only word for it—toss the laundry on the rack and keep the windows shut so the house would end up like a sauna. These slow-drying clothes inevitably developed a sour smell. No matter how many times I nagged him, he never hung them properly, which is what compelled me to throw one of my T-shirts at his face after I got home from work.

—Look! Our clothes smell like rags!

—You’re just smelling your own dirty face.

And the fight would progress until one of us was shouting . . .

Now that I was employed, I got into the bad habit of buying things to relieve stress. Gyu-ho was the same, and I tended to acquire books or trinkets while he competitively purchased clothes and daily essentials. Gyu-ho demanded I throw out books I wasn’t going to read while I demanded he throw out clothes he wasn’t going to wear. Neither of us was willing to compromise, and our small apartment was getting smaller by the day.

Gyu-ho couldn’t stand how I let all my things just lie around the house. When he once said to me that everything should have its place, I retorted, “What place? Look at this tiny apartment! Wherever I am and wherever I go, there a place shall be, and that is God’s truth.” We almost broke up after the fight that ensued.

Even after hating him so much I felt like killing him, I’d find myself turning back to Gyu-ho as if nothing had happened and saying things like “What are we having for dinner tomorrow?” or “Please don’t forget to buy trash bags tomorrow at the store.” Mostly we slept on our own beds but occasionally in the same one, not having sex but taking turns giving each other an arm-pillow, breathing in the scent of each other’s chests or armpits, slowly coming to believe that this was what it meant to love and be together.

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