Work Text:
“Love is not consolation," she wrote. "It is light."
- Maggie Nelson, Bluets
It was a Saturday night in Seoul, when Taehyung remembered.
When this all began, no one got what this all was, remembrance. If you were to survey the city earlier in the year, you might’ve encountered an uptick in people who might’ve reported new cases of idle daydreaming, or some vague sense of deja vu, but nothing about whole lifetimes and the lifetimes before that. It was something Taehyung observed on his own, watching TV by the window after sundown: a woman yelping and dropping a grocery bag outside, hand over her bleeding nose on the street; the loud neighbor downstairs screaming, “I was a king! I was a king! I was a king!”; a baseball player missing his chance to catch an easy fly-ball, his smile dopey and awestruck, teeth stained with blood on national television.
“It appears that he’s remembering a past life,” said the sports commentator. “Viewers at home, do you think this is a man in love?”
Taehyung looked down at his own sweater, blood on his good cashmere.
“Great,” he said to himself, since this was what he was going to wear out tonight. He recalled the government health department warnings that had been dominating the airwaves. He glanced back to the television. STAY CALM IF YOU REMEMBER A PAST LIFE, a local PSA urged with a childlike jingle, during a commercial break. THIS DOESN’T HAVE TO CHANGE ANYTHING.
Taehyung went into to the bathroom, running the cold water and cleaning off the blood on his face. He decided to shave his stubble after all, and not because he remembered a lifetime in which he looked horrible, trying to grow out a beard. He had another date tonight, and when he felt his phone vibrate on the counter, he knew Jimin was about to bombard him with questions about the whole thing.
“Hello?”
“Taehyung-ah, where are you? Are you okay? I heard there was a wave of remembrances tonight.”
Another drop of blood made its way out of Taehyung’s nose when he came upon another realization: that he’d known Jimin across other lifetimes, perhaps every single one since the beginning. It was a revelation that came like a small breeze, easy and natural, like finding relief from a kind of air previously thought windless.
“Ouch,” he said, and “yes.”
“I was hit just now. Did you know, about us?” Jimin asked, making it sound more provocative than it all was.
“Yeah, I know about you hating everyone I’ve dated across all my lifetimes.”
“It’s not my fault your taste really makes me want to cry.”
“Now, don’t talk about yourself that way.”
“Oh, god. I’m seeing it now too. So we had a drunken one night stand in Prague, of all places? Oh, wow. Paris, too.”
Taehyung went red in the face. “Past lives, Jiminie. Past lives.”
“Yeah, yeah. But no really, but it would be horrible if that guy—oh, what’s his name again? Jeongwoo?”
“Jeongguk.”
“Well, would it be so terrible if Jeongguk was an ex, or something? You know, from a past life. It’d really put an end to your suffering. You’d be able to say, we loved each other deeply once upon a time, so I would like love you deeply in this lifetime too.”
“Don’t make me gag.” Taehyung went quiet a bit, catching himself fixing his hair in the mirror because he had someone to impress for once.
“Well?” Jimin asked.
“What?”
“Would that be so bad?”
Taehyung swept his bangs from the left side to the right side of his face. In that moment, he wished he did not have a face to begin with. He wished he was a rock, whose job was to lay still in some cool, unbothered earth.
“Oh, so you like him like him,” Jimin said.
“Shut up. And what does it matter anyway? He’s going to remember some other great love from another life and that’ll be that.”
“Your optimism astounds me.”
“Even fifty year old marriages are breaking up over this, Jimin.”
“See, that’s your issue. Just have fun. No need to think about marriage.”
“Fine, you’re right.”
“I know,” Jimin said with a sigh. “Anyway, I’m gonna go now. Oh, but before I do that, I do have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“Have you remembered Jeongguk at all? Like in any way?”
Taehyung thought about everything he’d remembered so far, since all this started: liking the color green in one lifetime, then grey, then red; dying old and dying young, glasses half empty and glasses half full. He remembered arranged marriages and fun affairs. Lifetimes spent alone, which were fine because he always had dinner parties to attend and too much work to do. Studio apartments could only hold so much. He remembered love languages past: warming cold hands with his own, the small but meaningful gifts under 20,000 won, mixtapes with songs only containing lyrics about fruit. He remembered confessions and the small swell of pride hearing them (because it always nice, to be liked in such a way). He even remembered lovers’ faces, the desperate, awkward puckering he hated seeing just as as they were about to kiss him, because none of it was never really love, it was just an itch, or boredom, and it didn’t matter how many lifetimes he’d lived, trying to convince himself it was something more than trivial. He remembered ending things, then closing the door and deleting phone numbers. He remembered relief and empty rooms, and painting those empty rooms new colors like sage green and deep, deep purple. He remembered nights at an open window, looking out at cities he’d never been to.
He remembered, and yet he didn’t. He didn’t remember Jeongguk.
“No, I haven’t remembered him yet,” Taehyung answered.
“Ah, well,” Jimin said. “Whatever happens, happens, right?”
“Right.”
Taehyung hoped he would find him around the corner of his memory, in the form of another voice, or body, or name. He hoped he would be able to pick him out from that memory’s crowd, by some miracle, and call him something worth holding onto.
Taehyung did find Jeongguk around the corner, literally, in front of the convenience store. He had his eyes up at the night sky, or rather, the streetlight, because of the plague of moths attracted to the lit bulb. He was smiling, which Taehyung didn’t understand at first: he counted all the lifetimes in which he hated bugs and knew, without a doubt, that he had and would continue to hate them with every fiber of his existence.
“Hyung,” Jeongguk said, glancing over at Taehyung. “Come look at this.”
He wondered, then, how someone’s eyes could go so big and bright over nothing. Taehyung mulled over the possibility that Jeongguk was in the middle of his own remembrance, which sent him into a small panic; he would’ve liked one more night, at least, until Jeongguk ran off to be with some old lover from some lifetime he’d just recalled. Maybe that old lover liked bugs. Maybe that old lover was beautiful, and very well-versed in the science of them, and Jeongguk was remembering a time they studied an obscure species together.
“Oh, moths,” Taehyung said.
“They look like snow flurries in the light,” Jeongguk said to Taehyung. “You don’t even have to wait until winter, if you think about it.”
Taehyung never thought about it like that before. He thought of winter, and even forced some cool exhale of relief, before noticing how close he let himself stand next to Jeongguk on the curb.
The seasons shifted in his chest, an early summer spreading across his entire body. Under the slight cover of a jacket sleeve, he could feel his fingers graze Jeongguk’s, right on the verge of finding the gaps between his. He flexed his hand, feeling ridiculous about the whole thing. They’d already slept with each other plenty of times, so it shouldn’t have been such a debacle, letting himself hold his hand.
“How did you know I liked the snow?” Taehyung diverted.
“You told me.”
“What, in a past life?”
“Over dinner, last week.”
“Right,” Taehyung remembered. “What did we have that night? Fried chicken?”
“Bossam, actually.”
“I don’t like forgetting things like that,” Taehyung said.
“You can’t help it.”
Taehyung bit the inside of his mouth. He knew he could float away from the life in front of him, if he wasn’t careful, and that he’d already had plenty of specifics to remember: favorite restaurants and favorite bars; what vitamins were good for gut health; his skincare routine; phone numbers and emails and Instagram handles. People forgot each other just fine without the past lives. There was already so much he had to keep and cherish and he was surprised he hadn’t gone absolutely insane trying to do it.
“The next time I see you, I’ll have your phone number memorized,” Taehyung decided in that moment. “Really. That will be my way of making it up to you.”
Jeongguk’s eyes went wide again.
Taehyung thought this was it—that Jeongguk would have his first remembrance right now, in this very moment, and want nothing to do with moths and how their hands nearly linked together. But it was for the best, he decided. This might be for the best, because it was torture, scanning his face like this, looking for cracks and clues that this was never meant to be.
He made peace with this all, really, until Jeongguk did something terrible—unforgivable, really: he smiled at him, gushed, even. It made Taehyung do the same, so quickly and without reservation he was sure this was some body’s last uninhibited euphoria before dying.
“I’ll be counting on it then,” Jeongguk said. “Now, what do you say about dinner?”
Taehyung had first met Jeongguk in the bookstore a month ago, around the same time he’d had his first remembrance. He’d gone directly to the puzzle section, because he was sure all this remembering and remembering and remembering wasn’t good for his head, and that the best course of action was to do a copious amount of sudoku to keep his brain sharp. He’d picked out a stack of them when Jeongguk, browsing the cookbook section, had tapped him on the shoulder. “Um, sorry,” he said to Taehyung, “but your nose is bleeding.”
“Shit,” Taehyung said. And then, “sorry.” He wasn’t sure what he was apologizing for. He hadn’t even looked up at Jeongguk at first, and had honestly written him off right away, annoyed. After all, in a store full of thousands of books, and plenty enough to get distracted by, Taehyung never thought he’d be seen. He didn’t want to be seen. He even decided he’d tell this stranger to fuck off, because everyone’s nose was bleeding and everyone was remembering so it was no longer worth it, to point the red of his memories out. But then red was red, and the blood meant the beginning: soon he was out of his body again, observing the scene of a past life’s love.
This time, Taehyung remembered hydrangeas, the deep violet kind that only made that kind of hue when the soil met the right conditions. In this past life, he lived in a house on a hill where the hydrangea bushes climbed up to look into the windows. When the seasons permitted, he remembered the feeling of loving: loving the way the sunlight had peeked through the gaps of petals and foliage; loving the small hint of some lavender-tinged shadow; and loving the owner of the house, despite how much he seemed to despise the way the hydrangeas never turned blue.
“Why do you need them to be blue?” Taehyung had asked him, because his soul had been younger and more prone to letting things be beautiful in some wild, as-they-come way. It had been a small annoyance of his, but one he tucked away, because the lover had been older and wiser than with a record collection that transcended any reservations he may have had about their relationship. Taehyung remembered being called an old soul, though technically it was only his second life. An old soul, all because he liked jazz and the slow daze of drinking fruit juice by the window. At the time, it was an immense compliment. He wanted nothing more than to be everything to this lover, to match up to him, even if it meant ripping up the hydrangea bushes one afternoon and watching the bright violet of them wither into a dead and rotten brown. He remembered it hurting, for some reason. He remembered tears that didn’t make sense and how he’d brushed them away before the lover could see.
Waking up on the floor of the bookstore, Taehyung came face to face with the stranger from the cookbook section. He was hovering from above, eyes round and bright and concerned. His face, full when you looked at him head-on, revealed some line of a sharp jaw when he turned to the side. Taehyung looked—at the stranger’s long, tied back hair, his eyes, the mouth of his smile—and felt—at an offered hand, which was strong and foreign in his grip, and wide in the body of his palm—and decided this was not the old lover. This was someone new, or least someone he had yet to remember.
“Hi,” the stranger named Jeongguk said. “Are you OK?”
Yes, Taehyung had wanted to say. This is only the beginning of my remembrances, and I believe I have so much more ahead of me. Because you are not an old lover of mine, you are no one, and I have no room to care for no-ones.
“I’m not, actually,” Taehyung lied instead. He let the stranger help him back up to his feet and gather up his books. “Could you help me outside? I think I need to get some fresh air.”
“Sure,” said the stranger, hand still in hand. “Anything you need.”
Later, on that first evening, Jeongguk listened as Taehyung relayed how his love had begun and ended with the hydrangeas. He wasn’t sure how they got here. A breath of fresh air, just under the awning of the book store had turned into coffee, and then dinner, and then a walk along the Han River, and soon Taehyung could do nothing but blame the beauty of the view for bringing him to tears. Under the street lamps, and the dim light of a hurried city, he assumed Jeongguk couldn’t see anyway, and looked away, towards the water, whenever he felt himself want to burst.
“It was an amicable breakup, honestly,” Taehyung said, though it wasn’t. He remembered a burning house on the hill and choking on smoke and how they’d died together because the old lover wouldn’t have it any other way. “But after that day, we never spoke again. It was like I’d been reborn from the ashes.”
Honestly, it got easier and easier to talk about his past lives. The experts’ official position on the whole thing was that it was bad to bottle it up, and that finding healthy outlets for it all helped to cement the past lives into something constructive. And so that was Taehyung and his friends did. Jimin journaled about it daily, as if it were his job. Another hyung of his, Seokjin, had taken up stand-up comedy. Now here was Taehyung, talking. He was no comedian. But he was good at making his past lives into fun little stories for new and old friends alike. To him, he liked seeing people laugh and smile and feel good about it, even if he only ever tended to tell half-truths.
“It’s all kind of stupid, isn’t it?” Taehyung said. “All these lifetimes crammed into our heads, and what do we remember most? Our measly little breakups. Imagine what else we could accomplish, if we recalled important things. What if I’d discovered the cure for the common cold in some other life? Wouldn’t that be more useful than remembering the time an ex burned down the house we lived in?”
Taehyung didn’t mean to say the last part, and it seemed that Jeongguk caught it immediately. He stopped where he was walking, stepping closer towards Taehyung.
“So that’s what you were crying about then.”
“I wasn’t crying.”
“You don’t need to pretend,” said Jeongguk. “I could see it on your face, under the moonlight. You also sniffle loud.”
He raised a hand, cupping it close to Taehyung’s face. In turn Taehyung nodded yes, as if he had any idea what Jeongguk was going to do to him. But he stood there, frozen, letting things happen; they were adults, after all, and there was no need to demure at a touch that wouldn’t probably amount to anything serious. So he stood there and closed his eyes, waited for Jeongguk to graze his cheek. He imagined the faces of all his old lovers, only to find darkness behind his eyelids. A blank space where anything could happen.
On that first night, in a bed Taehyung did not know, he turned to face Jeongguk and decided he would run another time.
“I can go, if you want me to,” Taehyung whispered.
“Don’t,” Jeongguk murmured, half asleep. “Stay.”
For once Taehyung’s mind did not race. For once, he thought of making new memories, instead of remembering old ones.
He curled up closer, into the crevices of Jeongguk, and rested his head against the curve where his shoulder and neck met. He remained in this hidden world and closed his eyes, drifting off to the possibility of entanglement.
Two months after their first meeting, with phone numbers memorized, birthdays known, and apartment key-codes acknowledged, Jeongguk sat up in bed, still naked, dutifully pressing a tissue to Taehyung’s nostrils. It was a small gesture he made whenever Taehyung remembered anything, having tissues ready, but this was the first time Jeongguk had pinched it directly to Taehyung’s nose, getting directly involved in the mess. But he welcomed it, letting himself look down in Jeongguk’s care.
“You know,” Jeongguk said. “You’re supposed to look up whenever you have a nosebleed. Not down.”
“Really? I’ve always been told it was down.”
“Is that something you heard in one your past lives?”
“I don’t know, maybe.”
“Well, I’m telling you in this one. Look up.”
Taehyung did what he was told, before noticing how Jeongguk’s hand trembled, holding the tissue. Taehyung took a closer look at his face, and how flushed it was. He noted the thin shut line of Jeongguk’s mouth. Taehyung thought maybe this was the time now, that soon Jeongguk’s nose would also start bleeding and he would remember, by association, the time he had sex with someone lovelier in another lifetime. Normally, even the idea of this would driven Taehyung away from Jeongguk’s bed, before either of them could really get hurt, but today he stayed, feeling a little competitive about the whole thing. I’m lovely too, he thought, even if it was nonsensical, even if his nemesis was invisible and imaginary.
“Aren’t you going to ask me what I remembered this time?” Taehyung asked. “You always ask.”
Jeongguk shrugged, lowering the tissue away from Taehyung’s nose. “I don’t know if I want to.”
“Why is that?”
“Well, this is the first time you’ve remembered during, you know,” Jeongguk said, pointing between the gulf between their bare chests. “And I’m afraid of what you’ve seen.”
“What, like a long and torrid affair?”
“Yes, things like that.”
“But that’s the thing. I could’ve remembered a long and torrid affair while grocery shopping. Who said I only have to remember things like that during sex?”
Taehyung went to sweep the hair out of Jeongguk’s eyes, to which Jeongguk caught his hand and kept it to his cheek. He didn’t laugh along with Taehyung, no matter how much Taehyung wanted to draw it out of him.
“Talk to me,” Taehyung said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t nothing me.”
“When we started, I thought, he’s going to leave one day. I told myself it would be okay, because that was the way of the world, no matter if there were past lives or not. But now, you’re here, and...”
“And?”
“I don’t know if I want to know a time where you’re not.”
Hearing such a thing—the same thing Taehyung had been afraid of for months—made him lose all the strength in his limbs. He found it suddenly intolerable to hold himself up, so he let himself lean against Jeongguk like that first night, head to his shoulder, arms wrapped around his waist as he laughed into his collarbone. Jeongguk held him back, though he was slow to do so, which Taehyung took to mean, why are you laughing? What is there to even laugh about?
“You didn’t let me tell you what I saw,” said Taehyung. “Actually, I want you to guess.”
“Oh, I don’t know.”
“Just guess.”
“How can I? The world is so big.”
“Guess anyway.”
Jeongguk fired off a few guesses. Taehyung could tell he was annoyed, or at least in a terrible mood, because he guessed things like the lifetime in which you were a prickly pear cactus on the side of the highway and the time you survived the eruption at Pompeii but your pet cat didn’t. But this was what he liked about Jeongguk: not only was he was able to even fire off strange facts about prickly pear cacti and Italian volcanoes, but he was the type to reciprocate, and wrap his arms right back. He answered Taehyung’s silly questions, and for once Taehyung wondered if this was it was like, to be held.
“Do you want me to tell you, then?” Taehyung asked, after about a billion attempts. He found himself with his back to the mattress again, Jeongguk peppering kisses on his neck, yanking away the heavy winter duvet.
“It was a lifetime where I didn’t like bugs.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. I don’t think any lifetime like that exists.”
“But you see, I was obsessed with mollusks,” Taehyung said. “Snails, to be exact. I was an ancient Phoenician, I think. You know, the people who made that rich purple dye using snail secretions? But all I could remember was painstakingly going after these snails, to get their color. How insane is that, to recall something like that during sex?”
Jeongguk parted himself from Taehyung, frowning. Serious. Laying there, the view from the mattress reminded him of the first time they met, which was to say that things could’ve gone anywhere at this point; which was to say that either one of them could’ve said goodbye without warning. But then Jeongguk started laughing, and then Taehyung was laughing, too.
“Snails!” Jeongguk exclaimed. “Snails!”
And soon he was kissing Taehyung before Taehyung could kiss him back, and soon it was a matter of letting the weight shift between them, as if pressure were nothing but the measure of how close the other could pin the other down.
But this was the part that Taehyung didn’t tell Jeongguk: that he lived a long and lonely life as an ancient Phoenician, his hands constantly dyed violet. If he were to find himself in a history book now, he’d see that he was nameless, reduced to an inexplicable devotion to color: the unknown worker spent his entire life ensuring the vibrancy of his dyes, and died alone in his workshop, purple curtains blowing in the coastal gale before a storm.
What Taehyung remembered, specifically, was the last breath of that lifetime. He remembered that it’d been raining. He was lying on the cool stone floor, light leaving his eyes, no other color existing except for the one he worked so hard to extract.
This must be love, he’d thought then, even though love had no name except for wanting more, past death.
This must be love, he thought, like he was inventing the very feeling.
This must be love, he thought, swearing he’d see violet in the next life, and the next, and the next.
“I feel like we should just admit it,” Jimin said one night, both them bundled in layers that were still comfortable to exercise in. Despite the winter, the two of them had to stop on a park bench and plug their noses up with tissue paper, because they were bleeding which meant they were remembering again. The memory of the evening was a shared one: they were a Busan-based trot-singing duo back in the eighties, locally famous for their hit single, “The Lavender Rabbit Jumps Over the Moon.” They’d made a small enough fortune from it, though the lyrics were seemingly gibberish, which allowed them the highest of booze tabs and plenty of allure in the eyes of potential hookups.
“We were such whores, Taehyung. And I’m not afraid to say it.” Jimin would definitely have something to write in his journal for later. “We weren’t afraid to get what whoever we wanted, to initiate, but what’s that gotten us in all our lifetimes? Maybe that’s why you’re freaking out about Jeongguk-ssi. Maybe it’s because you’re past the starting mark now.”
“I am not freaking out.”
“Taehyung, you asked me if I wanted to go power-walking. It’s ten at night. And it’s supposed to snow in twenty minutes.”
It was the end of December, just a few hours before Taehyung’s twenty-seventh birthday. In truth, he’d wanted it to be a quiet occasion, just dinner and drinks with friends, but he had to admit that what he’d wanted the most was to spend it with Jeongguk. He was beginning to feel needy about the whole thing. They still hadn’t declared what they were to each other, though Taehyung knew that any of the usual labels would feel too small: what did boyfriend mean, when the sensation was more akin to being struck down, dead, by Jeongguk? Taehyung even wondered if he’d ever been ended by Jeongguk in another life. Just looking at him gave him phantom chest pains, some impression that he was being stabbed repeatedly, some knife dragging slowly through the muscle each time. Even the mere thought of him made Taehyung want to lay down for a few hours. Maybe this is what they called love.
“Forget power-walking,” Taehyung said. “Let’s go for a good and proper run.”
Jimin looked up at the sky, towards the impending snow, and then at Taehyung. “You’ve gone insane.”
“Maybe, but it’s my birthday wish.”
“Too bad, I already got you a gift card.”
“Seriously, Jimin.”
“Well, that is what the health officials say, right? Running is one of the healthiest ways to stay grounded in this life.”
“Is it?” Taehyung lied. He knew the merits of cardiovascular health, of pounding his feet against the concrete and connecting, step by step, with his body. And so he set off, after Jimin, because Jimin was actually a regular runner with a consistent practice, while Taehyung could only hope to burn a different burn than the one he knew with Jeongguk.
“I can hear you hitting the ground,” Jimin called from the front. “Lift your feet up more. Don’t let your heels strike the pavement.”
“Oh, go easy on me!”
“Nope! It’s what you wished for! Happy birthday to you!”
Taehyung tried his best to lift his feet, and he knew his form was bad because his shins started aching, but he couldn’t help but keep going the way he was going anyway, because feeling this sort of ache was a sign that he was bruising his way into this life, hurting for it in the right ways. If he was out of breath, so be it. If it was a little painful, fine. At the finish line, he would say nothing about his efforts because he knew he’d done everything in this lifetime to keep going. So he kept running. He kept running, tossing his head back to the sky, thinking of where he would go after he was done running himself ragged.
They went on like this until Jimin received another remembrance, one brought on by the newly fallen snow. He pinched at his nose, proclaiming it was like being hit with a baseball bat this time.
“This is new for me,” Jimin explained. “I remember being in love. The real thing, this time.”
“With who?” Taehyung asked.
“He was our producer, back when we were trot singers,” Jimin explained.
“Min-something, right?”
“He played guitar for me when were alone in the studio and said he liked my voice, even though we bickered a lot. Wow. Shit. Why am I crying?”
It was a mess for a lot of people that night. The city of Seoul reported a thirty percent increase in reported remembrances, a spike that seemed to occur out of nowhere. Taehyung would later learn that it had to do with the snow, though scientists could never pinpoint why. Theory wise, he thought each particle of snow must have been a past life, touching them by the bare skin, a cold shock to some current warm body. Maybe the snow just brought on nostalgia.
What was strange was that Taehyung, who’d been so prone to remembering at the most mundane and random times, did not remember anything else that night. All he could do was part with Jimin at the train station and wonder where Jeongguk was in the thickening flurry.
By now, it still pained him to think that Jeongguk might remember at any point; Taehyung was afraid that first memory was going to be long and potent and unforgettable, a late-blooming arrival because it was meant to subsume everything else. But at least that pain was more like a hooked lure now, the kind that made Taehyung want to latch on more than ever, instead of calling it a day. He could have easily run the other way. He could have easily blocked Jeongguk’s number out of an abundance of caution, instead of calling him, wanting him.
“Hey,” Jeongguk picked up. “I was actually meaning to call you.”
Taehyung held his breath. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jeongguk said. “Are you out right now? I know it’s snowing right now, but could you meet me?”
Meet me. This sounded serious. “I don’t know. Sure. Of course.” Taehyung didn’t know where to land.
“I’ll text you the address.”
“OK.”
“See you soon.”
They got off the phone and Taehyung was sure this was it—that this was Jeongguk, telling him he’d remembered something so wonderful that now nothing else could compare. It turned out that Jeongguk was at a karaoke joint in Hongdae, just a short cab ride over, so Taehyung stuck his face in the window, flipping through everything Jeongguk could’ve possibly remembered: liking every color imaginable, because that’s what that unforgettable life was, colorful; dying old and fulfilled, glass always half full. He’d probably had someone so lovely and committed that marriage felt too small to name what they had. He imagined Jeongguk leaving dinner parties early and getting off work a reasonable time, so he could always share a meal with his lover back at home and then tell his lover good night. Taehyung imagined a studio apartment, happily shared. He conjured up love languages past: that Jeongguk would always have warm and firm hands, no matter the lifetime; his large gifts and even larger gestures; mixtapes with songs only containing lyrics about the sweetness of love, full on. Taehyung wondered what Jeongguk looked like, getting confessions: it was probably a face of sorry, awkward denial, because he was already madly in love, and it didn’t matter how many lifetimes he’d live after, because nothing would ever compare to this one great devotion. Jeongguk probably closed the door behind him and greeted that lover everyday. He probably panicked at the thought of a suddenly empty room, even if that lover was only just going out for errands. They probably picked paint swatches together. They were probably the type to sit at an open window, pointing out places to go next, because it was only natural for them to go together.
Taehyung arrived at Hongdae, paying his cab fare and taking a moment to exhale.
Jeongguk was waiting under the awning of the karaoke place, puffer jacket unzipped, hands in his pockets. His hair, which had been getting longer, peeked out from under a winter hat. He looked cold, huddled to himself, which he instantly hid the moment Taehyung stepped out of the car.
“You came,” Jeongguk said.
“Of course.” Taehyung looked up at the snow, its contact a cool relief on his face. “You didn’t have wait out here for me.”
“It’s all right,” Jeongguk said. “I didn’t want to miss the first real snow of the year.”
Taehyung remembered the moths. “Ah right. The moths.”
Jeongguk’s face broke into something of a grin, an undeniable smile. He tucked his chin downward for a moment, as if he couldn’t bare the happiness of remembering. He couldn’t have been this way over snow. Moths. Taehyung stood there, stupefied. He was ready for the end.
“So, listen—”
“You remembered,” Taehyung said. “That’s what you want to tell me.”
“No,” Jeongguk answered. “Well, yes.”
“It’s fine. Really. What did you remember?”
Jeongguk didn’t say anything at first. He bit down on his lip, hard enough that Taehyung was sure it’d draw blood, just nodding over to the stairs. Together, they went up, one floor, then another, passing by people holding their noses and laughing, or crying, trying to stop the bleeding. They passed by fully booked karaoke rooms, all of them blaring songs about lost love and eternal regret and never going back. Jeongguk stopped at one of those rooms, gesturing Taehyung to go inside first, not saying a word.
Inside, under the dim light of the room, a TV blasted faded violet technicolor, auto-queueing instrumentals of old songs as it waited for users to jab numbers into a remote control. There were streamers everywhere, balloons on the ground which meant Jeongguk had blown them all up himself. The window, floor-to-ceiling, let in views of the snow, so thick by now that Taehyung forgot there was a world they had to return to.
“It’s past midnight,” Jeongguk said. He even got a cake, which he carefully took off the table, lighting its single candle and holding it up between their faces.
“Is it?”
“Yeah. So, happy birthday.”
Before Taehyung could say a word, some past lifetime’s song began to play on the TV. The Lavender Rabbit Jumps Over the Moon. What he’d forgotten, until that very moment, was that he’d written that song with Jimin as a joke, that it wasn’t even really the trot music they usually released—that it was just a silly little acoustic song they made, off the cuff, because they’d simply needed the money. Because people loved love songs. Because even if Taehyung didn’t believe in a single word of it, other people did, and he had been amazed at how people’s whole demeanors could change in a crowd, under the influence of fog machines, cheap purple stage lights, and lyrics about missing someone special. And he’d even grin, wanting to laugh at the people who probably hadn’t lived many lives, but then he’d be hit with the reverb of the strum of his guitar like a pang of the chest. For a moment, and just a single moment, he’d wished to understand how they felt. How it was like, to miss a person who he knew didn’t exist.
“Hyung,” Jeongguk said. “You there? Did you just remember something?”
“No,” Taehyung lied. It was just that he couldn’t remember the last time anyone had surprised him like this in any of his lifetimes.
He stared down at the cake, finding a strong and unwavering flame. Wax was melting onto the frosting. So Taehyung closed his eyes and made the only wish he could think of.
Please let this be love. Please never let me be apart from him again.
In the weeks following, Taehyung did online research through a series of forums and reputable news sources. By now, most people had at least a dozen new memories of lifetimes they hadn’t possessed before, but there was a small part of the population that went on living without a single remembrance, which netizens deemed a horrible, horrible thing: how unfulfilled, those people must feel! I mean, I was an Olympic fencer in my last life. My neighbor was an astronaut. Can people really be content with a single life? How boring. What do they talk about at dinner?
There were names for them, none of them official. First lifers. Freshman. Existentially immature. They were much too young to understand the ways of the world. They didn’t know better like the people who’d lived multiple lives. In fact, it was suggested that it was wrong to date a first lifer, because they would naturally find wonder in their older, wiser counterparts, and then latch on irresponsibly. But in this lifetime, Jeongguk was accomplished in his own right: he cooked delicious recipes from memory, possessed a motorcycle license. He knew how to paint, even without ever taking formal lessons, and sang so well at karaoke Taehyung was sure Jeongguk could’ve debuted as an idol. He was even an efficient packer, which made hauling all his boxes across the river a little less painful, though now there was the matter of unpacking said boxes—and this was the sort of headache no one could alleviate, no matter if you’d lived one or twenty lifetimes.
Taehyung lay on the floor, half dreaming, fully exhausted, watching Jeongguk from across a mostly empty apartment. His new mattress hadn’t come in yet. They’d spent all day assembling shelves and chairs and tables. The thermostat hadn’t been set properly. Jeongguk still hadn’t even configured his door code to let himself into his new place, much less give it to others.
Though it was still too early to move in with each other, they were now going to be a little closer, which had Taehyung thinking about all the other lifetimes in which he moved in too quickly with a lover or never at all. He considered this in-between, this inching, a startling but refreshing practice in simply taking the next step. Exhausted from a day’s worth of unpacking, he even imagined that all the lovers from the lives he’d lived so far were like apartment leases: they were all just temporary arrangements, a place for the soul to rest until one could afford real home ownership.
Closing his eyes, he hoped this would not be another lease.
“You know,” he could hear Jeongguk say.
“Know what?” Taehyung asked sleepily.
Taehyung was on the verge of falling asleep, when he could feel him sit down next to him on the bedsheet, the warm press of Jeongguk’s palm covering his temple.
“I think you might be the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Hmm.” Taehyung didn’t know about that. “You just haven’t seen your other lifetimes yet. Talk to me after you remember the time you slept with a supermodel.”
“I’m serious though. I just don’t think it’d matter, even if I did remember.”
Opening his eyes, Taehyung looked up at Jeongguk again. Why did he always feel like he was on the ground with him? So prone? As he reached up, wrangling his arms around Jeongguk, really letting himself be held, he wished for his shelter. He wished to come home to Jeongguk and Jeongguk only.
Taehyung pulled Jeongguk on of top of him, smothering himself once more in his weight. He liked the feeling of barely being able to breathe under him. He let himself dig under Jeongguk’s t-shirt as he kissed him, painting the bare skin of his waist with the dragging of a clawing palm. He hadn’t even planned to break in the apartment until the new mattress had arrived, but he figured that this was a good as time as any, and that they were terrible at keeping apart for too long anyway.
Jeongguk unbuttoned Taehyung’s pants before stopping, sitting up, and holding his face.
“Shit,” he said. “I think...”
Blood seeped between his fingers. Taehyung went immediately to the sink, running the faucet as he rummaged for a washcloth in a box in the counter. “It’s okay,” Taehyung tried saying, though he knew it was more for himself than anyone else. “Just lay down and close your eyes. Sometimes that makes it easier for the memory to come.” He let the water run and run and run, forgetting to get the washcloth. “Oh, my dearest dongsaeng, encountering his first memory.” He tried laughing, though he didn’t know how he could ever muster the right sound.
“It’ll be okay, really,” Taehyung tried saying. “You’ll be okay. It’s never lethal, either. No one ever died from remembering. It’s what you do with it after. And I’m sure you’ll do really wonderful things with those new memories and...”
“Taehyung.”
“Ah! And you know what we don’t have? Ice. I should go out and get some. You’ll be good as new, really,” Taehyung said.
Soon he found himself re-buttoning his pants, slipping on his coat, and running down the hall, too quick to catch. Outside, in the clear winter night, he caught himself breathing hard up at Jeongguk’s window, his breath a heavy mist, so thick he wouldn’t be able to see Jeongguk, looking back down.
Starting off for the convenience store, Taehyung skipped right over it and looked for the next one, just a little but further. Then he did the same thing, over and over, until he got to the river and wished for it to flood over everything.
It was then that he remembered again. In a past life, a few centuries ago, Taehyung had been the one to discover the existence of ultraviolet rays. He didn’t really remember the details of his life, or the people he slept with and had children with, because his sole devotion was the discovery of this light source, so potent on the spectrum that the light alluded any visible color in its expression at all; hidden to the human eye, one just had to trust it was making an impression on the skin, burning it. This, Taehyung had learned, was due to the power of the only most young and brilliant stars, millions and millions of miles away. Of course this was the kind of thing that didn’t need to be seen. Only felt. In public, as a man of science, he could only equate this to what we’d known about physics and space. In private, though, he could not help but think of it in terms of poetry. This unknowable, invisible force, here since the beginning, the middle, and the end. Well, he thought, that sounds awfully like love.
When asked by a colleague why he’d named it ultraviolet, he had a perfectly logical explanation: well, violet is the last color on the spectrum, some borderline of known color before venturing into the unknown. So I just took the Latin word for beyond and affixed to the front. Ultra meets violet. Ultraviolet.
“Makes sense,” said the colleague. He didn’t inquire further.
Privately, and in a secret shared only with Taehyung, many lifetimes later, it was simply a matter of the color he loved the most. He didn’t like thinking any line of light could surpass it. So it was in pettiness that he didn’t make up a new name altogether; he’d wanted violet to remain, in some shape or form, as if he were stretching the color beyond any known scope of vision. As if it had anything to do with love.
As if it could be love, full stop.
When Taehyung came to, he’d already found himself running back, nose bleeding, staining the blue of his jacket. Without the convenience store ice, he ran right up to Jeongguk’s building, then up the stairs, to his front door. He didn’t know how long he’d been gone. Suddenly, he wondered if he’d just died by the river and woken up in a new body, a new life; one that he only deserved for running out on someone he really loved.
Regardless, Taehyung knocked. He waited for another small eternity, not knowing what to say, before Jeongguk opened the door himself. He pulled Taehyung back inside and into his arms, and Taehyung could only hold him back.
“What the fuck,” Jeongguk said.
“I’m sorry.”
“Please don’t ever do that again.”
“I won’t.”
They stayed like this for a long while, breathing each other in. When they parted, Taehyung didn’t think to kiss him, or lead him back to the bedsheet on the floor where they’d left off. He just remained, hand cupped to the face. He decided, if this was the lifetime for the beginning and the end of all things, that he had to remember to stop and take a good look at it. He observed the dried blood leading out of Jeongguk’s nostril, carving the shape of his strong jaw and his huge eyes and the mole underneath his lip into memory. He decided he was something to cherish, regardless of where it was all going to lead him. He decided that Jeongguk was never someone he’d forget, regardless of lifetime, and regardless of how many more he was going to live, because he would remember, and remember, and remember; that if this wasn’t the right doorstep, he would eventually find the one that was.
“You didn’t even ask me what I’d remembered,” said Jeongguk.
Taehyung was afraid to ask, but did so anyway.
“What did you remember?”
“Well, I couldn’t see anything,” Jeongguk said. “I didn’t see anything, because I’m sure I haven’t lived any other life but this one. But then I did what you told me to. I closed my eyes and saw it. I saw nothing but a single color, glowing in the darkness.”
Taehyung broke into a grin. He could feel it eat up his whole face, even though he wasn’t sure there was anything to smile about.
“Yeah?” he asked through tears. “And what was the color?”
On the forum, months later, an anonymous netizen penned a post, calling for the end of first lifer demonization:
You know, I think the lot of you are just afraid of the lives you’re living now. I just think you’re afraid to be happy.
Three years later, Taehyung realized he hadn’t remembered in a while. It was a phenomenon that seemed to dissipate more and more, the spring Jeongguk moved across the river. The citizens of Seoul came at this with mixed reactions: some of them decried their disappearance, claiming it made small talk less interesting, while others felt relief at not having to clean another white shirt. Taehyung, surprisingly, hadn’t noticed. A lot was happening around them: Jimin was still on his search for Min-something, the elusive producer, while still running half-marathons and still writing in his journal, while Jeongguk continued to collect strange trivia about cacti and volcanoes and started doing sudoku. For another winter, and then another, and then another after that, they watched the first and last snows of the season, and they they welcomed spring, usually complaining how their baseball teams weren’t winning and how the heat rose in their shared apartment. But it was just so: three years, and they were still stuck together; three years, and he didn’t see it changing for any foreseeable future.
“Hey,” Taehyung called under the covers. He could’ve sworn he had a dream, a nightmare, really,
Jeongguk opened his eyes, yawning and comfortable. “Yeah?”
“Tell me about the first time you met me,” Taehyung said. “Tell me the full story.”
At this, Jeongguk began.
“Well, honestly, I don’t really follow cookbooks, but I saw you in the bookstore aisle, going towards that section, and then settling down to look at the sudoku books. I felt a little crazy at the time, but I really thought, wow, that’s my person. That’s the person I want to spend my life with. It was completely irrational.”
“And now, look at you. Doing sudoku.”
“Yeah, and you’re not too bad, either.”
In truth, Taehyung was not desperate for the memory. He just liked hearing Jeongguk’s voice, and how it filled and filled and filled this lifetime. He liked he trail of his kisses, leading down his neck. He liked their laughter, mixing into a single voice, and how it didn’t sound like any other laughter in history.
“I love you,” Taehyung said, looking up from the sheets.
At this, Jeongguk leaned down to kiss him, undoing the covers to let in a brilliant star’s light.